To say that Sligo Pub was a fixture in Somerville’s Davis Square would be something of an understatement.
The small, nearly windowless hole-in-the-wall holds the oldest liquor license in the neighborhood, according to its website. And according to Tom Mannion, who ran Sligo from 1989 until his death last year, the space — once called Mahoney’s and prior to that Pat Connelly’s — has been a bar since at least 1932.
Somerville’s Ivonne Blanco, a regular patron for years, described it as “a pleasantly gnarly dive bar.”
No longer.
We spent some time in Sligo during its final week talking with numerous loyal patrons to find out what set it apart from the multitudes of other bars, why its closure is hitting them so hard and how it will be remembered.
“Everything else is like a bistro pub, it's a brewery. And this is just, it just screams, 'It's a bar,'” said patron Dave Wasserman.
“The bathrooms are gross, they don't serve food, but it's all these things that kind of make it what it is” said Ulysses Lateiner. “It's the last bar of it's kind of just Davis Square and things definitely won't be the same when it's gone.”
The rumblings of Sligo’s demise started to churn through Somerville in 2019, when real estate developer Scape purchased the block of Elm Street — home to Sligo and other restaurants and businesses — for nearly $10 million. Speculation at the time was that Scape would develop the block into a large residential building for students, a specialty of the British-based firm. But last year, Scape announced they would construct a four-story life sciences complex that will include lab and commercial space at the street level.
When Somerville’s planning board approved the project in September 2022, Sligo’s operators said the deal most likely spelled its end. When the news finally broke this spring that Sligo’s was closing for good on June 4, it elicited everything from despair on social media, to elegies in the local press, to philosophical musings from Sligo regulars.
“You catch me on a good day and it's like, well, that's the reality of the world,” said Tim Dalton, who’s been coming to Sligo for four decades. “Catch me on a bad day and there's just real anger that a lot of, you know, old Boston is disappearing.”
“You meet a lot of different people – characters I guess you could call it,” said bartender Sean McDonald. “People are tethered to this place, or their friendship is tethered through this place.”
