The Globe reports the city has ordered Ups N Downs in Neponset Circle shut immediately, following yesterday's seven-stabbing closing. An emergency Boston Licensing Board hearing has been set for Wednesday.
The Herald, meanwhile, reports police think just one guy did all seven stabbings.
Luke O'Neil, who wrote the book on Boston's best dive bars, explains how he went to Ups N Downs despite a warning from a Dot barfly:
That upstairs downstairs demarcation is where things get a little interesting here, if by interesting you mean racially fucked up. The name of the place implies a sort of segregation. Upstairs is for hip hop, downstairs is for Sinatra. Or to put it another way, upstairs is for blacks, downstairs is for Irish. It's the same old shitty story of Dorchester race relations played out literally every night in the place people in the neighborhood go to get drunk. Like that's not asking for trouble. The bar, formerly known as the Pony Room, has been in operation for about 50 years.
The last time the city shut a bar before a hearing was when four people were shot outside Packy Connors in Roxbury in 2009. After the emergency shutdown, the licensing board let the bar re-open, but with reduced hours. A Roxbury man was convicted last week for those shootings.
