This was the first piece I wrote for a long-form journalism class at Boston U.  

Above the door of one bar in Boston reads a perplexing manifesto: “There’s no place on earth like the world.”  Through the threshold is the place that Boston Magazine has voted the best Irish pub in Boston four consecutive years.  It is the best watering hole in Boston, per Ireland’s Sunday Tribune.  And it has only been around since 1988.  In the same neighborhood as Doyle’s Café, opened in 1882 and immortalized in movies like Mystic River, the Behan is the best.

But in the evenings, the bar is so dark it is nearly inoperable.  There is often a breeze, but it doesn’t come through the door.  It comes from the ceiling.  Black fans circle lazily overhead.  The fans rotate against the black ceiling, too dark to make out, creating the aforementioned mysterious breeze.  It looks like a few black holes carved out space in the ceiling of the pub.  Vortexes idling in a space only slightly bigger than a Jamaica Plain studio apartment.  A fish tank in the corner of the room glows.  The fish are the most visible living creatures in the room.  A matching fluorescent box glows overhead, cut out of the middle third of the ceiling.  This box houses newspaper clippings and posters, preserved but worn.  These two vestiges of light, coupled with a desktop computer in the far corner and the streetlights coming through the window, maintain enough light for ten feet of visibility within the bar.  There are lights suspended a few feet above the bar, but the bulbs are so dim it is as if their light was collected and stored sparingly from the sources on the street.  Outside, lights flicker in the Video Underground restaurant across the street, and a pet supplies shop with pale yellow walls closes for the night.  Brendan Behan’s namesake precedes the “PUB” in the gold block lettering seen outside many Irish pubs in Boston.

On a Wednesday night at 378 Centre Street in Jamaica Plain and John Casey paces behind the lacquered wooden counter of his pub.  He never stays in any spot for more than a minute.  Even when he isn’t to and from patrons, he’s constantly moving.  Not so much a nervous twitch or anxious fidget, but an excited jitter.  He finds ways to occupy himself while talking to the shadowed faces on the other side of the bar.  He clasps his hands together into a prayer-like position beneath his chin.  He taps on the bottoms of empty pints with his pointer and middle fingers, putting skittish drum fills into music coming out of speakers wedged in corners.  He taps his heel on the ground so quickly and forcefully that the tremors travel all the way up to his shoulders. The music is not explicitly Irish, but the spirit is similar.  Mumford and Son’s new single “I Will Wait” plays at a low volume, floating across the ears of the patrons before rising and swirling into the black holes overhead.  Next is Wilco’s “Can’t Stand It,” another piece of chugging folk rock from a band known to cover Irish tunes.  It’s a relatively slow night at the pub: all ten bar seats are filled, and a few people lurk in the booths, but nothing more.

Casey looks strong.  Almost six foot tall, bald, green-eyed and broad shouldered, he would be more intimidating if he could get rid of the perpetual trace of a smile that starts in his eyes and pulls on the corners of his mouth.  It’s a good night.  He’s flying to Puerto Rico tomorrow for a rare, much-needed vacation.  His job requires a much slower tempo than the more crowded nights, so he busies himself with his jitters and casual conversation with some familiar patrons.  The fact that the bar is more of a well-lit cave has one advantage: deprived of sight, sound is amplified.  It is easy to hear in Brendan Behan Pub on nights like this, when the music is low and the people aren’t drunk.  On other nights, the tiny bar is bursting with sound from art students, Irish fiddles or barking dogs (the Behan may be the only pub in Boston with a “dogs allowed” policy.  There haven’t been many in the pub recently but Casey hopes for more in the future).  Casey’s Irish lilt would be harder to notice on a Friday or Saturday night.  He brags about being interviewed by NPR, makes drink suggestions and mouths along to the music, all while pacing the length of the bar in a wide gait.  A picture of John F. Kennedy rests on the wall at the midpoint of the bar.  Its eyes follow Casey as he paces, an unsettling optical illusion.  One woman asks Casey for a drink he doesn’t know how to make.  He apologizes, noting that is the other bartender’s specialty, and makes a “comparable” rye and ginger instead.  Casey smells the ginger, makes the drink and hands it over with a look that promises a good choice.

John Casey lives around the Mission Hill and Jamaica Plains area. He has for almost eighteen years, aside from a couple stints in Toronto (where his wife is from) and Cape Cod.  He was born in Cork, Ireland but grew up in Wicklow, a town about an hour and a half drive south of Dublin.  His mother grew up where the Kennedy family has roots.  Casey’s first trip to the states was with a Gaelic football team, traveling and playing in six cities on the east coast.  “Historically, Irish people move,” he says.  “Almost as a rite of passage, we travel in our lives.  Some stay, some go back, some go on to another place.  But for a little while you have to get off the island.  I came here and I stayed.”  He moved with his sister, but she returned to Ireland one year later.  Casey worked in bars, just like he had back home.  First it was the old Littlest Bar on Province Street (possibly the only bar in Boston smaller than the Behan), before it moved to Broad Street, expanded and rendered the name inaccurate.  Then the Squealing Pig in Mission Hill.   Now, the Behan.

Almost seven years ago, Harry Walshe and Michel Soltani bought the Brendan Behan Pub from Gerry Brennan, who also owns Somerville’s Thirsty Scholar Pub.  Brennan sold the Behan to focus on the Scholar and spend more time with his sons.  Soltani, who immigrated to the United States from France in the 1980s, worked his way up to bar ownership.  He started with a pushcart at Faneuil Hall, opened some businesses in Mission Hill (the Solstice Café on Tremont Street was originally the Café de Michel), and then made a push for the Behan.  Now, one of the so-called “most authentic” Irish pubs in Boston is co-owned by an Italian immigrant.  Harry Walshe was a longtime patron of the pub.  He came when it opened, he worked there, and now he co-owns it.  Both owners found their own piece of the American Dream.

When Walshe and Soltani took over, they approached John and asked him to come work with them.  He obliged, and now he is the manager.  Casey handles ordering, staffing, and everything else from top to bottom.  He tends the bar in the evenings.

Casey is more comfortable calling the Behan a pub than an Irish pub.  According to him, a lot of newer places work into a template that he hopes the Behan remains outside of.  Two prominent purveyors of these templates are the Irish Pub Company and the Irish Pub Concept by Guinness.  These businesses work out what they deem to be authentic Irish pub designs and plant them all over the world.  The Irish Pub Company recreates Irish pubs, which are “successful culturally and commercially, anywhere in the world.”  The company has designed over 1000 pubs.  These pubs have rigid, aesthetically pleasing yet shallow styles: Victorian, Shop Style, Country, Celtic and Brewery.  Casey equates it to owning a McDonald’s franchise.

There are no visible shamrocks in the Behan (even in daylight) unless they are on bottles of liquor.  There are two recurring iconic images in the pub, though:  Brendan Behan and John F. Kennedy.  Brendan Behan was not just an Irish writer with a drinking problem.  He was the preeminent Irish writer with a drinking problem of the 20^th century, born and deceased in Dublin.  In the 41 years between, he wrote plays, poems, novels and prose.  Irish historian Ulick O’Connor recalls a story from when Behan was eight years old.  He was returning from a drinking session with his grandmother and his friend.  “Oh, My!  Isn’t it terrible ma’am to see such a beautiful child deformed?”  Someone shouted from the street.  “How dare you,” his grandmother replied.  “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”  It is surprising there are not more pubs that bear Behan’s name.

Behan was a boisterous character, and a terribly important one to Ireland.  His brother was a songwriter and his uncle wrote the Irish national anthem.  The Behans were a working-class family well known around Ireland.  When Behan was sixteen, he joined the Irish Republican Army.  As a member, he went on an unauthorized solo mission to destroy the Liverpool docks in England.  Behan was caught with explosives and sentenced to three years in a borstal, or youth prison in Liverpool.  Behan’s prison experience was central in his writing, first in his breakthrough play The Quare Fellow and later in his autobiographical novel Borstal Boy.  Behan’s plays showed on Broadway while he was still alive, a huge breakthrough for an Irish playwright.  When he returned to Dublin, Behan became part of a literary movement through Envoy, an art and literature review that published his first poem and first short stories.  Behan, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh and Brian O’ Nolan (known in his English language novels as Flann O’Brien, which is coincidentally the name of another Irish pub on Tremont Street) all used McDaid’s Pub in Dublin as the base of their artistic community.  As his profile grew, so did his drinking habit.  He became diabetic, and was viewed as the stereotypical drunk Irishman by the public after a few notorious interviews.  Behan died in Meath Hospital after collapsing in a bar.

Kennedy, the first non-WASP president of the United States (Casey insists that this is reason he is such an important figure, not only because he was Irish Catholic), grew up less than two miles away from the Behan.  He was the first US President to visit Ireland, and referred to the trip as the best four days of his life.  Kennedy made his visit to County Wexford, Ireland on June 26, 1963, just five months before his assassination.  He could not fulfill his promise to return.  Casey remembers how important John F. Kennedy was when he was growing up in Ireland.  He was a fantastically hopeful figure to people all over the world, but his connection to Ireland was unique.

Behan and Kennedy’s spirits are well embodied in the Behan and Jamaica Plain.   “JP” is 4.4 square-mile neighborhood that became a part of Boston in 1874.  It had an influx of Irish immigrants in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Breweries were major employers at the time, and many employed the Irish.  By 1900, the Irish were one quarter of the neighborhood’s population.  After a brief decline in the housing market crippled Jamaica Plain in the 1970s, neighborhood activists rallied behind a community investment plan to financially revive the area.  Now, JP is gentrified, home to art students, political activists and young professionals.  Hyde Square, where the Brendan Behan Pub is located, doesn’t have as dominant of an Irish presence as it once did.  In its place is a Spanish-speaking (primarily Dominican) population.

Casey still sees the pub as the type of place you would find in Ireland.  The only television in Brendan Behan Pub is a black flat screen that measures maybe 26 inches.  It is perched in a corner shelf of the bar, never turned on.  At night it looks like a particularly dark shadow.  There is no kitchen.  There never was.  In Ireland, the pub is like your living room.  It’s where you socialize, where you meet your friends and hang out.  It isn’t necessarily about the consumption of alcohol so much as it is the focal point of the neighborhood or of the community.  The Behan is influenced by what Casey’s concept of a real Irish pub is like, not so much the Irish “brand.”  That is obvious.  No one would call the Behan pretty.  It is dusty, cluttered and dingy.  Before it was the Brendan Behan pub, it was a gin hall, filled with Irish-Americans and Irish immigrants.  When the Behan opened, it was one of the few true Irish bars on its side of town.  A lot of younger Irish immigrants populated the place back then, fresh out of their homeland on a preferential visa program to the United States.  This was where immigrants came for information from back home.  They would come in, chat, share news and listen to music.

A fair amount of Irish come in and out of the bar now, but not as much as they did in the Behan’s infancy.  Now the clientele is different: some young, some old but plenty of variety, including a large contingent of writers and artists.  On Saturday afternoons, there are still traditional Irish sessions.  Fiddle players and guitarists come in to jam.  In addition, the pub does poetry/prose readings and even hosts plays (which seems impossible with its size).  The pub attempts to establish a literary tradition to honor of its namesake.  But, like the childhood home of Sylvia Plath across Jamaica Pond, there is no mention of literary merit.  It keeps a low profile.

The non-Irish community became a part of the Behan, and subsequently the Behan became a part of the community.  Casey described the attraction of the non-Irish community to the pub like a moth to a light.  It is probably more like a hermit crab to a dark, snug shell.  And the bar doesn’t just attract arty types.  Intellectuals of all kinds frequent the Behan.  On weekends, a group of students from Harvard’s biostatistics graduate and Ph.D. department come by to unwind.  Joey Antonelli is one of those students.  A second-year in the program, Joey makes his way to the Behan from his apartment in Fenway.  He has lived in Boston for a little over a year.  Before that, he was an undergraduate student and champion club soccer player at the University of Florida.  Now, he’s a student and teaching assistant within the program.  On weekends, he and a few friends come to the pub to unwind.  Unwinding for him doesn’t mean leaving studies on the Harvard medical campus.  He grabs a Dogfish 120-minute IPA and chats about the program: about homework problems he is struggling with, about who the real geniuses are in his department and about who he thinks will pass the “qual,” or qualifying exam, after their second year (students who wish to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard have to pass a brutal exam at the midpoint of the program, otherwise they walk away with just a graduate degree).  Listening to the conversation is enough to make anyone who doesn’t understand basic linear regression anxious.  But he still uses the pub similarly to how the early Irish immigrants did.

The pub in Ireland has the role of a meeting place, according to John Mackey, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Boston University.  The word “pub” comes the term “public house.”  People would go there after mass on Sunday to talk, to listen to music or to play music, and even to settle disputes through debate.  The image in America of a bar as a place where college students go to get drunk does not really hold merit in Ireland.  In Galway, West Ireland, university students hold club meetings at the pubs in town.  They may drink a couple of beers, but the primary focus is discussion.  Pubs are so braided into Irish culture because they foster communication and community among the Irish.  British researchers at Manchester Metropolitan and Bradford Universities explore the long tradition of the pub in marginalized society.  The pub’s “quasi-egalitarian” ethos brings a financially and culturally diverse crowd.

Casey started coming to the Behan shortly after he moved to Boston.  He watched and admired as the bar became a part of the community.  Now, the Behan is an integral part of Jamaica Plain.  If you ever want to find the best bar in a city, ask a bartender where he or she goes for a drink.  Casey contends that most bartenders within five miles would have the Behan high on their lists of best bars.  For such a small space, the pub has a sizeable selection: 30 beers on tap, twice as much bottled and a stuffed liquor shelf.  Though their selection is eclectic, they still have Guinness on tap and Bushmills and Jameson on the shelf.  The most popular drink choices are the beers on tap, which include fall selections like Sam Adams Octoberfest, brewed less than a mile south of the pub.

When Casey returns to work, it is a Friday afternoon with un-Puerto Rico-like weather.  A rainy morning gives way to a cold front, and it’s around fifty degrees when Casey walks in the front door, wearing a track jacket and red and white Boston golf hat.  He remembers how he felt the first time he walked through the front door.  “I felt like I was at home.  At home in the Irish aspect but also at home in the feeling at home aspect.  It’s got a soul.  It’s hard to explain it.  It’s really a living organism.  It’s a habitat.  You’ll go some places downtown or wherever where it’s about how you dress, what’s your background or what’s in your wallet.  Brendan Behan has never been about that.  It was always welcoming to everyone.”

The smile from last Wednesday night isn’t as noticeable.  The bar is filled with around ten people, all of them huddled near the window.  Everyone says hi to Casey: Justin, the café owner from across the street, Adam, the bartender from the New England School of Photography, two girls who work in a restaurant in Jamaica Plain.  A friend approaches Casey and tells him about his birthday party.  He plans on bringing his group to the Behan.  He hopes Casey will be around.  Casey considers everyone in the bar a close friend.  They all chat, and for the next hour no one looks at a cell phone.

I’m still not satisfied with this story.  I’ve tried to make it less hermetic by grounding it in Jamaica Plain.  That makes it feel a little more important, but I still wish I could have done more with the sociology and/or anthropology of an Irish pub.  I found some really interesting material, but it was impossible to wedge into my story without taking it in a completely different (albeit more complex) direction.  If I could do another draft, I would move away from the “Cheers” vibe of the pub and ground the story with a little more research; even try to hint at the significance the pub could have in the future to aspiring artists, thinker or politicians.  I’d like to explore the pub as a social forum, reminiscent of places in Boston like the Green Dragon Tavern.  Do bars still occupy the same social/communal space they used to?  Is it important that some still do?  Or has a more connected (but also disconnected) society abolished the need for a “talking bar.”  And where does the alcohol come into play socially?  And the fact that it is an Irish Bar?  Ultimately I thought this piece felt too much like a love letter to the Behan without enough explanation about why the bar was truly important.  Do we still need places like the Behan?  I would’ve liked to answer that question more thoroughly.  This piece just frustrated me.