“I’ve known his family for years,” says Jerry, a trim, tactful man whose pressed white shirt and necktie announce, “I run a tight ship.” The walls are covered with Boston Irish memorabilia, like posters for mayors James Michael Curley, Ray Flynn and Marty Walsh, the city’s current leader. They play Sox games on the TV that hangs next to a plastic diorama of the Budweiser Clydesdales. Jerry Foley-grandson of the original “J.J.”-and his four grown sons now run the place, which is unmistakably Irish American. Foley opened his namesake tavern in 1909, when “Irish immigrant” was still an insult. Foley’s Cafe.įoley’s is not to be confused with Boston’s newer generation of Irish bars-ones that are often run by recent immigrants from Ireland, who decorate the walls with Gaelic imagery and show soccer games on TV. Back then, I was utterly unaware that the neighborhood was home to one of Boston’s most legendary bars: J.J. I would occasionally make a pilgrimage to the South End from my drafty apartment in outlying Somerville in search of some up-to-the-minute nightspot. It was a mecca of galleries, gay bars, trendy restaurants and former tenement houses turned groovy lofts. By the time I moved to the Boston area in the 1990s, the South End had already become a desirable neighborhood, beyond the means that my entry-level publishing job provided me.
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