WBUR turned 75 over the weekend, but we’re far from the oldest organization in town.
Boston has a rich history of charitable organizations and family businesses older than us, each of which tells a chapter of the city’s story. So we asked the leaders of a few of these outfits: What does it take to last this long and build a local legacy?
Wally’s Café Jazz Club
Wally’s is about as legendary as legends get in Boston.
Opened in 1947 by Joseph “Wally” Walcott, a Barbadian immigrant who came through Ellis Island in 1910, the club was originally called Wally’s Paradise. It was the first African-American-owned nightclub in New England, and Walcott was the first Black man to receive a liquor license in Boston. Since its inception, Wally’s has invited local musicians and students to hone their craft on its small-but-mighty stage.
The late Wally’s cafe owner, Joseph “Wally” Walcott, sits at his bar in Boston on April 22, 1994. He was 97 years old. His club has been a mecca for musicians and a South End watering hole for half a century. (Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Walcott’s grandsons, Frank, Lloyd and Paul Poindexter, and daughter Elynor L. Walcott, run the club today.
Frank has manned the club nearly every day since 1984, when he was 18. To this day, Frank and his brothers can be found behind the bar, taking care of drinks and patrons. Walcott set that precedent for his grandsons.
“His mantra was hard work,” Poindexter said, “because even until he was, like, 99 years old, he used to walk up the street from his home. He’s, like, seven blocks away and coming to work, every day.”
An unassuming, hallway-like venue tucked under a brownstone, Wally’s brims over with musical talent 365 days of the year. Featuring three bands nightly — professionals and local music students alike — the first set is almost always a jam session, and the remaining two depend on the genre of the night.
American jazz greats like Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey have all performed at the club. Poindexter remembers giving multi-Grammy winning vocalist Esperanza Spalding one of her first gigs. But he said a standout moment in the past few years was George Clinton, founder of the band Parliament-Funkadelic, coming by to play a set.
It’s the close-quartered intimacy that Poindexter thinks sets Wally’s apart.
“Because of our size, you know, small, unique,” he said, “The advantage is that the crowd and the people who come and see musicians can get an intimate seat, seeing someone before they become world famous.”
New Deal Fish Market
Established in 1928, New Deal Fish Market in East Cambridge is nearing a century in business. Carl Fantasia took over the market from his parents, who inherited it from his great uncle. It’s the last fish market standing in a neighborhood that used to be full of them.
No one is “banging down the doors” to open a fish market these days, Fantasia said, but that makes New Deal’s expertise that much more valuable.
“What makes us really good is what tends to harm us too,” he said, “because we can’t appeal to everybody, but we don’t need to, because we’re a single-location business. So the secret sauce really is knowing how to buy, buying quality and knowing how to advise our discerning customers as to how to prepare these things.”
Fantasia is proud of his engagement with customers beyond their transactions. When a customer buys a cut of fish from New Deal, it comes with customized advice. This expertise, he said, is the shop’s competitive advantage over cheaper supermarkets.
“We have kind of a boutique-y approach,” Fantasia joked. “Scaling the salmon, fileting the salmon and pulling the pin bones, and doing it in a way that doesn’t damage the flesh and doesn’t ruin the appearance. We display our fish. Customers buy with their eyes. Gotta look good.”
Businesses like Fantasia’s depend on loyalty, and New Deal has earned it time and time again, with one of its most notable repeat customers being Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka’s wife, Tomoyo.
“Knowing our return customers and generally what they buy and how they like to cook gives us a greater success on selling to these customers and giving them what they need,” he said. “It’s like, I say we give them a hug, but we do it through seafood.”
The Home for Little Wanderers
Lesli Suggs has been with the Home for Little Wanderers for over a decade, but the organization has served children and families for more than 225 years.
A group of women founded the Boston Female Asylum in 1799, the first young girls’ orphanage in the city. One of those founding women was Abigail Adams, the First Lady to the second U.S. president, John Adams, and the mother of the sixth president, John Quincy Adams.
The orphanage evolved into an adoption organization, “and then there was the merger of several organizations that gives us that longevity and really represents the size and scale of the organization we are today,” said Suggs, who has been president and CEO since 2018.
“This organization was founded by trailblazers, you know, people who were looking to make a difference and pushing the community to take care of the most vulnerable kids in our community, and that culture just remains,” she said. “It’s really quite impressive.”
The Home for Little Wanderers has 36 programs with different models of funding and care. Over the course of one year, Suggs said the Home serves about 12,000 children in Massachusetts and New York. About 400 of them live in the Home’s residential care on any given day.
When she became vice president of programs in 2013, Suggs said, she championed a shift toward preventative and intensive family and child care, meeting needs in the home and at school.
“People often thought of us, and still some people do, as an orphanage where kids come to live, where they grow up with us, and then they move into adulthood,” Suggs said. “And that’s not what kids need, and it’s not who we are today. When that happens, it means that we failed kids.”
Surviving in Boston for more than 200 years is a feat for any business but especially for nonprofits, which, Suggs said, “run on such lean margins.” Suggs attributes that survival partly to the nature of longevity itself.
“We’ve had the good fortune because of our longevity, to have a very robust development team,” she said. “We raise money, we also have a sizable endowment for which we take a planned endowment draw, and those dollars allow us to invest in thought leadership, advocacy, evidence based models, really good training for our staff, and so that it all feeds each other.”
Broadway Lock Co.
Patricia Maestranzi-Fisher has been behind the counter of Broadway Lock Co. since 1980. The day she was laid off from her job in trucking was the day her father retired, so she stepped right into her family business that’s now in its third generation, 103 years later.
Maestranzi-Fisher’s grandfather immigrated from northern Italy and opened what was initially a knife store called Broadway Grinding Shop in 1922. Following their father one by one to Boston, all her uncles and her father saw the shop through the ’30s and ’40s.
Now, under her and her brother’s purview, the business has remained in the same two-room shop in South Boston ever since.
Sometimes the secret to a long-living business in Boston is age itself.
“Well, it’s very generational, the business,” Meastranzi-Fisher said. “So your father and his father came to the shop since we’re here 103 years.”
Meastranzi-Fisher reminisced about the days before people shopped online.
“I like to go to a store and touch things and see what I’m getting, you know?” Meastranzi-Fisher said. “That’s not the way of the world.”
Just like people suggest a great breakfast place, Meastranzi-Fisher said, “word gets around” about the service at Broadway Lock. Maybe Luigi, Broadway Lock’s black-and-white store cat, has some part to play in it, too.
“We’ve always treated people fair, so I think that’s a huge thing,” she said. “I think my wealth is in my heart, I would say.”
J.J. Foley’s
This past Sunday, J.J. Foley’s turned 116. Mike Foley, who runs the South End pub with his father, brothers and kids, said the success is a combination of “a lot of luck and a lot of hard work.”
“We’re very, very fortunate, because most family businesses don’t last two generations,” he said. “Never mind going on five generations.”
Foley said he has watched the South End change around the pub since 1998, when he started working in his family bar at 117 East Berkeley St.
“We always joked that we were a neighborhood bar with no neighborhood,” he said, when J.J. Foley’s was only surrounded by the Boston Herald, a police station and a hospital, and its customers were shift workers.
Now, the Foley’s have their neighborhood.
“The South End used to be, after 5 or 6 o’clock, 6 or 7 o’clock at night, there’d be no foot traffic. There’d be nothing around,” Foley said. “Now, you have people pushing baby carriages, people walking their dogs all night long. It’s a great neighborhood.”
For Foley, what makes it easier to work those 10-hour shifts until 3 a.m. is being surrounded by his family.
“I think for all of us, you definitely have a much bigger sense of pride going into work because your name’s on the building,” he said.
This story is part of a partnership between WBUR and the Boston University Department of Journalism.