Tue, Nov 3
Berklee Asia Rising: Celebrating Asian and Asian American Voices in Contemporary Music
8:00–11:00 PM
Berklee Performance Center · Boston
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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.
9 Boston spots that feel like a European vacation
Boston has a museum built around Isabella Stewart Gardner’s love of Venice and a public-library courtyard modeled on a Roman palace. Add a French café and dinner above the Public Garden, and you have the makings of a day that feels a little removed from your usual routine. These Boston spots offer some of the pleasures of a European vacation: looking closely at buildings, taking your time over lunch and walking somewhere simply because it is beautiful. Several are free. The paid museum visits and restaurant meals are choices, not prerequisites. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s attachment to Venice shaped the museum she built in the Fenway. She collected architectural fragments in Italy, including columns, windows and doorways, and used them around the courtyard and galleries. The result asks you to look at the building as closely as the paintings. Start with the courtyard’s arches and stonework, then take your time in the surrounding rooms. The museum closes on Tuesdays, so check admission before making it the first stop of your day. Acorn Street’s uneven stone paving and close-set brick houses make a short stretch of Beacon Hill worth stopping to see. The pleasure is in the scale: doors, shutters and windows close enough to notice their differences. Take the photograph from somewhere that keeps entrances clear. People live here, and their front steps are not part of a public photo set. Continue toward Charles Street afterward if you want shops and a place to sit down. Café Sauvage brings a French restaurant to the Massachusetts Avenue end of Back Bay. It is useful for a meal before walking Commonwealth Avenue Mall or continuing down Newbury Street, with daytime and evening service rather than one uninterrupted kitchen shift. Read the current menu for the meal you have in mind and reserve if the café is central to your plans. Mondays are its day off. A slow lunch works better when you have checked that lunch is being served. The Central Library’s courtyard has a particularly clear Italian connection. Its arcaded design draws on the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome. The covered walkways frame an open courtyard and fountain, giving you somewhere to pause without buying a museum ticket or a meal. Bring a book and use the library as a library. If you also want afternoon tea, book that separately; access to the courtyard does not reserve a restaurant table. Italian bakeries, restaurants and food shops give the North End plenty of reasons to linger beyond its historic sites. Choose a bakery stop, walk the smaller streets around Hanover and Salem, then decide whether you want a full meal. The neighborhood is compact enough that you need not plan every turn. For something to take home, Modern Pastry sells Italian pastries and cookies. Leave room in your bag as well as your afternoon. The comparison with a French boulevard is built into Commonwealth Avenue Mall’s design. Boston’s account of its history credits Arthur Gilman with that approach. Trees, monuments and a central walking path give the avenue a different pace from the traffic on either side. Walk a few blocks from the Public Garden and look across at the houses as you go. The side streets also provide easy exits toward Newbury Street when it is time to eat. Trinity Church on Copley Square is a chance to see Richardsonian Romanesque architecture up close: rounded arches, heavy stonework and a building that holds its own beside much taller neighbors. Inside, John La Farge and his collaborators created decoration that works with the architecture rather than sitting apart from it. Book one of the church’s visitor tours if you want to see the interior. It remains an active church, so sightseeing follows its visitor schedule and services. The Public Garden offers winding paths, planted beds and a lagoon crossed by a small bridge. Walk around the water, then find a bench rather than treating it as a shortcut between shopping streets. The garden itself is a year-round outing, though flowers and activities change with the season. The Swan Boats add a ride in the warmer months. They are closed for the 2026 season, with a return planned for April 2027; use the operator’s schedule before planning around them. Contessa serves Northern Italian food at the top of The Newbury hotel, with views across the Public Garden and Back Bay. Its dining room gives you a reason to dress for dinner, but breakfast and lunch are options too. Pick the meal that suits your budget before reserving. The restaurant lists dishes such as tortellini en brodo and ricotta gnudi among its specialties. Check the menu for your service, and use our rooftop guide if you would rather make the view a drinks stop elsewhere. For an easy afternoon, combine the library courtyard, Trinity Church and Commonwealth Avenue Mall, then choose a meal in Back Bay. Our free and cheap things to do in Boston guide has museum admission options, while our unusual Boston outings give you reasons to try another neighborhood.
Get to know Boston
Bostonians are generous and loyal but it goes both ways
Outsiders might read the generosity as a performance on the way in and coldness on the way out. Wrong. It’s an account. Reciprocity is expected in this town. When you skip your turn you say something about you. The first round The bar is the easiest place to see this. Someone raised here, especially in the neighborhoods, will fight to get the first round. We will argue for the privilege because that’s how we show we like you, but if you don’t buy one back, it’s an insult. What, so you don’t like me? Or worse, you’re a cheap motherfucker. Most of us won’t say that, although some will say the last part, joking/not-joking. Either way, you’re on the outs. Irish pub culture has the same rule written more tightly. The Irish Times describes the round as a system, not an act of generosity. Mess it up and you can damage a reputation or a friendship. Irish Central is blunter: nobody reminds you when it is your turn, and people will talk. Bostonians are the same way with conversation. Only talk about yourself, never ask a question, and show no interest in the other person, and it’s over. We also have strict rules about family and friends. For neighborhood Bostonians, family is always right and the people we have known since kindergarten are family. In the schoolyard we backed them no matter what, and we still do. New friends are judged the same. Pass and you have a friend for life. Galway House is one of the oldest Irish bars in Boston. Photo by 4300streetcar Parish, neighborhood, round This culture is thickest in Irish Catholic working-class neighborhoods of Boston like Jamaica Plain, South Boston, Roslindale, and Dorchester, or JP, Southie, Rozzie, and Dot. People who leave those places tend to take the culture with them, and new people notice even if they can’t name what they are noticing. None of this came from nowhere. Rural Ireland ran on neighbor labor as well as kinship. A meitheal was a working party. Neighbors helped with a harvest or a turf cut, then expected the same help when their own work came due. The Irish Independent describes it as neighbors helping each other in turn, with no wages, on farms of roughly equal size so nobody cleaned up at everyone else’s expense. That is not a romantic clan from a movie. It is a practical rule: you show up, then they show up. Boston gave that rule a parish and a street. Irish Catholic immigrants built churches against real hostility. In Dorchester, a church under construction in Lower Mills burned in 1854, a fire many believed was set by Know-Nothings. St. Gregory’s followed. Later, people from the neighborhood still asked what parish you were from, because the parish was the map. Global Boston notes that Irish Americans left more slowly than some other groups in part because Catholic parishes could not pick up and follow them to the suburbs the way a synagogue could. A study of South Boston’s Irish enclave, drawing on Thomas O’Connor and on residents, put it in plainer language. People identified themselves by parish as much as by Irish county. In South Boston you learned silence and loyalty. Those are not opposite traits. They are the same system seen from two sides. You take care of your own. You do not advertise the terms. Call it clan if you want. The useful word is still the round. Help is supposed to come back and loyalty is supposed to be answered. Conversation is supposed to have a return. People who grew up in it think it’s normal, but people who didn’t think we’re a harsh bunch. They don’t realize our generosity is not charity, it’s membership. If you want in, buy the next drink, ask a question, and show up when it is your turn. If you don’t, you just won’t be asked back.
Boston’s streets make absolutely no sense
Take 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.