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Local practitioners used to call it the crawl, a slow trek from pub to pub. T. J. Burke was first told about it when his father brought him to what is now the Blarney Stone when he was a boy of 9.
Back then, the Fields Corner hangout was called Costello & Kelly’s. It was a spot frequented by crawlers, and Burke’s father would buy him french fries and tell him to keep quiet when his mother asked how much drinking had been done.
Now nearly 70, Burke still visits the Blarney Stone, but the experience is a radically different one. The retired motorman for the T’s Red Line sits under track lighting and orders Budweiser, surrounded by a young, fashionably dressed cocktail crowd.
“They’re trying to make it more for yuppies,” Burke said of his longtime watering hole. “A lot of guys I hang around with, they don’t like the prices.”
Just blocks away, patrons like Burke still stop by Nash’s Pub only to find the green and yellow clapboard building locked. An Irish tricolor still hangs out front, but the building is slated to be reincarnated by summer as a sushi bar. Pete Nash, the owner who held court behind the oak bar for 20 years, shrugged off the change. The Irish construction workers and Gaelic football players who were the mainstay of his business have dwindled.

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