“When I went to my room, my brother touched the closet door and the door fell off,” Linda Levin, of Raleigh, North Carolina, said the other day, recalling a time she stayed at the Harrington in the late 1990s. Ta. She said, “There was some unexplained dirt in the bathroom.”
Still, Levine added, “It was an affordable way to see the city.”
The Harrington’s recent announcement that it will close on Tuesday after 109 years marks the end of its reign as the city’s longest continuously operating hotel. The accomplishment leaves the witnesses impressed and wondering how something so serious could have happened. oh dear It could last this long.
The Harrington also has the distinction of being part of a group of infamous Washington hotels. That group includes Vista, where the FBI videotaped then-Mayor Marion Barry smoking, and Mayflower, where Eliot Spitzer met up with prostitutes. For his resignation as Governor of New York.
In the case of The Harrington, at 11th Avenue NW and East Avenue, in 2020 hundreds of Proud Boys turned the hotel’s dive bar into a de facto clubhouse for election-denying Donald Trump supporters. We went camping at Harry’s.
With Harrington’s closing, Harry’s will end its 30-year run on Dec. 3, while another tenant, Olly’s Trolley, which has apparently not seen any new additions since opening in 1989, will also close.
To the uninitiated, mourning Harrington’s death may seem as unthinkable as, say, weeping over the closing of Motel 6. But for their fans – generations of tourists, Boy Scout troops and school groups from all over – mourning the loss of the Harrington family is as unlikely as crying over the closing of a Motel 6. There is no such thing. Regulars drinking Harry’s cheap beer and inhaling Ollie burgers. The Harrington is an unbuttoned oasis in a buttoned-down downtown.
“It’s like a scene from a Toulouse-Lautrec painting,” Kimberly Ashworth, 71, said of the French painter who immortalized the 19th century. Paris nightlife. Over a glass of white wine at Harry’s before it closed, he spoke enthusiastically about his legacy. “I’ve never seen a place where there aren’t people high and low, people who don’t frown. Law enforcement, lawyers, lobbyists, government officials, prostitutes, drug dealers, it’s always something.”
Ashworth, a former U.S. customs policy analyst who described his politics as liberal, said the presence of Proud Boys at Harry’s during the disastrous days of the Trump administration “made the place more interesting.” Told.
“I was kind of tickled that my little hole-in-the-wall bar was in the news,” she said. “It was kind of funny. Bringing in cash for Harry’s during the coronavirus pandemic. Who said there’s no such thing as bad publicity?”
Anne Terry, the Harrington’s managing director, initially agreed through a spokesperson to be interviewed about the hotel’s history and the decision to close. The representative then canceled the interview. Instead, the hotel issued a statement saying it would be “closed until sold.” The statement did not provide additional details about the timing or reason for the closure.
“The Harrington family has seen our country through many events, including 19 different presidents, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the civil rights and women’s movements,” the statement said. No mention of Trump-era cameos.
Harrington’s owner, John Boyle, said Harrington’s death seemed inevitable after the hotel’s owner passed away in 2020. charles mccutchen, a physicist, whose grandfather was one of its two founders. “We’ve had a really good 26 years, but the last three or four years haven’t been fun,” Boyle said in a phone interview. “It’s about time. I’m ready.”
The pandemic has been cruel to hotel tenants, leaving downtown without tourists and white- and blue-collar workers, many of whom had been coming for lunch and a nightcap for decades. .
“I survive on leftover food,” Boris Galitzen said. The family owns Ollie’s and hopes to reopen it in another location, but the restaurant’s unmistakable yellow sign or porcelain cow hanging from the ceiling are missing, both of which are being auctioned off. “I was devastated.”
“Tourist hotel in Washington”
Harrington was the founder of two businessmen, Harrington Mills and Charles Charles, who opened the hotel’s original six-story building in 1914, when Woodrow Wilson occupied the White House and at the height of World War I. Invented by McCutchen.
Over time, Harrington constructed two 12-story additions that would become the city’s first air-conditioned hotel. He opened a studio in a hotel in the 1940s and later broadcast The Milt Grant Show, a local version of Bandstand. .
But as the building’s sign still proclaims, the Harrington was primarily known as “Washington’s Tourist Hotel,” offering an affordable alternative to the expensive comforts of Beaux Arts like the Willard and Lowry Hotels. It was a good hotel for the price. (Right now, a king-sized room at the Harrington costs $185, compared to $324 at the Willard.)
The Harrington was a product of the “Henry Ford era, when ideas of efficiency and economy permeated everything,” said John DeFerrari, director of the D.C. Preservation Alliance and author of a history of the city’s hotels. speaks. “Hotels have changed to standard rooms where everything is organized, as opposed to the old luxury hotels where everyone gets special treatment.”
Americana pop culture humorist Charles Phoenix described Harrington as a time capsule of social history and architectural style. Upon arriving at the hotel on his recent visit, Phoenix said he was struck by what he described as “layers of time.” The building’s exterior has original Art Deco decorations, and the front desk has a 1970s wood finish that is “trying to be period, but clearly feels period.” ”
“The appeal of this work for me was that it was completely unpretentious, that we live in a world where form follows function,” Phoenix said. “I saw a really wide variety of people. There were Hasidic Jews staying there. There were Amish people there. I talked to people from France and Germany. It was a melting pot. was.”
With the hotel closing, he said: “We lose the story, we lose the lore. It disappears.”
However, for many visitors, Memories, both past and recent, remain vivid, good or bad.
Victoria Frederick, a retired public school administrator in Washington, D.C., worked in an office next to Harrington until the late 1980s. She and her colleagues regularly went to lunch at her style restaurant, the hotel’s cafeteria, then known as the Kitcheria. She also had drinks at the bar in front of Harry’s, Pink Her Elephant Her Cocktails in Her Lounge.
“Harrington wasn’t the kind of place where you’d say to your out-of-town relatives, ‘Hey, honey, stay there,'” Frederick says. But food is another matter, she added. “You’ll have a delicious breakfast of liver and onions and real biscuits.”
The hotel has always been the subject of lively reviews from Internet guests, many of whom are quick to praise its convenience while warning people not to expect the Ritz.
“It felt like staying at grandma’s house,” someone wrote on TripAdvisor in September. “Great location, but diving.”
Eileen Silverman’s main memory of visiting Harrington House with her “future fiancé” in 1971 was the “giant cockroach” that appeared when she “pulled down the bed.”
“We are from New York and have never seen anything this big,” she wrote in a text. “It was considered a ‘Southern’ thing.”
Ms. Silverman also shared her own experiences in the comments section of a Facebook post about the hotel closures, with others writing about long-ago tourist trips to Washington and one saying, “I remember my childhood in Washington, D.C. It’s slowly disappearing!” he lamented.
Tom Barron, who was a bartender at Harry’s from 1995 to 2010, said it’s this incredible lack of exaggeration that continues to bring back all kinds of humanity. On any given night, patrons at Harry’s might include FBI agents, off-duty strippers and even Harrison Ford, who stopped by while in town filming a movie, he said.
“He said, ‘Call me Harry,’ and I said, ‘Harry? Are you kidding me?'” Baron recalled. Only if you do one shot with me.’
Barron was no longer working at Harry’s when the Proud Boys appeared, but he was saddened and angry that the events of 2020 had tarnished the reputation of the place where he worked for 15 years and met his wife.
“It was all about inclusion,” he said of the bar. “And it got tainted for something it wasn’t supposed to be.”
Boyle declined to talk about the Proud Boys, saying he would “rather forget everything.” But he also noted that for more than 30 years, Harry’s has served a diverse clientele, whether it’s members of the Clinton, Bush, or Obama administrations or people who came to D.C. for demonstrations like the Million Man March. He also said that he had provided it. 1995 and recent rallies in support of Israel and Palestine.
He said that when the nearby Trump Hotel was still open, bartenders would send Trump administration officials and their crowds to Harry’s at closing time, where they would order drinks that were much cheaper.
“We don’t say, ‘You can come in, but you can’t come in,'” Boyle said. “We’re a place where people feel comfortable going.”
On a recent afternoon, a bartender at Harry’s told lunchtime customers that after the bar closed in December, they could go to Joey’s, the new restaurant Boyle is helping open on Capitol Hill. When asked about Joey’s, Boyle said it will be a “neighborhood family restaurant.”
“It’s not going to be a MAGA bar,” Boyle said. “This is not a dive spot. It’s got brand new furniture, sharp and clean. It’s probably not Harry’s. I don’t really like dive bars.
“Let’s start with a clean slate,” he said, adding that he wished he wasn’t there. After spending decades in the bar business, he plans to spend most of his time in Florida playing pickleball and golf, he said.
Story editor: Jennifer Barrios. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Copy edited by Kathy Orton. Designed by Jennifer C. Reed.