The Bell in Hand at 45 Union Street calls itself America’s oldest tavern, and the oldest tavern in Boston if you take the sign’s word. The year painted there is 1795, and the claim is that the pouring never stopped. The business under this name closed on Pi Alley on January 9, 1915. It did not open again until 1934.
Jimmy was still the crier in 1809
Jimmy Wilson made his living with a bell and a loud voice. The tavern’s about page says he cried Boston’s news for fifty years, then retired, opened the bar, and named it for the bell. He would not sell whiskey, rum, or gin. The ale, the page says, was so thick it needed two mugs, one for the drink and one for the foam. It calls the place a hangout for printers, politicians, sailors, and students, and says Daniel Webster dropped in. Wilson, it says, announced everything from the Boston Tea Party to the birth of the nation.
The Tea Party was in 1773. A bar dated 1795 missed it. The directories do not list Wilson as crier that early, either. J.L. Bell at Boston 1775 notes that the 1796 directory listed only John Weare as town crier, a post Weare had held since 1782, and that Weare died in 1800. James Wilson shows up in the 1809 directory, living over 23 Cornhill, and the job next to his name is town crier. He had not retired in 1795.
James Hale, writing in 1883, put him on the steps of the Exchange Coffee House, ringing for a crowd around nine at night. He would announce a lost child or a lost pocket-book, pile on the agony, and then crack a joke that sent everyone off. Edward Griffin Porter, in 1886, put the shop in the basement of that coffee house, facing what is now Congress Square. Wilson’s trade was brushes. The ale was a sideline, sold in pewter mugs, with a foaming toby painted on the door. The main sign was a bell in a hand, said to be a copy of the bell he carried. J.L. Bell writes that this shop is what became the tavern. The about page wants the opening in 1795, with the crying already done. The directory still has him at it in 1809.
Closed in 1915, back in 1934
Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, working from the newspapers, puts the tavern in that basement first, then on Pi Alley from 1853, near enough to Newspaper Row that bankers, reporters, and Harvard professors made it a stop. On January 9, 1915, that stop ended. The plan was to turn the Niles Block into offices. People came for a last night. The Boston Post, the Herald, and the Globe all wrote it up. The Herald said the last crowd sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and filed out. Two days earlier the wooden sign had come down, a raised hand holding a bell, about two and a half feet tall, and gone on loan to the Bostonian Society, to hang at the Old State House.
The block never came down. Daniel J. O’Connell, who owned the tavern, had talked about moving back in after the new building went up. There was no new building, and no reopening. The room sat empty until the summer of 1920, when Charles Ponzi used it as a cashier’s office for the Securities Exchange Company. The scheme cracked, investors lined Pi Alley for their money, and the police shut the office. They were queued up outside a bar that now says it never closed.
In 1928 the pewter, the portraits, and the sign went to auction. Brooks writes that D.F. Butler bought the sign for $255 and said he would loan it back for display. The business returned in June 1934 on Devonshire Street, in a building Harvard College owned and leased to Bell in Hand, Inc. The sign out front was a copy. A Cambridge liquor business with the same name sued, arguing Boston had abandoned it for more than 18 years. Nothing Brooks cites says who won.
Union Street is the date nobody agrees on. Boston Magazine in 2021 put the move in the 1950s. In July 2025, manager Adam Kessler told the Globe he does not know the year, and he thinks it may have been the late 1960s or the early 1970s. The Globe, using state records, reported that the building went up around 1844.
From January 1915 to June 1934 is a little more than 19 years. Prohibition falls inside that stretch. It did not start the closing. The country went dry in 1920, five years after Pi Alley locked up. Boston Magazine called the dry years a 13-year close. Kessler told the Globe the tavern stayed open through them and just stopped serving alcohol. The 1915 papers describe a last call, a sign taken off the building, and a plan for offices. Christine Sismondo, who wrote America Walks into a Bar, told the Globe that almost no one in America can claim a tavern that poured straight through Prohibition, and that the Bell in Hand fails the smell test.
Eat before the kitchen closes
The homepage lists raw oysters, lobster rolls, clam chowder, fish and chips, burgers, and salads. It has the room open every day from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., kitchen until midnight. The contact page stops lunch and dinner at 11:30 p.m. Come for the chowder and you are on the kitchen’s clock, not the bar’s. Check which one is running before you skip dinner.
Walk the block before you sit down
The tavern sits in the Blackstone Block, beside Faneuil Hall. Boston landmarked the block in 1983 for the streets and alleys, not for a single building. The city describes it as the only part of Boston that still has its original unplanned colonial layout. Union Street is the west edge. It was laid out in 1636 as Green Dragon Lane and renamed in 1708 for Great Britain. Scott Alley, Salt Lane, and Marsh Lane run off it. Walk those before you sit down.
