Redeveloping the Doyle's property would pose some interesting challenges because a brook runs under it

The owner of the now closed Doyle's Cafe at Washington and Williams streets has yet to say publicly what he plans to do with the land - and the associated parking lots - but should he sell it for redevelopment, any plans would have to deal with the fact that Stony Brook now runs in a culvert under part of the building.

A deed restriction on the roughly 2,000 square feet of land right at the corner of Washington and Williams, basically where the bar's main entrance was, not only grants the Boston Water and Sewer Commission a permanent easement to run and maintain the Stony Brook culvert under the building but mandates that nothing taller than one story ever be built on the parcel (also: That the basement floor consist of at least eight inches of Portland concrete, reinforced by 3/4-inch twisted steel bars set 12 inches apart and that this concrete layer be set eight inches above the top of the brook culvert).

This still leaves owner Edward Burke plenty of room for something taller, though: Doyle's actually sits on three other parcels, and next to a two-family house that Burke also owns. Add in the parking lot behind the cafe on Williams Street, and he would have roughly 23,000 square feet to play with (15,000 or so if the two-family house is excluded), even aside from the corner lot with the easement (he also owns land across Williams Street on either side of Meehan Street that served as parking for Doyle's).

The land is mostly zoned for light industrial with a maximum building height of 35 feet and with no allowance for housing, save for part of the rear parking lot, which is also zoned to allow a triple decker.

But in today's build-housing-everywhere environment, that alone wouldn't prove much of an impediment should the land be redeveloped as housing - just look along the other side of Washington Street, where multi-story apartment and condo buildings have replaced garages, parking lots and low-rise commercial buildings from Forest Hills to Egleston Square. In August, the Zoning Board of Appeal granted variances for a four-story condo building at 121 Brookside Ave. in an industrial zone next to an active sprinkler factory.

Like almost everything else associated with Doyle's, there is, of course, a story to go with a bar built over an underground brook.

Back when Jamaica Plain was part of the town of West Roxbury (and before that, the town of Roxbury), the area around Washington and Williams streets was mostly a marsh surrounding Stony Brook, which ran from Turtle Pond in Hyde Park to the Charles. The problem with Stony Brook, especially as people kept building closer to it, was that it flooded constantly. Over the course of several decades, Roxbury, West Roxbury and the city of Boston gradually just put the whole thing underground, in a series of large underground culverts that now flow into the Muddy River in the Fenway and the Charles.

Stony Brook on an 1873 map of the town of West Roxbury, showing it uncovered and crossing under Williams Street and through what is now Doyle's land (source):

By the late 1800s, the area on the northern side of the Washington/Williams intersection was dry enough that the Doyle family could open a bar there in 1882 and move the family grocery store from Brookside Avenue - one of several non-bar businesses that over the decades shared the sprawling building with the bar.

On Aug. 21, 1906, the city took the corner lot as an easement to permanently cover Stony Brook there and the next year paid owners Margaret A. and Mary Doyle $1,000. The city also agreed to rent the land to the building's owners for $10 a year, which the Burke family dutifully paid for nearly 100 years.

In 2005, though, the Boston Water and Sewer Commission solicited bids for the parcel. Burke put in a bid for $5,000. Then a mystery bidder said he'd pay $101,000 for the land. The commission, more of an independent authority than a City Hall agency, though, had the right to reject the highest bidder and did so, selling the land to Burke for the $5,000 he bid - subject to the requirements to keep Stony Brook flowing.