I spent the better part of my 20s as a society reporter in Manhattan for Vogue and for the now-defunct Style.com. For years, I dutifully trailed every fashion week, every film premiere, every nightclub opening, and every charity gala with the attention and zeal of David Attenborough. For the better part of 2015, I attended black tie dinners at Cipriani Wall Street more than I cooked in my own apartment. And as my career broadened into travel, I experienced nightlife around the world, from posh house parties in London to full-moon festivals in Bali.
All the while, Boston, my hometown, remained the punchline. If our neighbor to the south, New York City, was long known as “the city that never sleeps,” I always viewed Boston as “the city that not only sleeps but goes to bed early.” When I moved home in my 30s, I almost welcomed the predictability. A quieter city would mean less temptation, right?
Boy, was I wrong.
Boston has changed from Earth to the moon in recent years. There’s always been a semblance of nightlife with an abundance of live music and the odd nightclub here or there, but for a long time, there were many factors working against the city’s after-dark landscape. Liquor licenses are prohibitively expensive, often running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars if you can find them at all. Arcane governance structures make it difficult for the City of Boston to pass its own nightlife laws—keeping us beholden to the political whims of far-flung towns at the other end of the Commonwealth (which, ultimately, have very little day-to-day influence on life here). Bars close at 2:00 a.m., but the public transportation bafflingly stops running around 1:00 a.m. For a long time, you couldn’t help but feel that Boston’s Puritan roots lingered. Fun felt like a limited resource.
Then came our progressive Mayor Michelle Wu, who, in a bold move, created the role of Director of Nightlife Economy. Enter its first holder, Corean Reynolds: a sharp, unflappable bureaucrat who calls herself “the connective tissue between City Hall and the folks who make our nightlife live and breathe.” For the first time, restaurateurs, venue owners and promoters, bartenders, and patrons now have a direct line to city government.
“We’ve had mayors in the past who said, ‘Nothing happens past 10 p.m.,” Reynolds told me. “Historically, folks haven’t seen the value in the nighttime economy, or they didn’t see themselves in it.”
