One Night at the Charlestown 99
Where the old neighborhood still shows up.
By Ryan Burke
The first thing you notice when you walk in is the bar. A long rectangle with seats on all four sides. From anywhere you sit you can see everyone. Bartenders slip in through a small opening in the back. TVs line the inner wall. The Celtics game is on, but no one seems overly concerned.
The restaurant surrounds the bar. Photos of Boston on the outer walls. A framed Bruins jersey. A Red Sox jersey. There’s a sign about a shuttle to the Garden on Bruins nights.
Outside, the LEDs in the 99 sign are starting to fade.
Inside, the bar is full, and the beer is ice cold. That shouldn’t be notable, but it is.
Every few minutes a regular calls across the bar. Mostly one name.
“Tamieka!”
Tamieka is bartending tonight. She greets people by name as they walk in, and they greet her right back. I’ve been in a handful of times over the past few months. Enough that she already knows my order: a large frozen pint of Michelob Ultra.
Tonight is the first time she’s brought me one without asking. It’s a nice feeling.
She moves around the bar like someone who’s been on your team for a long time. She looks like she should be in her forties. She’s actually 53, with four kids and three grandkids. Two small tattoos, one on each cheek.
On my right sit two nurses from Mass General. Scrubs still on. One orders a half carafe of red wine. The other a half carafe of white. Boneless buffalo chicken fingers to share and two salads.
My second beer shows up before I ask.
A woman named Shirley walks through the door with a gift. Tamieka unwraps it slowly. It’s a red shot glass, fresh from Las Vegas.
It turns out she collects them. Vegas. Florida. Aruba. Random places across New England. The regulars know, and they always bring them back.
This is the moment I started writing.
Shirley nestles into the corner where the townies sit.
“You want a drink?” Tamieka asks.
“No,” Shirley jokes, “I just came to see you.”
Shirley grew up right next to the 99. She raised her kids there too. She’s in her sixties, definitely a pistol. The Vegas trip was to celebrate her daughter’s fortieth birthday.
Shirley worked as a drafter, creating the drawings engineers use to build major projects. She graduated from Wentworth as the only woman in her class. She helped design the Zakim Bridge. Thousands of people cross it every day, a few minutes from where she’s sitting.
Cities like Boston are full of these quiet overlaps.
The Ninety Nine began in Boston in 1952. Charlie Doe opened the original at 99 State Street with a simple idea: something between a fancy restaurant and a cheap diner. A place where people knew your name. The concept was a hit and helped pioneer casual dining across America. Today there are nearly a hundred locations. But this one is still built the original way, the bar at the center of everything, not optimized for table turnover.
The neighborhood around is being rebuilt. Rutherford Avenue, the long traffic-choked spine of Charlestown, once carried shipyard workers and tradesmen between the Navy Yard and to the bridges over the Mystic River. I’d come straight from CorePower Yoga next door. There’s a Whole Foods in the plaza now too.
Nearby, the Bunker Hill Housing development is being torn down and redeveloped, block by block.
The 99 is starting to feel like a historical marker nobody has put up yet.
Tamieka looks around the room and notices a regular isn’t here.
“You want to call Red?” she asks Shirley. “It’s eight and he’s not here.”
Shirley dials and slides the phone across the bar.
Later I ask who Red is.
“The guy with the red hair,” Shirley says.
I’m about to close my computer when a man walks in and heads straight for the corner.
“Red, you’re late,” Tamieka says, handing him a beer.
Final check: $30.36 before tip. Chopped sirloin with fries and broccoli. Two beers listed, even though I had three.
One night, not too far from now, someone will order the last beer at the Charlestown 99.
Most people in Boston won’t notice.
But the people sitting around that bar will.
And on a shelf in Tamieka’s house, the shot glasses will still be there.
Little souvenirs from regulars who once were.