You won't recognize the new Mary Ann's - it'll be in Allston, have large windows and small plates, oh, and a new name

So it will be referenced in every future article about this new place, which will be nothing like the old Mary Ann's.

But I feel Adam is like me....there is something sad about seeing places like Mary Ann's shut down, even if it was a big problem for the Brighton community overall.

The kids older than me always had good stories from this place in the 1980's, when I guess they didn't card or the drinking age was 18. Fights, drugs, gambling, sex you name it, that was the place for it. I remember seeing lines outside when it got busy as I got older, and would end up going myself during non college season every once in a while where it was your standard "dive bar". One thing you learn early is not to drink draft beer from a place like this, and also not to get too drunk or else some locals could easily put someone in their place, and not in a nice way.

Which made me think.....who were the "locals" in this place? No one grows up in that area. I never went in there enough to get a good feel for the place in the offseason. Who's "bar" was this? I would have considered myself a local growing up in Brighton, but the people in this place were strange. I always guessed they were just friends of the bartenders, and not locals. Joey's was another place that was purely local, and never got any college students or new residents. But they had real locals, Mary Ann's though?

And there were places where the sex/drugs/fights did not bring back "good stories". Ups and Downs was one of those places. I had gone in maybe twice in my life, but Mary Ann's was a different type of fun I'm guessing.

but big mugs?

For the all the people too young to have actually gone to Mary Ann's to pine about the adventures they'd have in the place.

now need a bar that they can take their families to.

But this is what I'm talking about when I call Boston "increasingly soulless."

sad, but not always. I remember when the B-Side Lounge took over the former Windsor Tap, a place my buddy rightly called "the best place in Cambridge to get an eight-ball and a stab wound." That was a useful upgrade, in my book.

Although it sounds like if any business could be argued to have its very soul and essence be represented by a liquor license, I guess it would be that one.

That the old Mary Ann’s is either housing some kind of secret government agency, or an underground market. If you don’t believe me, go stand in doorway and soak it in. Feels like something from The Boys.