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When men were men and drank Pickwick Ale down at Harry's

Harry's Tavern in old Boston

The folks at the Boston City Archives wonder if you can place this scene. See it larger.

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Cambridge Street in 1957

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Now East Berkeley

Here is another view of the same area.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofbostonarchives/13473667744

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It is now an expensive neighborhood, yet it looked far more vibrant and interesting back when the original photo was taken. Now its a street of parking lots.

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These before-and-after shots keep showing how urban renewal and the desire to accommodate the car sucked the vitality out of so many swaths of Boston. A row of businesses and apartments replaced with a parking lot and car wash. And the remaining buildings at left lost their street-level businesses.

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The South End east of Shawmut Avenue and north of Union Park Street was a derelict hell hole up until about 1995.

It's nice to get sentimental but it was for the most part a dump. I know, I've been going down there since the late 70's.

The urban renewal had nothing to do with cars. It had to do with jobs and owing to the projects, up to code housing.

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That doesn't negate the fact that this stretch of East Berkeley (formerly Dover) is a depressing city street, half-filled with parking lots and a car wash.

The urban renewal had nothing to do with cars.

I don't know if you mean this area in particular or in general. I hope you don't mean that in general, urban renewal had nothing to do with cars.

IMAGE(https://fedora.digitalcommonwealth.org/fedora/objects/commonwealth:8c97mm118/datastreams/access800/content)

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That's a view from the Custom House looking north, or in the other direction from the South End. The work in progress here, while definitely in support of the automobile, had nothing to do with urban renewal.

I'm not going to take a position on urban renewal and the rise of the autocentric culture, but the photo is misleading. Most of the urban renewal projects did not end with highways.

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Most of the urban renewal projects did not end with highways

But a common feature of urban renewal was to replace smaller streets with super-blocks, in part to accommodate car travel.

See, for example, the West End, or the New York streets, or the parts of Roxbury decimated for the proposed Inner Belt, or Scollay Square.

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You might want to brush up on your history.

New York Streets was a giveaway for the Herald. The Roxbury urban renewal was miles from any proposed highway. Scollay Square and the West End weren't on any highway rights of way either.

The Inner Belt (and Southwest Expressway) were highway projects, pure and simple.

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Don't forget we needed 'urban renewal' because the government thought the suburbs were better for us, so it pushed everyone to leave the cities, leaving them to become "derelict hell holes", and thus the government had to step in and solve the problem yet again...

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That corner of Washington and East Berkeley across from Myers and Chang in the Project Place Building is proposed to be a new office building with ground-level retail soon enough.

http://www.bldup.com/projects/eb80

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CVS,
Walgreen
Starbucks
Jimmy John's
Dunkin' Donuts

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If it is old Dover Street don't get too nostalgic. From before WWI till after WWII that was a red light district. Bars and brothels.

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and not just a bunch of decrepit old buildings that had to eventually get torn down? This is important, despite how much people reflexively moan about Scollay Sq.

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Compare this 1928 map to today.

http://www.wardmaps.com/viewasset.php?aid=7240

http://i.imgur.com/wfz8DH5.jpg
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/wfz8DH5.jpg)

Look at the grid of streets that was wiped off the map for the Castle Square development.

http://colabradio.mit.edu/peoples-tours-a-social-h...

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Which is different than UR to enrich real estate barons. Every article here is carpet-bombed with comments about how They need to provide more affordable housing, can we not complain about instances where they have?.(good research though).

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If it is East Berkley Street (Dover) I miss dirty Johns. Though the sign outside, a coca cola sign as I remember Bostonians knew it as Dirty Johns. A great place after the bars closed to get one more moxie (beer) or Apple juice (whisky) to wash down your eggs or sandwich.

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There is a reason that the street name was changed. It was a very disreputable area. From atleast the 60s until the 80s downtown Boston's lower Washington Street and LaGrange were hooker haven. Before that it was Dover Street. Remember we used to have two Navel bases in Boston. Unfortunately Dover was where many of them ended up. The last bar I can remember down there was a down on it's heals joint called McCarthy and Vaughns. Never went in though.

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We had navel bases? Where??

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Was it Pickwick Ale or Haffenreffers that had the puzzles inside the bottle caps and was referred to as "the green death"? It was good stuff.

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Haffenreffer's.

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I'm pretty sure that Lone Star - the beer of choice for Rust Cohle - has little pictograph puzzles under their bottle caps. At least, they did as of the last time I had one - sometime last fall.

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There was a company called G. Hillman that were the thlrd largest brewers in the US. It was a collection of old small brewers and beers consolidated into other breweries. Many of their products had the puzzles in the caps.

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Haffenreffer, Pickwick, Narragansett, Croft - all products of Narragansett, and I think they all had the puzzles.

Pickwick wasn't exactly top shelf stuff in the day, or at least in the late 70's when I delivered beer. You found it on tap in pretty scummy bars, and sold in quarts and GIQ's. Somehow, it became a boutique beer in the 80's (?) when I saw it in Sevens on Charles St.

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Harpoon revived the brand (in the late 90's, I think), but I haven't seen it around lately. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places... Anyhow, I liked it when I tried it-- light & refreshing.

It was originally brewed by Haffenreffer brewery in Jamaica Plain then licensed to Narragansett which Haffenreffer ultimately controlled.

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I dimly recall that the original Pickwick Ale was a sort of "poor man's whiskey" -- with a high abv% -- it was hard to tell because at the time it was illegal to list the alcohol % on beer cans and bottles.

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Still serves Pickwick Ale (or at least they did the last time I was there 2 years ago) I don't know where it's brewed.Good taste. I liked it.

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Was that the street that had Harry the Greek's clothing store? If so, the same Harry?

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always a pretty good chance you would get jumped coming out of there. they had good deals on sneakers and coats though.

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Never happened to me when I shopped there.

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In the 70s used to take the train from Dover Station to work every day, and walked past Harry the Greek's every day. I never saw or experienced any crime or felt threatened.
They changed the name of the street from Dover to East Berkeley, but the station was still Dover until they tore down the El.

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my friend had his nose broken for a sweatshirt and some socks by a group of kids who hung around outside the store. lol

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Thanks for playing, folks! This is indeed Dover Street. We're dating it between 1960 and 1967 (we definitely know its prior to 1967)

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