The Great American Saloon Series/Boston's Union Oyster House
Bartholomew, Douglas
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES BOSTON'S UNION OYSTER HOUSE by Douglas Bartholomew One day in 1887, ostensibly with the dual purpose of dining and drinking, a phalanx of natty Harvard men...
...Reading this made me wince...
...This is not to say that Boston's oldest tavern and eatery, known today as the Union Oyster House, has its place in history shored up by a mere toothpick...
...Of course, this was a ruse...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES BOSTON'S UNION OYSTER HOUSE by Douglas Bartholomew One day in 1887, ostensibly with the dual purpose of dining and drinking, a phalanx of natty Harvard men gathered at the Atwood & Bacon Oyster House at 41 Union Street in Boston's Haymarket section...
...Never mind the splinters-the toothpick was born into modern convention...
...Long known as the oldest newspaper in the United States, the Spy, with its incendiary motto, "Open to All Parties But Influenced by None," was moved during the Revolution to a safer habitat in Worcester...
...As with anything natural that is consumed in these days of health food fanaticism, oysters are not without their concomitant myths...
...Tall tales...
...More recently, Tommy says, Peter Falk (here to shoot the Brinks heist talkie), Warren Oates, Jill Clayburgh, Madeline Kahn, Arthur Goldberg, and Wayne Newton ate here...
...I also learn that the daily consumption of mollusks here (oysters and clams combined) is around 2,500 on a slow day, 6,000 on a brisk weekend day...
...I'd heard of the fabled dining room-named the Louis Philippe Room after the exiled Frenchman who lived here and instructed fashionable Boston jeunes filles in his native language before returning to become King of France in 1830...
...Their orgy complete, they hailed a waiter and loudly demanded toothpicks...
...When the Massachusetts Senator is too busy stumping to patronize on a sit-down basis, he calls ahead for a batch of take-out oysters...
...I had twelve the other night and only nine of 'em worked.'' To this an arithmetically deficient wag added, "Maybe three of 'em worked at once...
...On the other hand, as even-handed hacks are wont to say, it's altogether possible that he was...
...Perhaps because they contain certain minerals, most notably zinc, oysters are said to enhance the human capacity during the act of reproduction...
...Incidentally, the building itself was here long before the Revolution, but just how long is anyone's guess...
...None of this impresses the lobsters in the tank along the wall near the oyster bar...
...States a hand-lettered placard hung behind the original semicircular oyster bar in front: "He often punctuated his speeches with visits to the oyster bar where he drank a tall tumbler of brandy and water with each half-dozen oysters and seldom had less than six plates...
...But my trek, prompted by necessity and Bass Charrington, Ltd., led me to the third floor via two staircases, a dining room, and two kitchens...
...To the contrary, for more than two and a half centuries it has served as a favorite hangout of patriots, statesmen, kings, paupers, senators, Presidents, athletes, sailors, actors, the entire Kennedy clan, and even a college president masquerading as a dishwasher...
...Doug/as Bartholomew is a free-lance journalist in Princeton, New Jersey...
...Thomas Capen's silk and fancy dress goods store was here from the mid-1700s until 1826...
...Jack Kennedy came here in his Harvard days...
...Alas, what Webster did in this case I do not know...
...The scene at Atwood & Bacon, a showing of bad manners said to have rocked the city of Boston, ended all that...
...Tommy is saving the true luminaries for last...
...I quickly drowned any foolhardy thoughts of matching the old windbag oyster-for-oyster and brandy-for-brandy by downing two steins of Bass on tap...
...The best they can hope for between now and 1980 is a chance to ride the dumbwaiter upstairs...
...Though there are other beers on tap-Michelob, the now-ubiquitous Heineken, something called Miller Lite, and Narragansett dark, a Rhode Island product-Bass is the choice of most Union regulars...
...Coleman, in fact, got such a taste of what it is like to put in a real day's work that, after a few years' respite at his college job writing memos and so forth, he returned...
...Unfortunately for Forster, instead of becoming an instant rage in his native New England, his notion of cleaning one's teeth with a splinter of ash or pine was greeted with mockery and ridicule and generally viewed as a practice confined to pedants or the unabashedly troglodytic...
...Other" dining establishments, taking their cue from Boston's oldest saloon and restaurant, soon followed...
...It might as easily have been named the Spy Room, for it was here on the second floor of this ancient structure that, from 1771 until the onset of hostilities, Isaiah Thomas published the Massachusetts Spy...
...I ate twelve myself and all I got was three words from a blonde, a Texas-size hangover, and no toothpicks...
...While the lobsters behave as if under the gaze of a hungry shark in my presence, the ugly beasts have been known to flop from the ascending platform onto the plates-or worse, the laps-of unwary customers at the oyster bar...
...I order several, one at a time, and learn that a Harvard man set the record for consumption of oysters at a single sitting at 84...
...In true pagan fashion they imbibed stein after stein of ale and beer and feasted on massive quantities of oysters, lobster, scrod, and whitefish...
...He says George Raft, Jimmy Durante,'and Ted Williams came here often to gorge themselves...
...Months later when the media got whiff of this escapade, Coleman's aproned figure posed in front of the oyster house appeared in the pages of Time magazine and other publications whose business it is to expose such sensational doings...
...And the wives of such patriots as Samuel Adams, Josiah Quincy, and John Hancock spent their days on the building's first floor-then known as the Capen House, a silk and dry goods shpp- sewing bandages and mending clothes for the ragged Colonials...
...They are going to be eaten no matter what or by whom...
...It seems that Ebenezer Hancock, paymaster of the Continental Army and younger brother of John, set up his headquarters here as the official pay-station for American soldiers...
...Later, as Chief Executive, when he wasn't feeling up Marilyn Monroe's legs at Peter Lawford's place or plotting Cuban invasions, he feasted privately in a rear booth upstairs which is held in constant reserve today for Teddy and his gang...
...Tommy, the barman who's been shucking oysters here since 1939, is doing the teaching...
...There are no records extant predating 1742 when it was sold to a Thomas Stoddard, but it is known that Union Street was laid out in 1626...
...When told the restaurant had none, the Harvard contingent turned violently indignant, vowed it would never again grace the oyster bar with its business, and stormed out in a huff...
...with or without a toothpick, those are imposing stats...
...I sampled a half-dozen oysters, washed and opened before me on a massive chunk of soapstone covered with piles of the little critters-quahogs, cotuits, little-necks, and cherrystones...
...Milano, now the owner, says the college prexy has "a feeling for food" and is doing just fine as dishwasher...
...His volcanic countenance evaporated the remains of my ale and I resolved to embark upon a tour of the building, beginning with that most natural of saloon starting points, the men's room...
...The slide affords plenty of diversion for hard-shelled regulars and tourists alike...
...After four or five of these I was sufficiently fortified to venture conversation with the lissome blonde who had appeared on the stool beside me...
...I doubt it...
...Before long, fashionable types were seen twirling sticks of wood between their lips with the same self-assuredness that Reggie Jackson swings his club...
...A device from a more merciful era, this motorized slide connects the oyster bar to the dining rooms above...
...Now he gives it to me...
...Of these it is said that orator Daniel Webster was the most slakeless and esurient and thereby equal to the mighty task posed upon entry to this citadel of salty mollusks and malty brews...
...On the other hand, could it be that Teddy knows something I don't...
...Spilling a fresh bushel of oysters over piles of crushed ice, Tommy tells of his fishing exploits with Bosox great Ted Williams...
...Back at the oyster bar, where the Bass topers and the quahog-slurpers congregate to discuss such things as the proper way to pry open an oyster and the occasional finding of a pearl-like stone, the Texan and the blonde are gone...
...My attempts at Websterian eloquence were cut short when I learned she was with her husband, a hulking Texan who, standing behind me, cast a shadow the size of Chicago's Sears Tower...
...He chose the Union Oyster House as the site for his research, possibly for a sequel to his 1953 tome, Labor Problems...
...In that year Atwood & Bacon opened their oyster house and tavern and installed the semicircular bar and private booths that remain in use to this day...
...Notes attached to it on descent contain orders as well as occasional curses...
...The college men had been hired, primed, and rehearsed for their stunt by toothpick inventor-promoter Charles Forster who, while touring the Amazon jungle in the 1870s, had stumbled across a tribe of natives who deftly removed food from their teeth with slivers of wood...
...Meandering back through the cook's domain past plates of Lobster Thermidor, broiled whitefish caught this morning, "Bahston" scrod, and all manner of finny and shelled crea-tures, I passed a gaunt, sanguine-faced gentleman of middle age swathed in multistained kitchen garb...
...His name is John R. Cole-man, and he has descended not once, but twice, from his lofty perch as president of Haverford College to mingle with the common worker...
...Though unremarkable, this fellow, I later discovered, was an impostor, a ringer, as it were, from the halls of academe...
...When someone queried a Union shucker concerning the truth of a message on a T-shirt sold here ("Eat oysters, love longer"), he replied, "Nope...
...They're moist and salty, if slightly gelatinous, and go best when spread with Union's own zesty horseradish...
...A few years ago Coleman, then 51, clad in ordinary attire, approached oyster house manager Joe Milano for employment...
...So much for labor problems...
...The oyster house, fearing future displays of post-gustatorial outrage, promptly stocked up on Forster's kindling...
...It is rumored that Washington himself was a frequent visitor, though I could .find no solid evidence (a lock of hair, a slab of false teeth, or perhaps a wheel from his coach) for this commonest of all euhemerisms...
...For that matter, Webster is dead and gone and there is nothing standing between me and the record for consumption of Bass ales on tap at a single sitting...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
