BOSTON LETTER:
WHENEVER KERRY played in an
All-Ireland football final, the best place to watch the match in
Boston was Nash's of Dorchester, writes
Kevin Cullen.
Nash's was not just an Irish pub, it was a Kerry pub - and it was not just a Kerry pub, it was a west Kerry pub. The accents were thick and, before the ban, the cigarette smoke was thicker. There were chancers and characters and carpenters and the craic was 90. Every other word was unprintable. You'd might as well be in Dickie Mack's in Dingle.
But when I walked into Nash's on All-Ireland Sunday last September, everything had changed, changed utterly. Kerry won, of course, dispatching a Cork side that never stood a chance. But hardly anyone was there.
Those who were weren't celebrating. It was as if they were holding a wake, and a small one at that. There were a couple of dozen people. Five years ago, there would have been 200.
Pete Nash, the proprietor, sat on a stool at the end of the bar. He is a Kerry man and was a good footballer in his day. If anyone should have been overjoyed to have witnessed the Kingdom put away its 35th title, it should have been Pete Nash. But he looked around his pub glumly. He couldn't help but think about the heydays, when the pub was crammed with hundreds of young Irish, flush with cash and booze.
"They're all gone," Pete Nash says, staring at his pint glass, as if it held an answer instead of some cider. "They've all gone home."
So they have and so they will continue. The Irish are leaving Boston. Pete Nash has sold his pub to a woman named Karen Diep. Her parents are from Vietnam and have run a Vietnamese restaurant across the street from Nash's. Nash's is being renovated and will soon re-open as Van's, named for Diep's husband, not Van Morrison.
In some parts of Dorchester, the neighbourhood that for much of the 20th century was home to the greatest number of Irish immigrants in Boston, the Vietnamese are the new Irish. They look at empty storefronts and see opportunity. Vietnamese entrepreneurs have breathed new life into Dorchester Avenue, the main thoroughfare known locally as Dot Ave, from Savin Hill all the way down to Fields Corner.
The Irish had their time, their ascendancy, in Dorchester and there's still more than a few of them around, but along much of Dot Ave, it's someone else's turn.
If Nash's conversion from an Irish pub to a Vietnamese sports bar captures most dramatically the demographic changes in a city long thought of as the capital of Irish America, it is hardly an isolated example. In just a mile stretch of Dot Ave, over just the last few years, pubs that once proudly proclaimed their Irishness have rebranded themselves, or closed altogether. Ned Kelly's became D Bar, with a mostly gay clientele.
The Tara shut down and became a beauty parlour. Mickey's Place is now a Vietnamese social services agency. The Emerald Isle has just closed its doors.
Not all of the late Irish joints are missed. Karen Diep's parents opened their restaurant in the space that formerly housed Scruffy Murphy's, a rough pub, the kind of bar Bostonians refer to as a bucket of blood: the first shot was on the house; after that, you had to pay for your own bullets.
A strong economy in Ireland, the inability to get green cards to stay here legally and a crackdown on illegal immigration since the 9/11 attacks have conspired to make Boston a less desirable and hospitable destination for the young Irish who used to stand three deep at Nash's, with paint on their clothes and dreams in their eyes.
For most of two centuries, the Irish came to Boston looking for work and a better life. That steady stream has slowed to a trickle. Some here might cheer that prospect.,others might lament it. Still others might shrug and say someone else will take their place. That's true and that's America.
However it is also true that no ethnic group, no tribe, had a greater influence on Boston, on the way a majority of its residents do business, practise politics and even pray. Even as the Irish go home, even as fewer come over, their influence will linger, like the smoke that used to hover like rainclouds above the bar at Nash's.
A Tricolour still hangs outside the pub that once was Nash's. Its colours have faded, like the numbers of Irishmen in Dorchester who answered its siren call, looking for a jar, a smoke, a hurling match on the TV, Bagatelle on the juke box, a reminder of what they left behind. Karen Diep, the new owner, has left the Tricolour there while the bar is renovated.
But, she says, eventually it will be taken down. Nash's will then be like all those All-Irelands celebrated vicariously along Dot Ave: a nice memory.
Kevin Cullen is a columnist for the Boston Globe - cullen@globe.com