Eastern Massachusetts Liquor Licenses By Town, Resident

One of the common local myths circulating around any town in Massachusetts comes to life every time someone says "No town in Massachusetts has more liquor stores than (insert his town here)." I have heard the term ascribed to Provincetown, Worcester, Amherst, Winthrop, Scituate, Clinton, Bridgewater, Marshfield and a dozen other towns. The easier to swallow version of this myth is the same quote, but on a per-person basis.

Opinions vary wildly, and this is probably one of those articles where I'll get told to eff off in the comments section. I'm good with that. I will say that there are different lists with different criteria.

Boston generally wins Drunkest City In America. That title is shouldered by a heavily Irish population base, an unmatched pile of college kids, a nice flow of business travel, long suffering Red Sox fans, a solid nightlife industry and did I mention the Irish?

Roadsnacks, in an influential 2015 study using much of the same criteria as me (but using other factors like Package Stores, Divorce Rates and Twitter references), came up with a Top Ten of:

Plymouth
Scituate
Salem
Walpole
Adams
West Yarmouth
West Bridgewater
Andover
Hudson
Newburyport


WCVB, using a self-reporting technique of "Has More Than Five Drinks Per Session" and going by counties, had:

Hampshire County
Nantucket County
Sufflok County
Plymouth County
Barnstable County
Dukes County
Bristol County
Essex County
Franklin County
Middlesex County
Norfolk County
Worcester County
Berkshire County
Hampden County

They had Hampshire standing alone, Nantucket and Suffolk taking Place and Show, a glut with the same ranking (on that list, it runs from Barnstable to Norfolk Counties with each holding the same score) and the non-UMass western regions being a bit drier.

There are dry towns in the state where no Licka gets sold. Those towns remind me of the Civil War story of the Irish soldier slipping off the march into a dry-town inn and asking the innkeeper for "a glass of water, with a wee bit of the Creature added, unbeknownst to you or myself."

I was going to try to find out Liquor Stores Per Town, but that seemed like too much work. There exists no easily-Googled database. I'd have to Google up which towns have how many liquor stores, then divide or something by how many people live in each town. A good method, granted, but very work-intensive for a sunny Saturday morning in May. There would also be a large Margin Of Error.

What I shall instead do is use this map of 2011 liquor licenses per town from the Boston Business Journal. Old numbers, obsolete, but providing insight. I can then cross-reference my numbers with the population figures of the town in question, and... Voila! We have a new stat, one which I will name once I think of something catchy.

(Editor's Note: Or he can save 12 hours of math by just using this chart)

This map is just for places you can drink IN. Take-out drinking from packie stores isn't accounted for on this list.

I may as well make a few guesses here before I start looking at the numbers, thus becoming like more enlightened than you. Once I have had a look, I'm disqualified from guessing. You'll catch up to my enlightenment once you read the article, but by that time, I'll be looking up some other new ish, and the cycle will begin anew.

I'm thinking that "the Irish Riviera" will miss out on her rightful title, mostly because "Cape Cod" is a touristy place and will have her numbers padded by people on vacation. I have no doubt that New Beige and Fall-down River carry the "South Coast" on their backs, but if places like Acushnet and Mattapoisett represent hard, the region may be able to take down a contender.

Anyhow, here are the towns from our region and their ranking on the list. The criteria is residets-per-liquor license. If I had package store numbers, these rankings might be radically different.

Rank.... Town.... Residents... Licenses... Residents per License

1 PROVINCETOWN 3,390 62 55

Provincetown takes the title. At least one publication that I saw summed it up as well as I can... "Tourist haven in the summer... desolate, isolated winters."

"55 residents per license" means that, if every single man, woman, child and baby in Provincetown went out for a drink to a local bar, each bar would only have 55 people in it... less, once you factor out bar employees who live in Provincetown,

By contrast.... if a similar event happened in Duxbury, there would be 1444 people in each bar. If it happened in Boxford (ranked #318 and last in the state), there would be 8600 people in each bar.


3 WELLFLEET 2,748 26 106
5 OAK BLUFFS 3,731 29 129
6 EDGARTOWN 3,920 30 131
9 NANTUCKET 10,531 73 144
10 AQUINNAH 354 2 177
14 TRURO 2,134 10 213
16 ORLEANS 6,315 27 234
21 CHATHAM 6,726 26 259

The Cape represents hard, although runner-up towns like Great Barrington could complain about tourists and summer people swelling the numbers. If you assume that summer people double the population of Chatham, and that there are also a disproportionate amount of hotels filling up with families, you might have to triple or even quadruple the licenses-per-town rankings. All of a sudden, these supposedly hard-drinking Cape towns start tumbling to 150th in the state.

Provincetown is immune to that. Tripling their RPL only moves them to 3rd in the state.

Monroe- ranked second in the state, just above Wellfleet- has 1 license in a town with 96 residents. By contrast, the Mayberry hometown (may have been  County, or both town and county) of Andy Griffith fame had 5600 residents... in 1968.


27 DENNIS      15,473 53 292
34 TISBURY  3,805 11 346
40 BARNSTABLE 46,738 112 417
42 YARMOUTH 24,010 56 429
43 FALMOUTH 33,247 76 437
44 SEEKONK 13,593 31 438
46 HARWICH 12,387 28 442

The pattern continues through the Top 50.

Let's pause right here to tip our glasses to the western part of the state. While I'm only showing EMass towns, rest assured that about 90% of the towns that I'm leaving out are in the Berkshires.

"Mountain man/mountain man/drinks like a fish/and he hits like a ram."

Both of the islands assert themselves mightily. Island people are sort of kin to mountain people. Both are a bit strange. It's a different sort of strangeness, but it shares a common intensity. They're both about equally lost in a city.

54 FOXBOROUGH 16,298 34 479
58 EASTHAM 5,445 11 495
59 BREWSTER 10,023 20 501
60 HULL 11,067 22 503
64 WEST BRIDGEWATER 6,679 13 514
67 PLYMOUTH 55,188 103 536
68 MATTAPOISETT 6,447 12 537
71 COHASSET 7,182 13 552
74 FAIRHAVEN 16,124 29 556
75 WAREHAM 21,154 38 557

Rankings 50-75 have a few trends jumping out at me.

1) The South Coast is beginning to assert herself. Props to Seekonk for sliding into the top 50. Mattapoisett, Fairhaven and Wareham also step up to the bar by the time that #75 is called.

2) The South Shore and especially the Irish Riviera took awhile to show themselves. Scituate is nowhere to be seen.

3) I wonder if (and how much) Foxboro's numbers are pushed up by the Patriots being in town. I don't get out to Foxy Bro as much as I used to, and am not sure what sort of effect 8 home games (and X playoff games any year) has on the town's drinking establishments. They say that businesses on Cape Cod are made/broken by 8-12 weekends a year. I wonder how much 8-12 weekend days a year is worth in Hooch Sold?


78 BOURNE 19,023 33 576
80 BOSTON 599,351 1,033 580
82 KINGSTON 12,339 21 588
87 NEW BEDFORD 91,849 150 612

Cape Cod is starting to fade out... not because we don't drink hard enough, but because we've exhausted most of our towns earlier in the rankings.

Bourne does drink harder than Boston, something I'm a bit shocked to see. If Boston had better beaches, they might be able fight their way up the list a bit.

Note that many of Boston's Irish fled Boston in the 1970s, driving up the numbers in the otherwise sleepy Irish Riviera.

New Beddy closes out our presence in the top 100. 30% of the top 100 are towns in our coverage area.

108 MASHPEE 14,261 21 679
109 RAYNHAM 13,641 20 682
111 OTIS 1,394 2 697
112 HINGHAM 22,394 32 700
119 AVON 4,303 6 717

Hey! That town of Otis is in Western Mass, and it's not the rotary in Bourne.

My people in Raynham tell me there is great happiness that they conquered all but one Bridgewater.

In Massachusetts, the Avon lady is a bartender.

We forgot SWANSEA, they're 128th

131 MARION 5,217 7 745
132 SANDWICH 20,255 27 750
140 ABINGTON 16,365 21 779
141 BRAINTREE 34,422 44 782
145 QUINCY 91,622 116 790
158 FALL RIVER 90,905 111 819
160 MANSFIELD 22,993 28 821
162 WALPOLE 23,086 28 825
172 WRENTHAM 11,116 13 855
177 ACUSHNET 10,443 12 870
179 NORTON 19,222 22 874
183 ROCKLAND 17,780 20 889
184 DARTMOUTH 31,241 35 893
186 STOUGHTON 26,951 30 898
190 MARSHFIELD 24,576 27 910
192 EAST BRIDGEWATER 13,879 15 925
193 PEMBROKE 18,595 20 930
195 NORWELL 10,271 11 934
198 SCITUATE 17,881 19 941
199 WESTPORT 15,136 16 946

Fall River is pretty much right in the middle of the rankings. New Bedford and Fall River, which I thought would carry the South Coast, ranked a modest 87 and 158 respectively. Seekonk (44), Mattapoisett (60 something) and the Wareham/Fairhaven team (74 and 75) all represented harder.

At least 10% of the liquor licenses in Wareham are held by places that only serve breakfast. (Your Hometown Here) may have more or less, I just wanted to float that stat out there.

Sandwich finishes off the Cape.

Fall River trails Quincy, which is the same size but more Irish-heavy. The Squantum neighborhood of Quincy is about as Irish as it gets.

If a bar gets their license revoked in Scituate, this thought-she'd-be-ranked-higher Irish Riviera superheavyweight would fall out of the Top 200. She'd rank below hard-living Oakham (pop. 953, 2 licenses) in the state.

205 REHOBOTH 11,484 12 957
206 SOMERSET 18,268 19 961
209 TAUNTON 55,783 57 979
219 NORTH ATTLEBORO 27,907 27 1,034
223 MIDDLEBORO 21,245 20 1,062
224 WEYMOUTH 53,272 50 1,065
225 HANOVER 13,966 13 1,074
230 HALIFAX 7,700 7 1,100
233 HANSON 9,956 9 1,106
234 BRIDGEWATER 25,514 23 1,109
243 EASTON 22,969 20 1,148
247 ATTLEBORO 43,113 37 1,165
248 LAKEVILLE 10,587 9 1,176
249 HOLBROOK 10,663 9 1,185
250 WHITMAN 14,385 12 1,199

You'd think a town known as "Hangover" would be higher than 225, but No.

If Taunton gets a casino, they could jump up a lot of spots. Considering Boston is 80, a jump into the Top 10 may be a lot to ask for.

Bridgewater, which has the University, is the lowest-ranked Bridgewater. East and West pub much harder.

252 FRANKLIN 31,381 25 1,255
253 BROCKTON 93,092 74 1,258
259 LYNN 87,122 67 1,300
270 DUXBURY 14,444 10 1,444
272 FREETOWN 8,935 6 1,489
300 BERKLEY 6,433 3 2,144
304 CARVER    11,547     5 2,309
311 DIGHTON  6,748 2 3,374
315 ROCHESTER 5,218 1 5,218

The infamous "City of Sin" ranks an effete 259.

If the Gurnet Inn was still open, sleepy Duxbury would be ahead of Brockton and Lynn.

Rochester and Dighton hold down the South Coast, and Lakeville is the more "Let's go out" of the Freetown-Lakeville conglomerate.

Duxbury and Sandwich ranked similarly, something our staff predicted. Both towns are sort of the Rich People Conscience of either Cape Cod or the South Shore (I'm told by our Fairhaven editor that Dartmouth fills a similar role on the South Coast). Granted, Sandwich is about twice as pubby as Duxbury, but the Cape is sort of off the scale due to summer tourism.

Shame on you, Rochester!

Here's a quick region-by-region tally:

CAPE COD

Provincetown
Wellfleet
Nantucket
Martha's Vineyard
Truro
Orleans
Chatham
Dennis
Barnstable
Yarmouth
Falmouth
Harwich
Eastham
Brewster
Bourne
Mashpee
Sandwich


SOUTH COAST

Mattapoisett
Fairhaven
Wareham
New Bedford
Marion
Fall River
Acushnet
Dartmouth
Westport
Freetown
Rochester


INTERIOR BRISTOL COUNTY

Seekonk
Raynham
Mansfield
Norton
Rehoboth
Somerset
Taunton
North Attleboro
Easton
Attleboro
Berkley
Dighton


INTERIOR PLYMOUTH COUNTY

West Bridgewater
Abington
Rockland
East Bridgewater
Pembroke
Norwell
Middleboro
Halifax
Hanover
Hanson
Bridgewater
Lakeville
Whitman
Brockton
Carver


THE IRISH RIVIERA

Hull
Plymouth
Cohasset
Kingston
Hingham
Quincy
Marshfield
Scituate
Weymouth
Duxbury

The Cape Cod Canal Foliage Project

Quint wasn't talking about Cape Cod when he laid down the facts in Jaws, but he may as well have been. We are a summer community, and we need summer dollars, or we'll be on the welfare all winter... something to that effect.

However, money grows green in all seasons. Why not make some Autumn money? Does money really grow on trees?

Autumn money is sort of up our alley. We're the Thanksgiving ground zero for America. We have quaint little cranberry bogs scattered all about. As long as you don't go swimming, those beaches are fine on a warm autumn day, even in November.

We also have foliage. Now, when you think of foliage, you think of New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and even the Berkshires. You don't really think Cape Cod.

Middleboro certainly doesn't think so, and they planted this tree to prove it to you.

That's a shame, because we're the last region of New England to experience peak foliage. Maine trees are bare when we're just getting to the height of our season. Cape Cod, if you look at a foliage map, peaks right around when a Kentucky-Alabama swath is peaking, and those states don't do foliage like New England does.

We should be better known for it. Everyone who saw the beautiful foliage shots from New Hampshire on the news, and who then said "We should drive out in the country and see some foliage," but who then procrastinated... those people should be looking at Cape Cod as a Last Resort.

People aren't stupid, so there must be good reasons as to why we don't get Vermont's autumnal swagger. For starters, we lack the forest cover that northern New England has. We also have the wrong sort of trees.

That second problem can be fixed.

Trees drop acorns and so forth, and those can be harvested. Plant them in the ground, and they'll grow a version of the tree that they fell from. Come autumn, those trees will put off the same color that their parents did.

It's so simple, it pretty much takes care of itself.

I called a few tree farms, and the big difference a tree would see in Massachusetts as opposed to New Hampshire is that they would go into seasonal color changes later. Trees that turn in early October in Falmouth, Maine would have to wait until November in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Let that fact roll around in your head a bit as we figure out how to make money off of this.

Cape Cod is a series of tourist towns, and the weakest link in the chain is Bourne.

Bourne is very nice when compared to Fitchburg or Holyoke, but it's in last place as far as Cape Cod tourism goes. Bourne has nice people living there and has a lot to offer, but we have Bay where everyone else has Ocean, so we sort of lag behind the other Cape towns when it comes to tourism.

There's not much we can do about the Bay, but the Cape Cod Canal is another animal entirely.

The Cape Cod Canal is an ocean river, The canal is 7 miles long, and it is framed on each side by a wonderful bike path. These paths are framed by a thick row of trees.

These trees tend to be pine, Pine is lovely, but it doesn't do much during Autumn beyond dropping pine needles into that gap between your windshield and the car hood. There's nothing wrong with pine, but no one is driving out from New York City to look at it.

So, we have several problems: a weak sister of a Cape Cod town, a poor foliage reputation, a short tourist season and a boring pine Canal.

If we could somehow wipe that slate clean, even if it takes a few generations, we could maybe get this town back on a payin' basis.

That's why we should do whatever it takes to plant ten thousand acorns along the Cape Cod Canal. Not just any acorns, either. We should take acorns from trees that produce spectacular foliage.

I won't make it to the mountain top with you, but once those acorns become trees, we'll have the premier foliage display in Massachusetts and perhaps New England.

It's all there for the taking.

New Hampshire and Vermont have it easy. They didn't plant those trees, and they only still have those trees because not enough people want to move to Vermont to warrant clearing space. They don't deserve that foliage.

Bourne, on the other hand, would aggressively select their trees. We'd be Mother Nature on steroids, ruthlessly saying which tree will grow where. With the tree huggers appeased by the planting of ten thousand trees. we'd be free to play God yet again with the Cape Cod Canal area.

If the right people (and I'm not one of them, I become useless as anything other than a laborer after the Idea Stage) are running this, we could have a ridiculous run of foliage down each side of an underutilized Canal.

Planned by experts, planted in rows fronting the Canal and dropping acorns of their own each year, the Canal Forest would both own and pwn the rest of New England as a foliage destination.

Bourne would then have some nice assets to work with.

We'd have a sweet location, maybe 25% of the drive someone might have to take to get to the Maine foliage. We'd have foliage that would kick in during the run-up to Thanksgiving, which also draws tourists into the region. We'd have hotels, gas stations and all that other stuff that leeches money out of tourists.

Most importantly, we'd have our ridiculous multi-colored Canal. The canal has plenty of parking, would feature easy access, boasts of long-but-not-too-long walks and would look like New Hampshire would look if it were planned.

You could probably sell boat tours of this new foliage run, with the added bonus of three bridges and one power plant. I think they already have Canal foliage boat tours, but this would become a larger venture if our Canal looks like the Mohawk Trail wishes it looked.

 This would merge nicely with our present Tourist Season.

The majority of the tourists leave after Labor Day.

The old people are smart enough to do Cape tourism after Labor Day, and they help push the season into October.

A foliage explosion in the Canal would push that season into maybe mid-November (you can still see foliage driving around Cape Cod today)...

... where it would merge with the Pilgrim/Wampanoag/Thanksgiving connection, which we should also figure out an angle from which we could extract profit from exploiting it.

We just need the ten thousand acorns.

How to get those ten thousand acorns is the question we need to solve. I have no intention of standing up at a town meeting with this idea, as I'm not tree-savvy enough to answer the questions that citizens would rightfully ask if something that smells like Tax is spoken of.

I have no idea how much ten thousand trees would cost. I'll try to find out before we publish, as I tend to work during the Witching Hour. Hopefully, this section between the pictures will be bigger tomorrow.

UPDATE: I bothered a few people, including Stephen Davis and Chuck Teravainen.

Maple saplings go $20-30 or so, live 100 years, grow 6-12 inches a year, and need about 20-25 yards of space. Wisteria is $20, and Dogwood goes $15. Aspen is $18-29. Water and fertilizer would be needed for the first few years.

These prices are awesome if you have a big yard and plan to hold onto the house. If you have a 7 mile Canal to fill 2 sides of at $15-30 every 20 yards, that adds up to... like...uhm... carry the two..... a lot of money.

It's not too hard to grow trees from acorns. It's much cheaper. We can get the kids to do the labor for nada.

One reason that I'm not worried about town meetings and how much trees or acorns cost is that I have no intention of buying acorns.

I was never in the Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts myself, but I always thought of Scouting as an admirable pursuit. I assume that they spend a lot of their time in the woods, doing woodsy things.

I'd challenge the little SOBs. Give the world an eco-friendly, cash-grabbing project that shows off the beauty of nature, and help along a struggling resort town in the process.

I don't know how many Scouts there are on Cape Cod, but if a hundred of them could be trained to identify acorns from the proper foliage trees, would it merit a few bus trips worth of cash to send them up into the Enemy States to each steal one hundred of their acorns?

One trip to New Hampshire for supplies, another to Bourne for planting. Train the DPW people well enough that they don't cut down saplings. I'm not above using specially-trained prison labor, but residents may disagree.

If the Scouts won't do it, each Cape Cod high school should be coerced into sending their kids up to gather acorns.

Yes, every school or Scout troop on Cape Cod. I sit through a lot of traffic so that Orleans and Yarmouth Port can get their tourists, and we want some payback in the form of acorns. Before those brats get their diplomas, they pay the Gatekeeper fifty acorns.

Some of that cash will bleed into their towns too, as people who walk the Foliage Canal might decide to trek down 6A, or maybe watch the sharks kill the seals in Chatham. Its win/win, unless you're a seal.

Someone should be coordinating this effort. It's a tough sell, because we won't see the payoff in our lifetimes, but the kids will. When those trees sprout, we'll be in business.

For the bother of gathering and planting a few acorns, we'll be the most easily accessible foliage spot for what I'd gather is a large % of the leaf-peeping population.

Would you rather drive 6 hours into the Vermont wilderness and amble down endless East Bufu roads looking for bursts of foliage, or would you rather blast down to Bourne in an hour and take a leisurely stroll through what would essentially be a bursting-with-color foliage theme park set by an ocean river?

Bourne, who lost their end o' summer cash cow when the Scallop Festival skipped town, would slowly evolve into the Autumn anchorman of Cape Cod.

New Hampshire won't know what hit them.

The Bridge View Grill

We repeatedly dined at the brand new Bridge View Grill in Bourne.

Located at 100 Trowbridge Road, it occupies the spot formerly known as the legendary Trowbridge Tavern.

Our staff has repeatedly dined there, and even done some drinking. The new owner spent a year gutting and renovating the place, and opened in August.

There are very few known benefits to "hanging around with a website editor who is allergic to shellfish," but one of them is "He'll buy you clam chowder so he can take a picture of it." The dark chowder color comes from bacon, I'm told.

The Emily Post Book Of Etiquette tells the reader that white wine goes best with an All Buffalo Chicken dinner.

The only member of our staff who is culinary-proficient enough to write food reviews is working in Maine this autumn. I am incapable of it. For every food critic who smells wine before drinking it, there's a guy like me who shovels down nachos by the fistful.

Therefore, we're just essentially doing a visual menu. Otherwise, the reviews would be like "This was yummy." If pressed, I would resort to stealing Bret Easton Ellis food review styles from Patrick Bateman. "It's a playful little dish."

We were pleased to see Bourne-themed drinks on the menu. Our only complaint was that mainland Bourne was under-represented. We would add the Buzzards Bay B-52, the Sagamore Beach Sidecar and the Bournedale Bellini. We would also add the Gray Gables Gimlet.

I have a friend who has a worse diet than I do, to the extent that he to this day complains about the time I brought over a pizza with green peppers on it... in 1989. He didn't have to worry about this one, I ate it all myself. 

Just in case you think that I eat nothing but fried meat...

If you pester hotel employees for pictures of their dinner, you have to settle for take-out Prime Rib shots.

When the Fish in your Fish and Chips is too big for the plate, you've almost always found a good restaurant.

The garlic bread was served on a different plate, we just laid it on top of the chicken parmesan so we could zoom in closer. I'm a rotten photographer to start with, and it only gets worse when pretty girls are bringing me rum.

My man Hardcore Logo likes stuffed quangos, so your allergic photographer was able to get a pic of one. If my shellfish allergy isn't funny enough for you, know that your photographer was an orphan, very poor, very large, always hungry... and that he lived between a clam bed and all the lobsters he could dive down and catch, and could consume neither.

There's a Thanksgiving Sub hiding under the gravy and the fried onions.

Sometimes, Stephen forgets he's a photographer, eats half the meal before remembering that he was supposed to take a picture of it, then tries to fool the editor by zooming in.

We would heartily recommend that you go with the BVG's Pub Fries, which are spicier than regular fries. Note that Southerners look at you funny if you put seasoned salt and vinegar on fries, which is a very New England thing to do. Also note that your author loved Andy Capp's Pub Fries as a kid, to the extent that he sent a threatening email to Borden Foods when they were discontinued.

I like to keep the elements of Shepherd's Pie apart until they meet in my tummy. There's a good reason why Stacey generally writes the food reviews.

The BVG has daily specials aimed at professions. They have discounted food on various nights for soldiers, emergency responders, teachers and service workers. I showed my Salvation Army badge to get the military discount, took the teacher discount even though the last class I taught was like 2005, and said "I'm broke, so this is an emergency" to get the emergency responder discount.

Come on down and try it out. Be sure to mention Cranberry County Magazine to get absolutely no discount at all.