In 2014, City Councilor Ayanna Pressley succeeded in making her pitch for restricted, less expensive liquor licenses as a tool for economic development in Boston’s outlying neighborhoods.
The number of liquor licenses in Boston has barely risen since Prohibition – a 1930s era holdover of a Yankee-controlled State House that distrusted Boston's Irish-dominated city council. That limit has meant that liquor licenses can go for as much as half a million dollars on the open market, and bars and restaurants tend to be clustered in affluent neighborhoods like Back Bay and the North End.
Cheryl Straughter is the owner of the brand-new restaurant Soleil, in Roxbury’s Dudley Square – and a recipient of one of the cheaper liquor licenses. Soleil – French for “sun” – is her granddaughter’s middle name.
“It also, for me, is a reflection of our community,” Straughter said. “A lot of people don't see Dudley as a warm and bright place to open a business.”
Straughter said she believes in Dudley. She lived in the neighborhood as a young girl, and remembers the bustling commercial center it used to be. But in recent years, Dudley has fallen on hard times.
Now, there’s a push for revitalization, from the sparking rehabilitation of the Bolling Building, to the cheap neighborhood-restricted liquor licenses, intended to motivate restaurateurs like Straughter to open businesses here.
“If you now wanted to go out to dinner and have a nice glass of wine, you would either head toward the South End … or you would head to other parts of the city,” Straughter said. “People shouldn't have to leave their neighborhood.”
Straughter shared her vision for what nightlife in Dudley could look like.
“I do want to have jazz. I want to have music in the evening, so that cars that are coming will actually put on their brakes,” she said.
But for all of Straughter’s optimism, Soleil occupies the space that another restaurant left behind. A fast-casual burger joint opened and closed in the spot within two years.
New restaurants notoriously have a high rate of failure – but of the five licenses granted in Dudley Square from the 2014 legislation, two restaurants have already closed, and a third never opened at all.
“It does take a mind shift, because Dudley has not been a nighttime destination,” said Bing Broderick, executive director of Haley House, an established restaurant in Dudley.
Broderick opened another eatery, a pizza restaurant called Dudley Dough, with one of the new licenses. Just over two years later, it closed too.
“It breaks my heart,” he said of the decision. “At Dudley Dough, we were trying to do a lot of things. Any one of those things is challenging. To do them all at once, in a climate where five restaurants opened at one time, in a market that hadn't really proven itself yet… It was hard.”
Joyce Stanley, executive director of Dudley Square Main Streets, acknowledged that an affordable liquor license can make a difference for a new restaurant.
“But even a liquor license isn’t going to help you, if you don’t have a strong business,” she cautioned. Before Dudley Dough opened, she noted, there were seven other pizza places in the neighborhood.
“If you were doing a real market analysis before you came, you would pick somewhere else,” she added.
To the at-large councilor behind the initiative, a few closed restaurants are beside the point. As a counter-example, Pressley pointed to a new West African restaurant in Dudley that appears to be thriving.
“Neighborhoods like Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester had not seen a new sit-down restaurant for ten, fifteen, twenty years,” she said. “Just to contextualize it, the North End is a .2 square mile radius, and had ninety-nine liquor licenses. And then meanwhile, neighborhoods like Roxbury and Mattapan were food deserts.”
Pressley has filed a new home rule petition, currently in committee, asking for more neighborhood-specific licenses. She conceded less-costly liquor licenses won't fix everything and asked for patience.
“Considering the fact that we're trying to reverse a hundred years of hurt, we're not going to do that in four years,” Pressley said, referring back to the Prohibition era. “But we are on our way to making meaningful progress through these reforms.”
