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Time to pour one out for the Pour House

The Pour House on Boylston Street in the Back Bay announced tonight it's shutting down for good.

It is with great regret to tell you that after 34 glorious years, it is time for us to say goodbye and thank you.

Due to COVID the ownership of The Pour House will be changing hands.

We want to thank each and every one of you very much. The heart and soul of The Pour House has always been our staff and our customers. Without them, we would never have been as successful as we were for 34 years.

So many great times. So many fantastic memories. Far too many to post.

It has been a wild and crazy ride and we could not have done it without all of you.

McGreevey's announced its closing last month.

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Comments

That's a shame, only place in town to have a drink after spending the holidays with family. Been in there too many times to recall and while it had lost its luster over the years, it was still a good place.

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It was the only place in town that I've been to that didn't blink an eye at an order of coffee with cream and a side of Jack Daniels.

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A great cozy affordable place. ANd burger specials Saturday nights. This sucks.

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So many businesses are shutting down for good! It's kind of scary!

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Businesses have been closed or at reduced capacity for months. Of course many will close permanently, especially smaller businesses

We need to start supporting local businesses as much as we are able if we want them to stay.

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I knew a month ago this was coming after the phone was shut off.

PoHo was one of the LAST of all day bars in the city as they did a huge early morning biz from medical workers after an overnight shift.

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One of those places you can never imagine really closing permanently.

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but I will remember it as a place that had a bit more age, a stronger whiff of history, than its brethren on the block that catered to the recently-legal drinking crowd. My last memory of it is probably 20 years old, when I briefly lived nearby, getting a nice-priced, tasty little burger with a shot and a beer and thinking, maybe I underestimated this place. But given the nearby competition, that was a pretty low bar. "Forget it, Jake. It's the Back Bay."

There is no happy moral in any of this. Great places, bad places, middling places are going under, and it all could have been avoided with just slightly more competent national leadership in this crisis. The resulting devastation in the industry is going to haunt this town for a decade. Fuck all y'all that can't recognize how Trump's brutal, insistent ineptitude in responding to the pandemic -- Jared told him it would only affect blue cities, so fuck those people, do nothing -- has gutted individual lives and small businesses in the hospitality trade, and by extension, the heart and soul of public social life in this city. None of this needed to happen: none of it.

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Right, it’s Trumps fault. Everything is Trumps fault. Certainly not the draconian arbitrary lockdowns imposed by blue states which also happen to have by far the highest deaths. Other states managed to have way fewer deaths and also not kill their economy.

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Right, it’s Trumps fault. Everything is Trumps fault. Certainly not the draconian arbitrary lockdowns imposed by blue states which also happen to have by far the highest deaths.

Gee I don't know honey, maybe if Trump had DONE SOMETHING in JANUARY other than shew racist shit at China and followed the pandemic plan Obama had left him. He had instructions all he had to do was act, and he threw them awa.

Our leadership failed us, and that leader currently in office is Donald Trump.

Other states managed to have way fewer deaths and also not kill their economy.

like who Alaska? Hawaii? MA has one of the lowest infection and death rates now because we shutdown.

But what about places like Florida or Alabama or South Dakota where the corrupt GOP leadership would not shut down. Now they average 1,000's a cases a day or more.

Gee I don't know honey, I tend to value life over being able to eat a restaurant.

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like who Alaska? Hawaii? MA has one of the lowest infection and death rates now because we shutdown.

Seriously?

No, MA has a higher death/1m pop than every other state except NY and NJ. MA is STILL 6th in total deaths behind NY/NJ/CA/TX/FL. 5 of those states are significantly larger.

SD has 191 deaths per 1M people. MA has 1,314. FL has 536. Alabama has 452. I don't know about you, honey, but I'd prefer those states that have had LESS death, not more.

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We're still pretty damn low.

You can spin those numbers the way you want, but we're at 1% rate of new infections.. far less than other states.

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Lol at comparing SD (density 10.7 people per sq. m) or Alabama (94 people per sq. m) to MA (885 people per sq. m).

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For starters, MA is testing and counting cases, unlike Iowa and South Dakota.

Also, your Dear Orange Leader has FAILED and is continuing to FAIL when it comes to even TRYING to keep a lid on this epidemic, and for the worst of reasons.

Just see yourself out.

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Massachusetts has been carefully tallying and reporting its numbers for months while some other states have been sloppy, inept, or actually writing fiction.

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Give me a break, MA has the 3rd worst death rate in the country. Not testing doesn't hide deaths sweetie, show yourself out, you condescending ass.

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What have we done lately?

I guess there is an irony that those states that were hit hard in March and April are probably in the best shape today, but I guess there are those who learn from the mistakes of the past and there are the likes of Georgia and South Dakota.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/map-track-summer-2020-coronavirus-h...

You can click on the column to re-sort the states.

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How many bars are going out of business in Seoul and Rome and Hanoi because of their government's incompetent response to the plague?

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What came first, the infections or the lockdowns?

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We had one of the first outbreaks in the country. Deaths are higher in states that saw early action, because we didn't really know what we were doing at the point: we were short on PPE and it was impossible to get more, we didn't know the best ways to treat patients, remdesivir wasn't in use, etc.

The states that didn't see as many cases until later benefited from the lessons learned the hard way by states like MA, NY, and NJ. The uncontrolled outbreaks in our states, devastating as they were, never got even close to herd immunity-level ubiquity; it was our lockdowns that put on the brakes and eventually turned the tide. States like FL didn't need to lock down fully in response to an early, undetected outbreak, and when their outbreaks eventually came, they had had the benefit of much more advance warning and much clearer guidance for how to handle it than we had.

The difference between FL and MA isn't that we're liberal idiots and they aren't, it's that they simply had the good fortune not to suffer a Biogen conference in March. To the extent they've suffered less economic harm due to lockdowns, it's because they didn't need lockdowns as much as we did. They made a choice that was simply not available to us.

And if you're fixated on the unemployment rate, if being liberal idiots is to blame for our temporarily-highest-in-the-nation-during-a-pandemic rate, you also need to give our liberalism credit for the among-the-lowest-in-the-nation rate we had for years right through March. Can't have it both ways.

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Remember when the patriots had to orchestrate a covert operation to fly a private jet to New York to procure medical supplies for our hospitals after federal agencies confiscated them? Remember when mass national gaurd caravans had to escort those same supplies when they landed back in mass to prevent those supplies from again being confiscated by trumps federal agents? Remember when trump openly critized blue states and pledged to withhold federal aid at the height of the pandemic? Remember when you and others like you whined about the shutdowns and were fine with the death toll because it was just old people? Now you suddenly care about the death rate because it's convenient to your narrative?

Yes Trump is directly responsible for the initial deaths in mass and its only through the herculean effort by our state government, medical personnel and scientists who openly defied him that we flattened the curve exactly as predicted and now have one of the lowest infection rates in the country. You can pin every single one of those deaths on Trump, every one. It's the job of president to look out for the American people, all of them, and trump has shown time and time again he is only concerned about the ones that will vote for him. That's your hero, a man who would gladly see anyone who doesn't lick his boots die a slow suffocating death by a preventable disease while he plays golf.

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On the political inaction/malignant action (at all three levels, not just federal).

The industry was due for a market correction as well. Sucks and also ironic that it's legacy places like Pour House and The Fours that have called it a day first, though. Which remaining places that have been open for decades don't own their buildings? Those would be endangered species too, no?

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Market correction? How so? This is a place that had been slinging drinks for 30+ years, while rent probably went up 1000% around them. They were doing fine until COVID shut down all the bars.

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I hope so, Pour House is a Boston institution. But how prepared were they for a rainy day? Their prices were always low.

Conversely, most everywhere else I go either raises prices or has high ones already, because they've opened in more recent years. But my income hasn't increased, so as other expenses increase for me, bar visits decrease. I don't imagine these circumstances are unique to me.

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They were doing fine until COVID shut down all the bars.

I'm not so sure about that. Boylston St., and that particular block have not been the place to be seen on Thursday through Saturday nights as they once were and with tastes shifting from your grandfather's bar to a more aspirational environment enabled/required by the necessity to constantly promote oneself on social media have made it hard for legacy/mainstream venues to keep up.

Without flinching I can name Cactus Club, McGreevy's (Dad's Diner, Foggy Goggle), Whiskey's, Charlie's, Vox, Daisy Buchanan's, Cigar Masters and now The Pour House to the list of legacy names that made money during the Newbury St. nightlife / Red Sox rebirth era but were either unable to rebrand themselves to appeal to younger customers or whose real estate value overshadowed the business. Couple that with the alcohol license migration to the seaport and it's no longer profitable to sell cheap food to college kids while maintaining an address in an over-priced part of town.

ps Once they banned smoking it was impossible not to smell the bathroom inside PoHo. It wasn't great.

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This sucks

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More after work drinks, Syracuse games, and brunches than I can remember.

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I remember when they first opened and for starters it was $1 for a Bud Bottle and $1 for a good taco. The place they took over was also called the Pour House but it was a real dive bar like the small one whose name I forgot over by Haviland Street.

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T.C's Lounge was the dive bar on Haviland St.

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This one hurts. Hopefully the new owners will figure out how to keep it going.

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Just sayin'.

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Is the Pour House where the Honey Lounge was in the very early 80s? I saw great bands there like LaPeste (the post-Peter Dayton version) and The Neighborhoods. It was kind of an odd place for live music but the local scene embraced it even though it didn't last long.

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fondly recall both of those bands live, and the later Peter Dayton Band. Fun youthful memories unburied, thanks!

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The Honey Lounge was at that address in the 70s and 80s, originally a bar-restaurant before morphing into a punk-rock venue. Here is a link to a brief, colorful reminiscence from the 70s:

http://oneforthetable.com/stories/politics/1368-the-honey-lounge-ma

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...the Back Bay? Hard to believe it lasted this long!

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