Pity the neighborhood saloon in this pandemic. But pity even more the happy-hour and lunch spot for tie-wearing, pantsuit-donning, expense-account-having crowd.
The lockdowns and the plague have delivered a body blow to the corner pub, but they’ve delivered a death blow to the business district watering holes.
“There’s no people,” Karl Hemmer, general manager of Maddy’s Taproom in downtown D.C., said on the pub’s final Wednesday night in late July.
The bar’s business has disappeared not because of capacity limits or mask requirements. The problem is that its clientele are businessmen and businesswomen. The virus and the lockdowns have emptied out downtown.
“That building there,” Hemmer said to me as he pointed at an office building across L Street Northwest, “is probably less than 10% occupied right now.” Of those 10% actually coming downtown to work, most are afraid to dine inside.
“Even if the landlord gave us a year of free rent, there’s not enough to keep us alive,” Hemmer said.
Two blocks down from Maddy’s, another downtown mainstay already folded. The Post Pub near 15th Street was the locale for Washington Post reporters (back when they drank) and Examiner staffers for years. During the COVID lockdown, the Post Pub announced it was shutting down for good.
Restaurants and bars all over the country shut down for the coronavirus, and thousands will never reopen. In Chicago, the hip Blackbird was among dozens that shut down for good. One July study found 16,000 shutting down for good, including some of the oldest restaurants in the country.
Yes, many bars are thriving, particularly ones that folks can walk to from home. Hemmer is also the general manager at Macintyre’s, a bar in the Woodley Park neighborhood a few miles from downtown D.C. “That’s a neighborhood,” Hemmer said.
The business-district bars such as the Post Pub and Maddy’s? “Our ‘neighborhood’ was lunch and happy hour. That doesn’t exist.”
