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5 Boston bars for a hot toddy crawl
The first cold night in Boston is a reminder that pumpkin beer is not a winter strategy. Order something hot, strong, and made by someone who cares. These five stops, four with booze and one without, split into two walkable legs. Do both in one night if you like, or treat them as separate evenings and skip the long gap between Kendall and Fort Point. Start in Davis Square, then cross into Kendall. The walks are short. The drinks get less classic as you go. Batifol is where you should eat something before the toddies add up. Foundry on Elm is the purist stop. Their Hot Toddy is a clean, balanced classic of bourbon, lemon, honey, and clove. Nothing clever. Just done right. If someone in your group wants mulled wine or an adult hot chocolate instead, Foundry carries those too, including non-alcoholic versions. Start here at 255 Elm Street in Somerville, then head toward Kendall on the Red Line or a short rideshare. State Park sits downstairs in One Kendall Square, in the Alexandria Plaza lower level. It is the dive bar with the toddy nobody expects. The Hot Hibiscus Toddy mixes apple brandy and Bénédictine with pomegranate, hibiscus, ginger, and lemon, served steaming. Tart, bright, and stronger than it looks. This is the drink that turns the crawl from classic to interesting. Five minutes away at 291 Third Street, Batifol is full Paris brasserie mood. Order La Folie Douce, a hot drink of whiskey and Drambuie with maple syrup, lemon, and orange juice. It is a toddy in everything but name. Stay for the onion soup. If you want a second winter warmer, Batifol also pours L’Après Ski, a hot red-wine drink with brandy, citrus, apple, and spice. Five toddies is not a dinner. Eat here before you keep going. The second leg sits on the other side of the river. Uber the gap, or save it for another night. Matria is the pause for anyone skipping alcohol. The Envoy rooftop is the finale once the winter igloos are up. Matria, inside the InterContinental Boston at 510 Atlantic Avenue, is the non-alcoholic pick. The Twilight Toddy has no booze at all. It is built on lemon and honey with chamomile and cinnamon. Bring the friend who is not drinking, or take a break mid-crawl. The room looks out over the waterfront, which helps when the first leg has already done its work. No hangover from this round. From here, the walk to the Seaport is short. Rooftop at The Envoy is the finale, but time it for winter, when the heated igloos go up seven floors above the harbor at 70 Sleeper Street. Igloo seats are reserved, usually for small groups of about four to eight, and they go quickly on weekends. The toddy changes with the season’s gin sponsor. Last winter it was the Gin-gle Bell Hot Toddy made with Empress 1908 Gin. Book an igloo if you can. If not, the rooftop bar still runs walk-up seating when it is open. End the night here. Two legs, two nights works cleanly. One night works if you Uber between Kendall and Fort Point. Go on a weeknight. Igloos and prime seats disappear on weekends. Eat at Batifol. Confirm the current toddy names before you go. Seasonal menus move around, and the Envoy drink in particular changes with the sponsor. If the fire, the igloo, or a specific drink is the whole point, call ahead the day you go.
12 viral Halloween costumes that are so 2026
Show up as a broken AI image, six fingers and the tell-tale extra hand. Or what about a World Cup jersey (or the duck who never got in). Of course, there's always the Storrowed truck, which you know everyone gets. Beacon Hill is where a bad costume goes to die. Last year the city shut Mount Vernon, Pinckney, and a pile of other streets from 4 to 7:30 p.m. so the trick-or-treat crowd could take them over. The Beacon Hill Times ran the list. Brick, cobblestones, and someone asking what you are. Miranda has already rejected your costume. Silver hair, huge sunglasses, a coat that looks like rent. Andy is tall boots and a good coat. Emily is allowed to insult both of you, and someone has to carry the coats all night. The Devil Wears Prada 2 put Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci back together, and it is on Hulu and Disney+. It made about $693 million, so people will know who you are. A cape on the Green Line. Matt Damon is Odysseus, Anne Hathaway is Penelope, Zendaya is Athena, and Charlize Theron is Calypso. Circe is Samantha Morton. Do not show up as Circe and then argue. Linen, leather, gold, and sandals you can walk in. Odysseus gets the sword. Athena gets the helmet. Calypso gets to look dangerous. Couples can be Odysseus and Penelope. Ten years apart is optional. The movie has already passed $1.7 billion. Extra hand. Six fingers. A shirt with letters that almost spell words. A name tag that says Regenerate. The worse it looks, the clearer it is. One shoe should be a different size. An arm can come out of the wrong place. Bring a framed photo of yourself that does not look like you. You can start this at 6 p.m. and still be right. Diamond bones down to your fingers, a feathered coat, and a crown that will not survive the bar. Beyoncé wore it to the Met Gala in May, her first time back in a decade. Vogue has the arrival, Olivier Rousteing dress included. A black or nude bodysuit and silver bones will get you there. Rhinestones if you are patient. The coat is what keeps it from looking like last October. A hockey jersey will not get a second look in Boston. The name on it has to. Briar University, from Prime Video’s Off Campus. Jersey, stick, athletic shorts. The specific versions are better. Allie’s Shakespeare look is a blue corset, a satin dress, and fairy wings. The couple is Hannah’s bunny and Garrett’s magician, not Allie’s. Teen Vogue laid those out. Cowboy boots, flared jeans, big hair, a western shirt, and something that says Choosin’ Texas. Without the words, you are dressed for a country bar. Ella Langley’s song spent 23 weeks at No. 1, the longest run in Hot 100 history. A couple can split it. One person chooses Texas. The other one looks left. The costume people will understand is a national team jersey, a scarf, and a tiny trophy. Gillette hosted seven World Cup matches, including a quarterfinal, under the name Boston Stadium. CBS Boston has the list. Couples wear rival teams. The costume people will stop for is Merlín, the duck in a miniature Mexico jersey. Reuters followed him to a meeting with the president. He was still a duck. He did not get into the stadium. Stage clothes, the hair, the weapons. One of them works. All three work better. KPop Demon Hunters was already Netflix’s biggest movie, and Netflix ordered a sequel. Official HUNTR/X costumes exist, which beats building the whole thing out of metallic fabric after midnight. Woody, Jessie, and Buzz are the easy version. Lilypad is the one that dates it. She is the tablet in Toy Story 5, voiced by Greta Lee. Build a frame, put your face in it, and spend the night interrupting people. Disney said the opening was the biggest global debut of the year. Moana needs the necklace. Maui needs the hook, the skirt, the wig, and tattoos that were printed. A friend with a marker, after drinks, is not a plan. Catherine Lagaʻaia plays Moana. Dwayne Johnson is Maui again. The live-action movie opened July 10. It is a duo. Moana still does most of the work. Peach’s skirt has to be a problem on the T. Pink dress, crown, white gloves. Mario is overalls, a red cap, and a mustache. Rosalina makes it a group. A cardboard pipe makes every doorway a fight. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie put them back in theaters this year, so the closet version looks current again. Build a moving truck out of cardboard, crush the roof, and write Storrow Drive on the side. It reads as Boston from across the street, and it will take up a Beacon Hill sidewalk. Trucks keep hitting the low bridges on Storrow Drive, Soldiers Field Road, and Memorial Drive. The state calls it Storrowing.
5 funny horror movies to watch on Halloween for people who just can’t handle it
Halloween movies are way more fun when you don’t need a Xanax. With these five you get ghosts and vampires and a hungry plant, and enough comedy to help you through the scary parts. Blood levels vary. A horror comedy can still wreck you if the joke gives up halfway through. The funny Halloween horror movies that leave you able to sleep are the ones that stay comedies. Young Frankenstein is rated PG, and the scare is mild. What We Do in the Shadows is rated R, and the blood is intentional. Gene Wilder plays a scientist who introduces himself as Fronkensteen, which is how hard he is trying to quit the family, and then finds his grandfather’s notes and runs the experiment anyway. Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein in black and white so it would look like the old monster movies, then filled the castle with people who cannot keep a straight face. Marty Feldman is the assistant. Peter Boyle is the monster. Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, and Cloris Leachman are in the house too. The film opened in December 1974 and it is rated PG. The British Board of Film Classification calls the horror mild and the sex references moderate. One of the jokes is the monster in bed. You do not need the earlier Frankenstein films. You need to be all right with a dirty joke in a laboratory. The Ghostbusters to put on is the 1984 one. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson lose their university funding and open a ghost-removal business in a New York firehouse. Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis live in the same Central Park West building, which is how the mess reaches the city. There is a sequel, a reboot, and later movies about a new generation. The one with the ghost in the red circle is this one. It is rated PG, and the first ghost is a jolt. In the New York Public Library, an elderly librarian turns on them and they run. Murray never looks as frightened as the plot is asking him to be. The possession scenes get strange. The movie keeps handing the job to people who brought the equipment. Get the 1988 Beetlejuice, not the sequel. Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin die, fail at haunting their own house, and hire Michael Keaton, which goes badly. Winona Ryder is the teenager who can see them. Catherine O’Hara is busy making the house worse. The dinner where the new owners lose control of their own bodies is the reason to watch it with other people. It is rated PG. The images are not mild. A face comes off. A woman carries her own head. A teenager writes a suicide note, and there is a hanging gag. The afterlife is a dreary waiting room. If those pictures are the ones you were trying to avoid, skip to the plant. Little Shop of Horrors is a musical, so the horror arrives with songs, and the monster is a plant. Rick Moranis plays Seymour, a flower-shop clerk whose miserable little specimen starts drawing a crowd once he feeds it blood. Ellen Greene is Audrey. Steve Martin is the dentist, and the song explains the career choice: he likes the work because it hurts. Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops sings the plant. It is rated PG-13. People get eaten. Frank Oz reshot the ending after test audiences hated a finish in which the plant ate the cast, so the version that played in theaters is the less mean one. A cut where the plant wins is the ending they threw out. The plant is an enormous puppet, which helps if what you cannot stand is violence that looks real. Mute the dentist if the dentist is the actual problem. What We Do in the Shadows, the movie from 2014, is not the FX series. Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement play vampire housemates in Wellington who have had centuries to learn the dishes and still have not. A bouncer will not let them into a club. The television show started on FX in 2019, with a different cast, on Staten Island. Same kind of joke. Many more nights of it. This is the bloody one. The British board classified the film 15 for strong language and bloody violence: bites, large blood spurts, and some gory injuries, played for comedy. In the United States it is rated R. If a dark house is what keeps you up, this is easier than a straight horror movie. If blood is what keeps you up, Young Frankenstein is still at the top of the list, and the vampires can do their own washing-up.Get to know Boston
Boston’s weather beacon has a special signal for the Red SoxBoston’s weather beacon has a baseball setting. The red and blue lights on the old John Hancock building were designed to announce a forecast, but a flashing red signal during baseball season has also meant a Red Sox home game was postponed. Apparently rain is not specific enough until it affects Fenway. The beacon sits on the Berkeley Building at 200 Berkeley Street in Back Bay. It is the older Hancock building, not the much taller glass tower at 200 Clarendon Street. If you are looking for the lights on the glass one, you have the wrong Hancock. How to read Boston’s weather beacon The basic weather-beacon code uses two colors and two behaviors. Steady blue means clear weather. Flashing blue means clouds. Steady red means rain, while flashing red is the snow signal. Notice both parts before trying to read it. Blue alone does not supply the whole message, and neither does red. Whether the light holds steady or flashes makes the difference between two forecasts. The familiar rhyme pairs a clear view with steady blue, clouds due with flashing blue, rain ahead with steady red and snow instead with flashing red. You do not need to recite it on the sidewalk. Remembering the colors and the flashing pattern will do. The system gives you a broad category rather than a detailed forecast. It cannot tell you how many inches of snow to expect, what time the rain will start or whether your particular walk home will be dry. That was never information two colors could comfortably carry. The lights arrived after the building The Berkeley Building opened in 1947. Its weather beacon first lit on March 15, 1950, according to Atlas Obscura’s history of the structure. The beacon rises above the office tower, making the signal visible beyond the immediate block. A building that communicated by colored light was a useful idea before everyone carried a screen. Someone who knew the code could glance up and get the message without buying a paper or waiting for a broadcast. The weather service has not been continuous. The beacon went dark during the 1973 energy crisis and returned in 1983. In 2020, steady blue was used as a tribute to hospital workers during the pandemic, temporarily giving a familiar color a different meaning. Those interruptions are a reason to understand the lights as a piece of Boston history, rather than treat every photograph of them as an exact record of the weather. A blue beacon in an old image may be carrying a message other than clear skies. The Red Sox got their own signal The baseball connection extends beyond a rainout. After the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, the beacon flashed red and blue together. The usual forecast could wait. The combination was repeated for the championships in 2007 and 2013. It is a pleasingly Boston use of an office-building fixture: two colors responsible for clouds and precipitation recruited to announce that the Red Sox had done something worth looking up for. The Curse of the Bambino story explains why 2004 carried so much weight. The championship ended a wait that had lasted since 1918, long before the Berkeley Building or its lights existed. Look for the older Hancock The two Hancock buildings can make directions confusing. The Berkeley Building is the one with the stepped top and beacon. The reflective glass skyscraper is 200 Clarendon, the later tower associated with the same company. The beacon belongs in a wider collection of Boston signs and signals that people recognize without necessarily knowing their original job. A corporate building can become a reference point for people who have never worked inside it. View the lights from a public sidewalk or another open vantage point, and give yourself a few seconds to distinguish steady from flashing. For a game-day decision, check the Red Sox’s announcement directly. The skyline is good at shorthand, but it cannot explain what happens to your ticket.
Boston’s streets make absolutely no senseTake a wrong turn in downtown Boston and the city seems to rearrange itself behind you. A street bends without warning, changes its name, feeds into something called a square, and sends you back toward the place you just left. The usual explanation is that Boston paved over cow paths. It is repeated so often that it sounds like established history. The better explanation involves a small peninsula, private property, enormous amounts of fill and several towns that became Boston after laying out streets of their own. Boston’s streets started on a much smaller piece of land When English colonists established Boston in 1630, the Shawmut Peninsula was connected to the mainland by a narrow strip called Boston Neck. The route across it roughly followed present-day Washington Street toward Roxbury. There wasn't much room to leave town. The National Park Service describes the original peninsula as a place of three prominent hills, wetlands and estuaries. This was Massachusett land long before English settlement. Much of the ground that now seems inseparable from downtown Boston was still water. Early streets connected the places colonists needed to reach: houses, meetinghouses, markets, docks and fresh water. Routes fitted around slopes, shorelines and property. What served a small port town did not anticipate delivery trucks or someone trying to make a left turn on the way to a parking garage. The cows had other things to do Cows and sheep really did graze on Boston Common. The city eventually banned grazing there in 1830. That history explains why livestock belongs in the story, but it doesn't establish that wandering cattle determined the street plan. Ralph Waldo Emerson helped the idea stick. As Boston.com recounts in its examination of the cow-path story, he wrote, “we say the cows laid out Boston.” The article's historians point instead to fresh water, property boundaries and the original terrain as practical reasons for the early routes. A path used by animals might also have been used by people. That possibility is a long way from explaining an entire city. The cow story survives because it is easier to remember than the history of somebody else's property line. Boston made more land and gave it different streets Boston spent centuries creating room to grow. Hills were cut down, tidal areas were filled and the shoreline moved outward. The Leventhal Map & Education Center's account of landmaking describes both the physical work and the financial incentive: new ground could become valuable property. The result is particularly easy to see in Back Bay. Its rectangular blocks look different from the older streets downtown because they came from a different process. Planners could set out a street system for land being created, rather than fit roads around an existing waterfront town. Arthur Gilman produced his Back Bay plan in 1856. Filling began the following year and continued for almost four decades, according to the Friends of the Public Garden's history of Commonwealth Avenue Mall. The broad central mall gave the new neighborhood a long, planted space between its roadways. Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester and Hereford streets even proceed alphabetically. Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury Street and Boylston Street run alongside one another. For a few blocks, Boston gives you a system you can remember. Boston also bought into other towns' street maps Today's city includes communities that developed separately. The city's annexation timeline records Roxbury joining in 1868 and Dorchester in 1870. Charlestown, Brighton and West Roxbury followed in 1874. Hyde Park joined in 1912. Those places already had roads, town centers and property boundaries. Becoming part of Boston did not erase them or require their streets to meet a Back Bay grid. A trip across the city can take you through several different systems without a sign announcing the change. Later traffic rules added another complication. One-way streets and turn restrictions can make a short route on foot a much longer trip behind the wheel. Knowing where a place is and knowing how to drive there are separate accomplishments. To see the difference without dealing with either problem, start on foot in Back Bay. Follow its rectangular blocks, then cross toward Beacon Hill's older, narrower streets. The change in the map is right under your shoes.
Why Bostonians say “wicked” so much“Wicked good” is a compliment. “Wicked expensive” is a complaint. The same word does both jobs without any concern for whether the subject deserves praise. In Boston, “wicked” often means very or extremely. It turns up the volume on whatever comes next. Say someone is wicked tired and you mean they are very tired, not that they have become a worse person. The meaning comes from how the word is being used. That is the useful thing to know before attempting a Boston impression. You can pronounce every R and still use the word correctly. You can also drop every R and put “wicked” in a sentence where it sounds like you learned to speak from a souvenir sweatshirt. Why Bostonians say wicked before almost anything In this usage, “wicked” is an intensifier. Merriam-Webster records its adverbial meaning alongside the older adjective meaning morally bad. The two uses can occupy the same language without confusion. A wicked person and a wicked good sandwich are different propositions. Think of “wicked cold,” “wicked funny” or “wicked crowded.” The word strengthens the description. It does not tell you whether to like the thing being described. Someone saying the restaurant was wicked busy might be recommending it, explaining a long wait, or wishing they had stayed home. The placement is more important than putting on an accent. “That was wicked good” has the familiar local construction. “That was wicked,” meaning excellent, is another slang use, but it does a different grammatical job. Adding the word everywhere will not make every sentence sound more Boston. The Puritans do not get automatic credit Boston’s reputation makes an origin story involving stern Puritans tempting. But the fact that an old word existed in England does not prove that seventeenth-century settlers brought this particular local use with them. The language program A Way with Words discusses “wicked” as a New England intensifier. That regional association is useful. It does not supply the name of the first person who said it, or a neat date when everyone in Massachusetts agreed to start. There is no need to invent a founding ceremony. People repeat words they hear in their families and communities, and a familiar expression can feel entirely ordinary to one speaker and immediately regional to another. “Wicked” works perfectly well without a colonial certificate of authenticity. Ordering a frappe does not require dropping an R Other local words need a little more translation. A frappe is a thick milkshake; the familiar New England pronunciation rhymes with “cap.” The spelling can make visitors expect a different word, especially if they are thinking of a coffee drink. For an order, the menu is more useful than a debate over terminology. Ask what is in the drink if the distinction matters. Regional vocabulary is interesting until it becomes the reason you receive something other than the ice cream you wanted. “Bubbler” means a drinking fountain, with a history that reaches beyond Massachusetts. Our bubbler explainer separates the regional word from a frequently repeated manufacturing story. Calling it a water fountain is also a perfectly effective way to ask for water. Vocabulary is not the same as an accent The Boston accent concerns sounds: which R’s a speaker pronounces, what happens between words, and how vowels are formed. Vocabulary concerns the words chosen. They overlap in conversation, but one does not require the other. A person raised here might say “wicked” constantly, occasionally, or never. Another might arrive from elsewhere and pick it up. Neither case is a useful citizenship test. Boston contains more than one way of speaking, and ordinary conversation is less uniform than the movie version. If the word is new to you, listen to what follows it. Good, bad, fast, slow, cheap, expensive: the next word does the describing. “Wicked” just makes sure you heard.
Bostonians call drinking fountains ‘bubblahs’Ask for a bubbler in parts of New England and someone may point you toward a drinking fountain. Ask in Wisconsin and the same thing can happen. Boston does not have this word to itself, even when it pronounces the ending differently. “Bubblah” is a written attempt to capture the local pronunciation of “bubbler.” The object is familiar: a fixture that sends up a stream of water for someone to drink. Its regional name has generated a surprisingly persistent origin story involving a plumbing company and a trademark. A bubbler is a drinking fountain Merriam-Webster identifies “bubbler” as a drinking fountain. The word is not a joke invented for visitors or a different kind of beverage. If someone tells you there is a bubbler down the hall, they are giving you directions to water. The name is descriptive enough. Water rises from a small outlet, making a short bubbling stream. “Drinking fountain” describes its purpose; “bubbler” describes what the water appears to do. Neither name requires a complicated explanation to be useful. That does not mean every Bostonian uses it. A family’s vocabulary, where someone went to school and the people around them all help shape which words feel ordinary. Hearing “water fountain” from a Boston resident is not evidence that they are secretly from somewhere else. The Kohler story needs a correction One popular account claims that Kohler invented the fixture, called it the Bubbler and watched the brand name become a general term. Versions of the story even identify an inventor named Harlan Huckleby. WUWM investigated that account with historian Beth Dippel, who had worked with Kohler’s archivist. The company records did not establish the supposed employee, and the dates in the story did not fit the business’s manufacturing history. Kohler did later make a design called a bubbler. But the word was already in use. That is the important distinction: a company using a name does not establish that it invented the name. Dippel discussed an older attachment on school water containers as one possible explanation. She presented it as a theory. The reporting does not replace one tidy invention story with another proved beyond doubt. Why the final R sometimes disappears The spelling “bubblah” moves the discussion from vocabulary to pronunciation. In the traditional Boston accent, an R after a vowel may disappear before a pause or another consonant. That is the pattern people are trying to represent with the “ah” ending. It does not mean a speaker removes every R from every word. R’s at the beginning of words remain, and an R can connect a word to a following vowel. The same person can sound different when saying a word alone and when using it in a sentence. The word and the accent also travel separately. A speaker can call a fixture a bubbler while pronouncing its R. Another can have a strong local accent and call it a drinking fountain. Treating those choices as inseparable makes a caricature out of ordinary speech. Other words that can trip up a visitor A frappe is another useful example. The dictionary records the thick-milkshake meaning and the pronunciation “frap.” Recognizing the word helps you order; copying the server’s accent adds nothing to the transaction. Then there is “wicked” used to mean very. It changes the strength of a description rather than naming a different object. These are separate features of regional English, not a script that everyone in Boston follows. A bottle-filling station may stand beside a traditional drinking fountain, but the fixtures serve different actions: one fills your container, while the other lets you drink directly from the stream.The next time you hear “bubblah,” you do not need to settle a trademark dispute or demonstrate your local credentials. You just need to find the fountain.