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It seemed to me that this desertion of the old saloon, child of the taverns where the clipper captains used to meet to drink, I suppose mulled claret and canary wine, is as significant of Finis Bostoniæ as the installation of the most modern repetition plant. For here is a revolution in the mind, which matters more than a revolution in the workshop. The old saloon meant as much to Boston as the learned ones who paced the greensward at Cambridge; it was part of the same adventurous individual life, where a man took a single chance and, when he succeeded, took his pleasure. Now, Boston is socialized industrially, and a new impulse toward efficiency has turned away the flow of its people from the taverns where it used to royster. It is not age which has killed Boston, for no cities die of age; it is the youth of other cities, of young America, who would not let Old Boston live unless it transformed itself as it is doing.
— W. L. GEORGE