There's Something About Mary Ann's

Molly Boigon at Mary Ann's — The author celebrates her 21st birthday at Mary Ann's bar in Cleveland Circle

Molly Boigon is a former associate producer and reporter for Learning Curve, WGBH’s K-12 education desk. She has also worked for Boston Public Radio and WGBH’s higher education desk, On Campus. Her interests include jazz, yoga and public records requests. Before joining WGBH, she worked at SiriusXM, WZBC and WAAF. She has a degree in Applied Psychology and Human Development from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education.

August 09, 2018

Updated August 10, 2018

Hop on the C Line, screech into Cleveland Circle and arrive at your destination sandwiched between a CVS and a Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s marked with what looks like a huge white piece of computer paper gurgling out “Mary Ann’s” before flopping over into the dust. Enter the bar, wait for your eyes to adjust to to the darkness. Smell the stale beer, mop water and the notes of dried vomit from the back bathrooms. Sing “Don’t Stop Believing” with a room full of white men wearing Nantucket red.

You’ve arrived.

This is Mary Ann’s, the quintessential Boston College dive bar, and last month, our beloved windowless brick rectangle was sold to an investment group called Greatest Boston Bar Co. for $1.51 million. No one knows the fate of this sweet, sweet dive, but the investment company might try to hold on to the existing liquor licenses and keep the Eagles coming to Mary Ann’s.

Two years out of Chestnut Hill, I can shamefully admit I spent almost every Tuesday night at this bar. This was the scene of my first legal beverage on my 21st birthday. One of the bartenders called me “Wisdom Teeth Girl” because I stumbled in a few days after getting my wisdom teeth out. This was where we went to drown our sorrows after another devastating football loss, to play Chance The Rapper’s latest album on an auxiliary cord at the bar, or to run into the exes we still wanted.

I mourn the loss of another grimy Boston institution as the city looks more and more like one giant glass skyscraper. I shudder to think of what an investment group called Greatest Boston Bar Co. is going to do to an establishment that cemented shut its second door so people who started fights could not escape. Where will modern BC students escape from a complicated world and get back to the simple things: beer, power ballads and a real life "Cheers," where everyone knows your name?

It always felt to me like not going to Mary Ann’s on Tuesday meant not attending BC in the fullest possible sense, not YOLO-ing enough, not fully realizing the image of a college student I had stored in my brain since birth. I needed a scrappy dive bar to make me feel like a whole person in college, and I know I wasn’t the only one. Mary Ann’s, more than “The Rat” cafeteria or (heaven forbid) the classroom, was the slice of life at BC that convinced me I was doing college correctly, living up to the standard set by the Eagles before me of early-adulthood debauchery and good times. The beer was cheap and lukewarm, the jukebox was terrible and I knew almost everyone inside the bar. This was college. Right?

One night at Mary Ann’s, I saw a group of rowdy young men gathering glasses from the counters lining the outside of the bar. "How nice," I thought. "They’re collecting glasses to ease the bartender’s cleanup at the end of the night."

They gathered their stacks of glasses and sat on the counters and one by one, lifted the glasses into the air and dropped them on the floor so they broke and the pieces shot around the floor like crushed ice. They laughed, and I and my fellow Men And Women For Others looked on silently as “Wagon Wheel” was accented by the sound of breaking glass.

The end of Mary Ann’s as we know it makes me look at those Tuesday nights a little bit differently.

We went to Mary Ann’s to fit in, to meet the expectations set by our friends and generations of previous students who also numbed their fear and doubt by heading to an insular bar to drink. We drank from dirty glasses and stood on sticky floors to feel bigger, to prove how little we cared. We played “Sweet Caroline” on an electronic jukebox and sang along at high volumes, because who could accuse us of being boring when we and 40 of our closest friends were screaming the same lyrics to the same old song, all holding Narragansett tall boys, traipsing across the street for a slice of Pino’s pizza?

Mary Ann’s was supposed to exist forever. It was supposed to be something we could point to and say with certainty that we did the college thing correctly, and look at the proof, we’d say, desperation shimmering beneath our voices: aren’t BC kids still lining up outside of Mary Ann’s? This is the real shame of the changing hands of Mary Ann’s — not that Boston has lost another dive bar, but that BC grads are forced to reckon with the fact that a fear of missing out on the legendary Mary Ann’s conned us into picking a common experience as shallow and flimsy as a white paper sign.

Molly Boigon graduated from BC in 2016.