One of the oldest dive bars in Boston is apparently closing down after nearly a century of operation near Fenway Park.
The Dugout Cafe is set to close for good, affiliates said, after the city’s licensing board approved the transfer of its liquor license last week, according to board documents. The recipient, Earl’s Kitchen and Bar, plans to use the license for a new location set to open in the Seaport next year.
It wasn’t immediately clear why the bar sold its license, which was previously reported by WBZ NewsRadio; the Dugout’s ownership could not be reached for comment.
But the Mendoza Line, a comedy group that regularly performed at the bar, said on social media Monday that the Dugout was “officially, permanently closed.”
“The Mendoza Line at the Dugout Cafe is officially done,” said the group, adding that its upcoming shows would be held elsewhere. “Thank you to everyone that has performed, attended, or produced our cozy little show in the back room of a bar over the last 12 years.”
It marks the end of a long and colorful history that dates back to the end of Prohibition, when the bar received one of the first liquor licenses issued after the 18th Amendment was repealed in December 1933, according to BU Today. (Legend has it the bar may have originated a few years earlier, before the sale of alcohol was fully legal.)
Located at 722 Commonwealth Ave., the bar was just a short walk from Fenway Park as well as Nickerson Field, the former home of the Boston Braves.
It soon became a haunt for baseball fans, sportswriters, and players. Sox greats Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams were among the many friends and customers of owner Jimmy O’Keefe; Williams, a rookie at the time, was once pulled over after a police officer recognized him driving O’Keefe’s car, the Globe reported.
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He was reportedly a bootlegger during Prohibition and rubbed shoulders with mayors Jim Curley and Maurice Tobin, whom he helped get elected governor. As the story goes, O’Keefe once physically beat up Tobin when the then-governor and future US secretary of labor refused to find a job for a friend of his.
“O’Keefe smokes and coughs too much and looks tired and grouchy,” read one column in the Globe. “But that’s not the real Jimmy O’Keefe. He likes people and if he is your friend, you have a real friend.”
As the years went on, the Dugout became a popular hangout for Boston University students — despite the school’s early objections that “the place is not conducive to academic work.” (Decades later, the school would open its own pub, exclusively for students, just around the corner from the Dugout.)
The association was strong enough that Globe sportswriter Peter Gammons described it as the official bar of the 1980 Winter Olympics, since the “BU Four” of the “Miracle on Ice” team — Mike Eruzione, Jack O’Callahan, Dave Silk, and Jim Craig — either worked or went there.
Today, the Dugout is under a BU housing building. A college spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that BU owned the property but deferred further comment to the business owners.
The legend of the Dugout grew throughout the years. It was supposedly the place where a crew planned the Great Brink’s Robbery of 1950, BU Today reported. It offered shelter during the blizzard of 1978, when O’Keefe enlisted an electric company truck to deliver cases of beer through the mounds of snow. (Only essential vehicles were allowed on the road “and beer was essential at the Dugout,” the Globe wrote.)
When O’Keefe died in 1987, the Globe described him as “the closest thing to a legend Boston had left.”
Luke O’Neil, a local journalist and author, wrote “Boston’s Best Dive Bars” 15 years ago, chronicling their slow disappearance. Back then, there were roughly 120 true dive bars, he estimated. Today, there may not be 20.
“It’s the same story as anything else about how the city has changed,” O’Neil said. “Overpriced and homogenized and designed now as a playground for the rich. With every beloved old bar or music venue that closes, usually because of greedy land hoarders, the city loses a piece of what makes it special.”
Places like the Dugout, he added, were “the reasons why so many people were proud to live here or wanted to move here in the first place.”
Globe correspondent Maia Penzer contributed.
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