Doyle's Online Collection Launched
The Boston Public Library, Digital Commonwealth, and the Jamaica Plain Historical Society are pleased to announce the launch of a new online collection comprised of items that once hung on the walls of the beloved Doyle’s Café in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Having served as a community gathering place, an inevitable backdrop for hundreds of political campaigns, and a cornerstone of the American brewing industry for almost 125 years, Doyle’s closed its doors in October of 2019. Soon thereafter, the public was invited to a public auction of equipment, fixtures, and historical memorabilia that made the space so compelling and unique. Most of these items were subsequently loaned to the Jamaica Plain Historical Society to be digitized at the Boston Public Library to be digitized and and hosted online by Digital Commonwealth in the Jamaica Plain Historical Society section.
This gallery serves to preserve the memory and context of this important community gathering place. Currently the gallery is comprised of digital images and basic textual descriptions of each historic item that hung on the walls of Doyle’s Café.
Doyle’s was more than a community pub, its story mirrored the history of European immigrants in the late 1800s, particularly Irish and German immigrants who used Boston as their key point of entry. Like these immigrants, Doyle’s played a role in the emergence of the American Brewery movement whose base at the turn of the century was in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain thanks to the clean water of the Stony Brook which flowed through these territories.
New Deal Era murals were painted onto the plaster of the interior walls of Doyle’s by Jamaica Plain Artist Max Beichel who was commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project. Later in the 1900s, as the fortunes of Irish immigrants improved and gained political stature in Boston, Doyle’s Café became the epicenter for city, state, and national politics. Its back room was formally dedicated the Honey Fitz Room to raise the profile of Senator Ted Kennedy in Jamaica Plain in the anticipation of his 1988 Presidential Campaign. Multiple Presidents – of Ireland and the United States – visited Doyles as guests of former Boston Mayor and Vatican Ambassador Ray Flynn who commented that “You could learn more about politics at Doyle’s than at Harvard’s JFK School of Government.”
While a picture is said to be worth a thousand words, we still hope to add even more words to describe the memorabilia that has been collected. Here is an opportunity to ask everyone for their own memories, stories, and personal knowledge related to individual items. To this end, the BPL has also posted the images on their Flickr account here. Please use the “Comment” section on any individual image to tell us more about the item. The information will be used to enhance our Digital Commonwealth gallery so a more intimate story of Doyle’s and its connection to the community can be told and preserved forever.