What this is

In the summer of 1986, two engineers at the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts set out to visit every bar in the city. They managed forty of them across eleven nights between 2 August and 12 September, photographed most of them, and wrote the whole thing up as a mock academic paper.

The title page credits James Francis Murnane II, Professor Sclerosis, Mastoid Institute of Technology and Grant Arthur Albert, Doctorae un Urinal, University of Canned Light Alcohol. The afterword thanks Fran, who “translated handwritten doggrel into typewritten text”. She typed all forty five pages.

It was never published and never meant to be. A photocopy surfaced in a desk drawer and was passed on. This site reproduces it in full.

Why it matters more than it looks

Lynn in 1986 was a city of about seventy eight thousand people in the middle of a long industrial decline, and it supported at least forty bars. Many of them were shift bars within walking distance of the GE gates. Read as a comic pub crawl it is very funny. Read as a record it is a street level account of a working city in the year its work was going away.

The authors knew this, in their way:

It is, at best, a moment frozen (well, most of 'em are frozen - the Shawmut's petrified). In time, years from now, some will surely have drained the last key and rolled on to that great empty keg in the sky or have been remodelled to suit the latest fashion.

Afterword, 15 December 1986

They were right. Most are gone. Four are still pouring.

A note on the text

Everything here is reproduced as it was typed in 1986. Spelling, punctuation and typing errors are left alone. So is the language, some of which belongs to its moment and to two men writing for an audience of each other, and would not be written that way now.

Nothing has been corrected, softened or cut. An archive that quietly edits its own source is worth less than no archive at all, and a reader in another forty years should be able to see what was actually on the page.

The photographs are reproduced from the same photocopy, at whatever quality the Xerox left them.

What is still missing

The addresses. The original names only the bars, never the streets, and the 1986 Lynn city directory has not been digitised anywhere reachable. A handful of addresses are stated in the text or have been documented since. The rest are marked as guesses or left blank, and they will stay that way until somebody opens the physical directory at Lynn Public Library.

Also missing: number 27, The Arena. It is in the index and has no entry.

Contributions

The authors asked for them:

It is not a complete work, rather we liken it to a watershed work designed to encourage the reader to his or her own contributions to the literature.

If you drank in any of these, worked in them, or know where they were, that is exactly what this needs.