The Hotel Harrington, Washington, D.C.’s oldest auberge, closes today. For many within The American Spectator community, the shuttering marks the end of an era.
Harry’s, the street-level bar under the 109-year-old hotel’s rooms, hosted for many years revelers spilling over from The American Spectator’s gala and wishing to keep the party alive. The free food and drink at the annual event whets rather than satiates the appetite of a certain genus of greedy-guts gala-goer. With cheap pitchers of beer and a clientele that mobbed the bar more toward last call than immediately after work hours, Harry’s cut a contrast to other bars in downtown D.C. It felt more time machine than trendy.
READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Getting Into How Do We Get Out of Here?
The shortest walk from the former Trump Hotel, now known as the Waldorf Astoria, of any bar in the area, Harry’s offered convenience and affordability to those wishing to trade in five-star luxury for something more populist. This came at the price of an out-of-order bathroom or an awkward conversation with a patron better suited for the Star Wars bar than this public house in a galaxy close, close to home. At least one always exited with a story.
The Washington Post article on the Hotel Harrington pays homage to its broken door handles and cock roaches.
“It’s like a scene out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting,” Kimberly Ashworth, 71, told the Post about Harry’s, whose last call predated the hotel’s final checkout by about a week. “I’ve never seen a place where the highbrow, lowbrow and no brow come. Law enforcement, attorneys, lobbyists, government people, hookers, drug dealers — it’s always something.”
The Hibernian-in-last-name-only Max Dublin described the American Spectator crowd from October’s gala as “all Irish-American writers with one unhyphenated genuine Irishman.” The lone teetotaler among the bargoers — and, therefore, the only chronicler of the night with a trustworthy memory — further noted that “one whose name I cannot recall was genuinely blotto but not in a bad way.”
The raconteurs discussed Ludwig von Mises, conservative publishing houses, and the Philadelphia Phillies defeating the Atlanta Braves in the National League wildcard series playing on the television. The names Greg Luzinski and Bake McBride came up. Someone unwisely bought a round of Jägermeister.
It all seemed rather harmless, but the Washington Post coverage of the closure infers far more sinister activity at Harry’s. The Post claims the bar “achieved infamy” for serving as a watering-hole to Donald Trump supporters who reckoned he really won the 2020 election. In addition to Proud Boys downing beers there, the Post informs, “bartenders at the nearby Trump hotel, when it was still in business, sent Trump administration officials and their crowd to Harry’s where they could order far less expensive drinks.”
Was there something in the firewater that might prove contagious to the locals? With the bar done and some of its past patrons incarcerated for the next decade or two, the danger appears somewhat less menacing than COVID, about which, as many D.C. denizens understand, one can never be too vigilant.
Even the seemingly penitent past owner promises something far away in terms of place, clientele, and style of bar.
“It’s not going to be a MAGA bar,” John Boyle says of a new endeavor. “It’s not a dive spot. It will have brand-new furniture and be sharp and clean. It’s not going to be Harry’s. I don’t really like dive bars.”
While the death of the previous owner in recent years, onerous COVID restrictions, and the sale of the hotel — this really serving as the alpha and omega of the closure — the Post article fixates on Proud Boys briefly making Harry’s a drinking spot as precipitating its downfall. One imagines an owner embarrassed by the patrons and holding his nose at the type of bar he bought did not help the bottom line. A few right-wing writers pilgrimaging there every October can justifiably say that they did. And now they must find another capital taproom to annually contaminate.
READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:
Hunter Biden Indicted in California
Disney Lives in a Small World, After All
The Evil Origins of 60 Years of JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories