There were two primary ways we ventured from MIT to the House of Roy at 12a Tyler Street in east Boston.  Mostly, we went on the T, Boston’s subway system.  We walked across the MIT campus to Kendall Square, which at the time was at the border between the east campus of MIT and the slums of East Cambridge.  We took the Red Line from Kendall Square to Washington Street (now called Downtown Crossing) and then switched to the Orange Line.  (One of the denizens at Washington Street came up me and my MIT friends in the T station and interjected a famed phrase, “zip, zap, zoop”.) At other times, we arrived by car, whether Joel Berez’s or others.

The House of Roy was a weekly staple of this MIT crowd on weekends.  (Note that the MIT dining system in this time and era did not serve food to students on weekends!) Check out an advert by House of Roy on page 4 of the 13 November 1959 edition of The Tech!  Wow!  I started eating at House of Roy around 1972!

The usual question once we sat down (and we rarely needed to glance at the menu) was: “n or n minus 1?” To translate: do we want to order main course dishes for everyone, or one less?

House of Roy was located on Tyler Street, not far from the infamous (in its time) Combat Zone in downtown Boston.  Boston in the 1970s designated some areas as its red light district, for prostitutes and others, and it was called the Combat Zone.

Since many of our memories of House of Roy are just that, only memories, here are some other memories of House of Roy to help us out here:

• http://criticalpalate.blogspot.com/2008/03/house-of-roymmmm-special.html
• http://www.nesfa.org/History/HouseOfRoy.htm

All that said, this seems to only be a first step in the door to this history. Looking forward to more!

– Rick