Pimps and hookers worked out of the adult bookstore on the corner. Right across the street was Penelope’s, where the wise guys hung out. That’s because there is already one in the building.īack when Big Tony’s father poured the first drink in 1970, this section of the Back Bay was decidedly not a latte place. Whatever goes in T.C.’s space, it probably won’t be a Starbucks, that favored symbol of gentrification. T.C.’s was the antidote to everything in Boston that has become soulless.”
There are already too many of those places. We don’t need another bar meant to look like an old bar. “What does the world need, another Starbucks? There’s so few of these bars out there that are just institutions. “It harkened back to a Boston that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Lawson Clarke, who works in advertising and is better known by his award-winning Internet persona, Male Copywriter. We’re losing part of the grit of the city,” said Jamie Bissonnette, the chef and owner at Toro and Coppa, who has spoken with the Consalvis about doing “pop-up” T.C.’s nights at other bars. “It’s like watching what happened to Times Square. The Mackin Group, a Brookline management company that represents the co-op, will say only that the landlords are reexamining the property and looking at different alternatives.įor T.C.’s regulars, the loss of the bar is more than just sad it is symptomatic. “Now they won’t even talk to me,” he said of the tenants above him.
This hurt Big Tony Consalvi immensely he had been there so long that he had seen the tenants upstairs grow up, had been to their weddings and some funerals.
Since that time, according to the Consalvis, the First Fenway Cooperative, which owns the building on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street, has had no interest in discussing the matter with them. But the Consalvis had a clause in their lease that allowed their landlords - the building is a co-op, so essentially their neighbors - to terminate their tenancy in the case of a fire.