Ward Eight

Rye, lemon, orange juice, and grenadine — an 1898 Boston creation at Locke-Ober with one of bar history's most specifically documented cocktail origins.

The Ward Eight was created in 1898 at Locke-Ober's Winter Place Wine Rooms — known simply as Locke-Ober — the storied Boston restaurant and bar at 3 Winter Place, off Winter Street, that had been established in 1875 and was one of Boston's most celebrated dining establishments through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The cocktail was created to celebrate the anticipated electoral victory of Martin Michael Lomasney, the Democratic political boss of Boston's Ward Eight who was one of the most powerful figures in Massachusetts Democratic politics around the turn of the century. Ward Eight was the North End and West End district of Boston that Lomasney controlled through his Hendricks Club political organization for decades. The drink — rye whiskey, fresh lemon juice, fresh orange juice, and grenadine — is a rum-adjacent whiskey sour of simple construction whose dual-citrus formula (both lemon and orange) gives it a broader, more rounded acid profile than single-citrus sours. The Ward Eight is one of the most specifically origin-documented cocktails in American bar history: the location, the occasion, and the political figure it honored are all matters of documented record. The cocktail appeared in American bartending guides throughout the early 20th century and has been maintained as a Boston regional classic.