For Cambridge’s late-night crowd, this was a summer of highs and lows, as the freewheeling joy of the World Cup collided with a longstanding fact of life in the city: its leaders have seldom been friendly to the flow of alcohol.
For six weeks during the summer, bars in the city of Cambridge were permitted to stay open until 3 a.m.—an hourlong extension beyond the usual closing time. And within the boundaries of a few designated blocks, drinks legally went out the door in plastic cups until the end of July.
The changes began on June 8, when Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey ’92 signed an act allowing cities across the state to temporarily opt in to more permissive alcohol restrictions as part of a six-week pilot tied to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the country’s 250th anniversary.
Cambridge was the first city in line, adopting the maximum flexibility allowed under the act before any other city in the state.
By the end of the week, the Cambridge License Commission had approved later operating hours and six public drinking zones in major squares across the city, including Central, Kendall, Harvard, Inman, and Porter (including North Massachusetts Avenue), as well as lower Massachusetts Avenue. In the weeks that followed, nearly 40 bars and restaurants began offering to-go drinks, and hundreds of patrons shuffled from bars to crowded outdoor World Cup watch parties, plastic cups in hand.
But even as residents were quick to welcome late nights and free-flowing drinks, an overhaul of the city’s regulations for alcohol licenses was already underway. The Cambridge License Commission—the three-member body responsible for issuing liquor licenses to bars and restaurants—committed to reviewing its regulations in April, noting that the rules had not been updated in a decade.
On May 1, the License Commission sent licensees a first draft of the proposed rule changes—a 30-page document that drew public backlash from bar and restaurant owners, who zeroed in on two provisions as especially unworkable: a 30-minute wait between alcoholic drink orders and a ban on alcohol sales within an hour of closing. The proposed changes had been informed by “10 years of suggestions, different Commissioners, public servants, investigators, as well as changes to provisions in the state law,” according to a city spokesperson.
But after a public outcry spread across social media and gained traction on news feeds, city officials said the draft was only meant to gather feedback, not to represent final policy. By the time the Commission released an updated draft on June 30, both the wait-period and last-call rules had been struck.
A Decades-Old Debate
Cambridge has been having some version of this argument for at least 140 years, when it first voted to ban alcohol sales entirely.
That was in 1886, and Cambridge remained a dry city for 47 years, until Prohibition’s repeal in 1933. The vote to go dry had grown out of the national temperance movement, which took root in the 1820s amid anxieties about a new nation’s values, and intensified as waves of immigration reshaped New England’s cities. Temperance leaders framed alcohol as a threat to productivity, family stability, and the moral character of a young nation—and white women without political power widely drove the movement’s moral suasion.
Beth Folsom, a program manager at Cambridge’s historical society, History Cambridge, said the License Commission’s first draft “definitely has echoes of the temperance era.” She described the temperance movement as “people coming in from outside of a community and telling a community what it needs and not trusting the community to know.”
“I see echoes of that coming in and saying, ‘You’re not responsible enough as individuals, or even as a particular establishment, to know when it’s time to stop serving someone,’” she said.
But banning alcohol in the nineteenth century didn’t stop Cambridge from drinking; it just pushed alcohol use underground, and police raids on basement drinking rooms became frequent. Still, patrons often crossed the river to drink freely in Boston when they couldn’t in Cambridge, taking tax revenue with them—the same complaint bar owners are making today about losing customers to neighboring cities if tighter restrictions go into effect.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, Cambridge rebuilt its licensing structure and much of its identity from scratch. Alcohol-free “temperance houses” during the dry years rebranded as new restaurants and bars, and the city built a more cosmopolitan identity around food and drink in the postwar decades. But city leaders didn’t leave behind the impulse to control drinking as it became commonplace.
“A common solution to problems in Cambridge is, ‘Let’s legislate something,’” Folsom said.
The city’s current regulations were first adopted in 1979, and have been updated four times since, in 1997, 2006, 2008, and 2016. The changes proposed this year followed a similar public review process, with License Commission and City Council hearings scheduled to solicit feedback. But after the 30-minute wait and last-call provisions sparked heightened backlash, the city faced pressure to improve the transparency and opportunities for public input in the drafting process.
Kari Kuelzer, who owns Grendel’s Den and Sea Hag in Harvard Square, said the draft—which she said was first sent to licensees on a Friday afternoon—was “a step too far in terms of what the licensing rules really should be encompassing.” She had a particular issue with the notion of policing how much time should elapse before a patron could order another drink, noting that only two restaurants were cited for overserving alcohol last year.
“Prescribing minute-by-minute seems counterproductive to achieve the goals of compliance,” she said.
Kuelzer also said providing feedback on the 30-page redlined document posed a challenge for many licensees who were unfamiliar with dense legal contracts. Kuelzer responded to the License Commission’s solicitation shortly after receiving the proposal, but she said communication afterwards was sparse. She received a two-word response: “Receipt acknowledged.” She hasn’t heard back since.
Two months after sending the draft proposal, and in response to public outcry, the License Commission scheduled three listening sessions with licensees on July 13, 22, and 28. The Commission additionally set meetings with the city’s Economic Opportunity and Development Division, Office of Tourism, and local business associations. According to a city spokesperson, formal discussions will take place in the Commission’s August and September meetings before a vote is taken.
The Commission hopes to vote on updated rules by the end of the year, but “intends to be deliberate with the process and dedicate as much time as necessary to balance the needs of the [hospitality] industry with those of the public,” according to the spokesperson.
World Cup watch parties across the city’s major squares drew thousands for marquee matches, and as of July police had recorded no alcohol-related arrests connected to the designated drinking zones.
Still, Massachusetts continues to debate how much drinking is too much; the state still bans happy hour and enforces blue laws that restrict when alcohol can be sold, by preventing package stores from opening before mid-morning on Sundays, for example.
“I think we’re trying to balance what seems to be very successful right now, especially the World Cup temporary restrictions,” Folsom said, “but it’s coming out of this very Puritan set of blue laws.”
As the summer pilot ends on July 31, Cambridge is left to decide which version of itself sticks—the one that loosened up, or the one already writing its way back to caution.
“We’re a city that’s really divided, still,” Folsom said.
