Cheers Beacon Hill

Where it sits. The bar occupies the basement of 84 Beacon Street, on the flat lower slope of Beacon Hill, directly across the road from the Boston Public Garden. Beacon Street here is a terrace of nineteenth and early twentieth-century brick and limestone town houses with black iron railings, and the entrance is exactly the arrangement the television audience knows: a short flight of steps dropping from the pavement below street level, a hanging sign above them, and a green awning. The building above is the Hampshire House, a Georgian Revival mansion of 1910 that runs the restaurant on the upper floors. Stand on the top step and you can see the Public Garden's trees; walk two minutes west and you are at the Charles Street antique shops, or two minutes east and you are on Boston Common.

Where it came from. Thomas Kershaw bought the building and opened the basement in December 1969 as the Bull & Finch Pub, fitted out with English joinery to look like a London public house that had somehow surfaced in Boston. It was a respectable neighbourhood bar for a decade before a location scout for a new NBC sitcom photographed the exterior in 1981 and the producers used the images as the basis for their set. Cheers ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993, and those exterior steps opened almost every episode. In 2002 the pub struck a licensing deal with the show's rights holders and formally changed its name.

The thing everybody gets wrong. The inside of this bar is not the inside of the bar on television. Every interior scene of Cheers was shot on a soundstage at Paramount in Hollywood, on a set that took its general mood from the Bull & Finch but matched none of its geography. There is no long mahogany bar in that configuration, no pool room through the arch, no staircase up to Melville's arranged the way the show has it, and the real room is smaller and lower than the set. Regulars of the actual pub in the 1980s found themselves in the odd position of watching a fictional version of their own local every Thursday night. A second venue at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, opened in 2001, did reproduce the television set almost exactly, and it operated until it closed in 2020 — which means that the replica is now gone and the original, which never looked like the show, is the one that remains.

What it is like now. It is a tourist bar and makes no pretence otherwise. The room is dark, the walls are hung with cast photographs and framed memorabilia, the menu runs to burgers, chowder and a respectable beer list, and a shop by the door sells shirts and pint glasses. Service is fast and used to short visits. On a summer afternoon the queue can run up the steps to the pavement; on a wet Tuesday in February you can have a stool at the bar and a quiet hour. Boston has a great many better and older drinking rooms — the Bell in Hand, the Warren Tavern across the river in Charlestown — and locals will point you to them without much prompting, but none of those has the steps.

The neighbourhood it belongs to. Beacon Hill is the reason to make the walk even if the bar itself takes twenty minutes. Behind Beacon Street the hill climbs through Charles, Chestnut, Mount Vernon and Pinckney Streets to Louisburg Square, a private oval of 1840s houses with the only surviving communal garden of its kind in the city. Acorn Street, a short gaslit run of cobbles between Willow and West Cedar, is the most photographed street in Boston. The Massachusetts State House with Charles Bulfinch's gilded dome sits at the top of the hill on the Common's edge, and the Black Heritage Trail runs along the north slope, where Boston's free African American community built the African Meeting House in 1806.

Getting there and timing. Arlington on the Green Line puts you on the far side of the Public Garden, a four-minute walk; Charles/MGH on the Red Line is about six minutes the other way. The bar opens daily from late morning. The best sequence is to come at the end of an afternoon in the Public Garden, take the photograph on the steps, have one drink, and then spend the remaining daylight on the hill behind it — which is what the neighbourhood deserves and what the queue outside the door will not tell you.