Tag Archives: boston

Closing The Go Go Bars

January 11, 2020 – 2:22 am

I liked old go-go bars. My first was the 2 O’Clock Lounge in Boston’s Combat Zone. 1971. Drums, bass organ, sax, stripper. Paradise. I hate gentlemen clubs. They have no class, but class went dead in the beginning of the 21st Century, except for those who never gave up the dead.

By Peter | Posted in Art | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

Combat Zone Amnesia

January 11, 2020 – 2:10 am

In the 60s urban social scientists suggested to Boston officials that the city create an adult entertainment area between the bus station on Boylston Street and Chinatown to contain the wickedness of mankind. The experiment green-lighted prostitution, drag queens, piano bars, go-go bars, rent boys, and pornography along Washington Street and the adjacent blocks. The […]

By Peter | Posted in boston, Nightlife, Sex, Sin, youth | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

El Phoenix Bar – Boston

January 6, 2020 – 2:15 am

My friend Jorge posted this photo and I thought ‘pink elephant’. Only one place had one and it was in Brighton, Mass. In college I drank in Concannon and Sennetts’, a Commonwealth Avenue establishment with a mural of a naked woman riding a pink elephant over the bar. The dive offered draft ‘ganseets at 25 […]

By Peter | Posted in 70s, boston, Drinking | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The That That Was

January 4, 2020 – 12:47 pm

I left my native Boston for New York at the age of 24. Much of my life has been spent overseas in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. When I returned to the States in 2008, friends asked, “Don’t you miss anything about the United States?” “I miss Warmuth’s Restaurant and Hi-Hat Lounge in Boston, the […]

By Peter | Posted in Drinking, history, Traditions, youth | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

$148 LEVIS by Peter Nolan Smith

November 15, 2019 – 5:45 am

My mother dressed my older brother and me in jeans for most of the 1950s and early 1960s, however when the hippies adopted the tough western trousers as part of their unofficial uniform, Cardinal Cushing of the Boston diocese banned Levis on his evening rosary program. A fierce Catholic my mother obeyed the Pope’s representative […]

By Peter | Posted in 60s, boston, fashion, semi-fiction, youth | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)