RIGHT NOW THE CLUB IS STILL OPEN
THERE'S A LONG TERM LEASE
NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE QUOTES BILL WELD...BUT NOT THE CLUB
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/us/covid-restaurants-diners-closed.html
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
A dive bar that drew poets, too
If you ever went to the Cantab Lounge at 8 in the morning, you would meet regulars named Hoopy or Ralphie Moneybags or Growling John or Illinois, guys who showed up every morning, as if they had a time clock to punch.
This was before Cambridge, Mass., became a tech boomtown, home to a 300,000-square-foot Google satellite office complete with decorative canoes and a miniature indoor putting green.
Back then this stretch of Massachusetts Avenue was genuinely grungy. The Cantab took only cash. The bar was always sticky, and you wouldn’t want to use the bathroom. In a 1996 Senate debate, the Republican candidate, Bill Weld, held up the establishment as an argument against public assistance, saying, “They get the check, go down to the Cantab in the morning, and drink it away.” (The competition groused that his comment had been good for the Cantab’s business.)
But if you wandered in there on the right night, you could find a poetry slam or bluegrass night or Little Joe Cook and the Thrillers. Ben Affleck’s father used to work there, serving Budweisers to off-duty postal workers. Even the barflies were somehow uniquely Cambridge; Hoopy, for example, carried crossword puzzles in his inside pocket, and gave his profession as “solipsist.”
In July, when the Cantab’s owner, Richard Fitzgerald, announced he was putting it up for sale after 50 years, a howl of distress went up from that old, scruffy bohemian Cambridge. Mr. Fitzgerald, known as Fitzy, is hoping to find a new buyer to reopen the place in the summer — let’s hope in its old, sticky style.
— Ellen Barry
NEW ORLEANS
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