Anthony's Pier 4 was a restaurant on the

South Boston South Boston is a densely populated neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, located south and east of the Fort Point Channel and abutting Dorchester Bay. South Boston, colloquially known as Southie, has undergone several demographic transformati ...

waterfront opened in 1963 by restaurateur

Anthony Athanas Anthony Athanas (July 28, 1911 – May 20, 2005) was a multi-millionaire Albanian American restaurateur and philanthropist. His restaurants included Anthony's Pier 4, known throughout United States. In 1976 the National Restaurant Association name ...

. In the 1980s it was one of the highest-grossing restaurants in the United States. It closed in 2013 and the site was scheduled for redevelopment.

History

Restaurateur Anthony Athanas opened Anthony's Pier 4 in 1963, and lived in an apartment above it. It served traditional American food with an emphasis on locally caught seafood; the dining room, with seating for 500, overlooked

Boston Harbor Boston Harbor is a natural harbor and estuary of Massachusetts Bay, and is located adjacent to the city of Boston, Massachusetts. It is home to the Port of Boston, a major shipping facility in the northeastern United States. History Since ...

on three sides. In 1968, Athanas bought a 1927 former

Hudson River The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between N ...

cruise ship, the SS ''Peter Stuyvesant'', and brought it from New York to Boston, where a specially built concrete and steel cradle held it in place adjacent to the restaurant; it served as a private bar and dining room and held a wine cellar as well as art works and mementoes collected by Athanas. The ship broke free, turned turtle, and sank during the Blizzard of February 1978; after unsuccessful efforts to salvage it, in 1979 all but the hull was removed. The restaurant shot to prominence when

Elizabeth Taylor Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. ...

and

Richard Burton Richard Burton (; born Richard Walter Jenkins Jr.; 10 November 1925 – 5 August 1984) was a Welsh actor. Noted for his baritone voice, Burton established himself as a formidable Shakespearean actor in the 1950s, and he gave a memorable pe ...

ate there in 1964 while ''

Richard Burton's Hamlet Richard Burton's ''Hamlet'' is a common name for both the Broadway theatre, Broadway production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, tragedy that played from April 9 to August 8, 1964 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, and for the filmed record of it that h ...

'' was at the Shubert Theatre. It was a prominent restaurant throughout its first two decades, attracting both out-of-town celebrities and Boston politicians. By the early 1980s, it was grossing about $12 million annually, making it one of the five highest-grossing restaurants in the United States. Athanas died in 2005; the restaurant closed in 2013. A condominium tower was erected on the site of the parking lot, and in 2016–17 the restaurant building was demolished and the remains of the ''Stuyvesant'' were dredged up for scrap in early 2017. A multi-use complex on the site including offices and condominiums opened in 2018.

Winter Hill Gang murders

In 1982, Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue were murdered in the restaurant's parking lot by

Whitey Bulger James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. (; September 3, 1929 – October 30, 2018) was an American organized crime boss who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Bost ...

and another associate of the

Winter Hill Gang The Winter Hill Gang is a loose confederation of organized crime figures in the Boston, Massachusetts, area. The gang members and leadership are predominantly Irish-American and Italian-American descent. The organization itself derives its n ...

. In 2014, Anthony's Pier 4 having closed, this murder was recreated at the Porthole in

Lynn, Massachusetts Lynn is the eighth-largest municipality in Massachusetts and the largest city in Essex County. Situated on the Atlantic Ocean, north of the Boston city line at Suffolk Downs, Lynn is part of Greater Boston's urban inner core. Settled by E ...

for the 2015 film '' Black Mass''.

References

{{Restaurants in Boston 1963 establishments in Massachusetts 2013 disestablishments in Massachusetts Defunct restaurants in Boston Defunct seafood restaurants in the United States Restaurants in Boston Seafood restaurants in Massachusetts Seaport District