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Guides
9 Boston holiday party spots with axe throwing, skeeball, darts and more
An office holiday party goes better when people have something to do with their hands besides hold a drink. These nine Boston venues build the whole night around a game, and every one of them has a package or a planner for groups. December books up early. Puttshack is already asking anyone planning a December event to send an inquiry instead of booking online, and PKL lets groups lock in a date before its regular seven-day booking window opens. Here's what each spot plays, how many people it holds, and how to book. Flight Club Boston books spaces for 13 to 300 people. The semi-private Main Room holds 200 guests and lets 12 players compete at once, and the Harbor Room fits 75 to 80. Crews of 2 to 12 can book online, and groups of 13 or more plan through the events team, which has its own holiday party brochure. Puttshack's Seaport location hosts corporate outings, team building and holiday parties built around mini golf, food and drinks. Groups of 13 to 18 can book online starting at $36 per guest, bigger groups can inquire about parties of up to 500, and anyone planning a December date is asked to submit an inquiry. PKL takes group bookings further out than its regular seven-day public window. A two-hour rental of its Faded Monkey Lounge party space is $250 plus a food and drink minimum of $25 per person and fits about 35 guests. Add cornhole and it's $350 for about 50. Shuffleboard is a $100 add-on, and the booking is confirmed once you sign the contract and pay the space rental invoice. The Greatest Bar calls itself a restaurant, bar, event venue, museum and nightclub, with separate spaces spread over four floors, and it runs a skeeball league. It also stays open until 2 AM Thursday through Saturday, which it calls the latest last call in the city. skeeBOSTON, the league that plays there, will turn your company party into a skeeball party if you email info@skeeboston.com. Roxy's Arcade at 292 Mass. Ave. in Cambridge holds up to 180 people for private events, with a full beer, wine and cocktail list, food and a game menu. Its own motto sums it up: eat, drink, play, nerd out. Urban Axes at 2 Union Square in Somerville pitches itself for team building and holiday office parties, takes online bookings for groups of four or more, and lets you add knife throwing to an axe throwing event. Five Iron Golf's Seaport location at 311 Summer St. has Trackman golf simulators that fit up to six people each. It also has two duckpin bowling lanes that each take up to six bowlers, no bowling shoes needed, and events can combine duckpin, the simulators and more. Kings does holiday parties with bowling, billiards and arcade games, a special holiday menu and bar packages with seasonal cocktails. An event manager helps plan the night, down to Kings-themed invitations for your guests. Boston has two locations, in Back Bay and the Seaport. Howl at the Moon runs a dueling pianos show built on today's hits, party classics and audience requests. Its holiday party package scales with your group: reserved seating for 10 to 20, the semi-private area for 25 to 50, special arrangements for 50 to 99 and the whole venue for 100 or more. Groups of 300 to 500 can add Down Boston, the nightclub attached to it. Drinks can be an open bar, a hosted tab, drink tickets or a cash bar, and food runs from passed hors d'oeuvres to a full dinner buffet, a chef's carving station or interactive food stations.
5 Boston pet hotels for when your besties just need to get away
Boston dogs can get a suite, daycare and even a bedtime snack. Cats have rooms too. These five boarding spots include a South End dog hotel, a Charlestown stay and a West Roxbury resort with cat villas. The dog still needs a bed, and the cat has not agreed to any of this. One Boston pet hotel will not board a new dog until it has done three days of daycare. Another stops drop-off at noon. MSPCA-Angell will not take a pet it has not already seen. A new dog cannot book The Urban Hound the week of the trip. The hotel, at 129 Malden Street in the South End, wants a full-day temperament test on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, then three full days of daycare, and only then a boarding reservation. Staff stay in the building overnight. The lobby does not. The rooms are a standard 4-by-6 and a larger 6-by-10. Posted non-holiday rates are $105 and $135 a night, daycare included. The solo rate drops the group play and substitutes four walks. Half the stay is due up front, and that deposit does not come back. Cancel inside 72 hours and the card is charged for the whole reservation. Holiday weekends want 10 days’ notice. Food has to arrive in a labeled bag for each meal. A small blanket is fine. One toy is fine if it is quiet. Dogs older than six months have to be spayed or neutered. The vaccine list includes both rounds of the canine flu shot, so a last-minute booking can die there. Suite Escape puts dogs in glass-fronted suites at 200 Terminal Street and walks them in the Charlestown Navy Yard. It is taking new clients. The tour is by email, not by wandering in off Terminal Street. Drop-off ends at noon every day, Sunday included. Pickup runs until 8 p.m. A flight that lands after lunch does not get the dog in the door that afternoon. At Red Dog on 274 Southampton Street, a dog stay is either social or private. Social means daycare and two potty walks, after the dog passes a daycare evaluation. Private means no other dogs, and four potty walks. Cats have separate rooms, meals the way you wrote them down, and a report card at pickup. Half the bill is due when you book. A dog or cat that is 10 or older needs a senior questionnaire before the stay is confirmed, and Red Dog will not give that older pet an injection. The care team is there overnight. The lobby is not: weekdays 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. It is also closed for check-in and check-out on New Year’s Day, Easter, Memorial Day, the Fourth, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The Boston price list includes a bedtime tuck-in with the Presidential Patio and the Seasonal Suite. On a cheaper room, the tuck-in is an add-on, and so is a pup cup or a mid-day snack. Luxe Pet Resort, at 1220 VFW Parkway in West Roxbury, will sell a cat a Beachfront villa for $100 a night. Garden View is $50. A standard villa is $45. Food and the litter box sit in separate parts of the room. Two cats from the same house can be joined through a porthole. Dogs get their own crate-free suites, daycare included, at a posted premium rate of $90 a night. Peak dates add $10 for a dog and $5 for a cat. Luxe says someone is on site all night. The hours for walking in the front door do not match from one part of the site to the next, so ask for the pickup time before you pay. Grooming and dog hikes are extra. Dry food has to be portioned by meal. Wet food can stay in the can. MSPCA-Angell boards healthy dogs and cats at 350 South Huntington Avenue, and only if that pet has seen one of its non-emergency veterinarians in the past year. An emergency visit does not count. The suites are separate from the hospital wards. Dogs get four private walks a day, and photos go out twice a day. If the animal gets sick, the vets are in the same building. Pets that need more care than a healthy stay can be booked as medical boarding instead. Bathing is available before pickup. Drop-off and pickup run 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. A boarding assistant can be reached from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. After that, nobody at the boarding desk is picking up. Get the tour. Ask which vaccines they want, whether a new dog has to pass a trial day, who is in the building after the lobby locks, what time pickup actually ends, and what the stay costs once the deposit and the holiday rate are on the bill.
Get to know Boston
Boston was named after another Boston
Boston was named after Boston. The earlier one is in Lincolnshire, England, where a medieval church tower rises above a port and market town. English settlers carried the name across the Atlantic in 1630. Massachusetts made it rather more famous. The connection is well documented. Historic England describes both the borrowed name and the prominent residents who left the English town to help lead the new settlement. The longer story involves a saint, a minister who arrived after the naming, and a peninsula whose human history did not start when the English showed up. Boston was named after a port town Boston, Lincolnshire, was an important trading port long before the Massachusetts settlement existed. Its position connected the town with North Sea commerce, and its surviving warehouses, markets and church reflect that wealth. St Botolph’s Church is the building most likely to catch your eye. Its tower is known as the Boston Stump, a nickname that undersells a structure visible across the flat surrounding country. The church supplied a religious and civic focal point for the town that gave ours its name. The name Boston is generally traced to Botolph’s town. The Getty Research Institute’s place-name record includes “Botolph’s Town” among its historical names. By the time the name reached Massachusetts, the shorter form had already done the work. John Cotton came later John Cotton is an important part of the connection between the two Bostons. He served as vicar of St Botolph’s before settling in Massachusetts. But the dates matter: the American town was named in 1630, and Cotton arrived in 1633. Boston Borough Council’s account of the transatlantic connection explains how Cotton’s congregation and other local figures linked the English town to New England. It also separates that migration from the earlier story of the Pilgrims. The English Boston has a Pilgrim connection too. In 1607, separatists trying to leave for the Netherlands were betrayed and arrested there. That episode belongs to the history leading toward the Mayflower voyage, not to a single founding trip that created every English settlement in Massachusetts. Putting those events into one neat departure story loses the actual sequence. Plymouth’s 1620 settlement and Boston’s 1630 settlement were different undertakings. Cotton’s later arrival strengthened an existing connection rather than creating the name on his first day. Before Boston there was Shawmut The English name was new. The inhabited place was not. The City of Boston’s archaeological history of the Common describes thousands of years of Massachusett life in Shawmut and emphasizes that the Massachusett people are still here. Archaeologists have found stone tools, pottery and shell deposits near the Frog Pond and Parkman Bandstand. Those objects give a much longer account of life on the peninsula than a founding date printed on a city souvenir. William Blackstone, also spelled Blaxton, was already living on the peninsula when John Winthrop’s settlers arrived. In 1634, he sold land to the colonists that became the Common. The familiar park therefore holds several histories at once: Indigenous use, English settlement and the development of shared public land. A city name is only part of the map Boston’s name is comparatively straightforward once you find the English town. The names inside Boston can be less cooperative. Jamaica Plain’s name, for example, has competing explanations rather than one securely documented answer. For Boston itself, there is no need to invent a secret message or claim the Puritans were asking a saint to protect their new home. A familiar English place name traveled with a community of settlers. Understanding why that name felt familiar requires looking back across the Atlantic; understanding the place it was applied to requires looking much further back here. The next time you hear “the original Boston,” the speaker may mean a Lincolnshire market town with a very large church. Ours was the sequel.
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.