Post Pub in downtown DC closed permanently this past Friday.
“It’s done forever,” says Jeremy Wladis, the New York-based restaurateur who revived the business after it closed during the first Covid summer of 2020. “I kept spending money to try and keep it alive, and I just couldn’t,” he says. “I felt bad that it’s the Post Pub and it’s been there 50 years.” Wladis took over the bar from longtime owner Bob Beaulieu, who closed it due to the pandemic “and related factors.”
Wladis lists several factors that figured into his closing, among them “The government not forcing people to go back to work,” he says. “Lunch just became obsolete.” And his landlords, he says, wouldn’t negotiate lower rent. “New York landlords are tough,” he says. “DC landlords don’t make sense.”
This being DC, there’s a media piece to the story of the closing of Post Pub, which despite its name hasn’t really been a Washington Post hangout for some time. (Post journalists supposedly used to write stories at the bar, but “That was before cellphones and all that,” Beaulieu told the Post‘s Tim Carman in 2020. Also, the Post moved out of the immediate neighborhood almost a decade ago.)
But staffers at other publications did spend time at Post Pub. One was the Weekly Standard, which is where Anna Kriebel comes into the Post Pub story. A summer intern at the Dispatch, Kriebel knew that some of her coworkers are veterans of the Standard, which ceased publication in late 2018. She passed by Post Pub on her way into the office every day and remembers thinking that it looked like an “old-timey, chain-smoking, hardscrabble, old-school journalist watering hole” and that she and other Dispatch interns should organize a happy hour there sometime.
But on Monday, she says, she walked by the bar and saw a plaque that denoted one booth as a hangout for Standard employees on the ground. “What the heck,” she says she thought, “I’ll pick it up and take it in with me.” She brought it into work in case anyone might want it. After she posted a photo of the plaque in Slack, she says many “open-mouth emoji” followed.
Jim Swift, a former Standard staffer and editor at the Bulwark (another publication with strong Standard connections) actually bought that plaque for $50 and had it installed with the bar’s blessing after the publication closed. He remembers knocking a few back at Post Pub regularly before the pandemic, and that the Washington Examiner‘s old daily tabloid paper had a plaque at a table as well, so he figured his plaque would be a good tribute. Swift says he’s fine with the Dispatch folks keeping the plaque, should they want it. (Kriebel says the experience has taught her that she shouldn’t wait to schedule events at bars that look interesting.)
Wladis says he’s particularly sad to lose the business’s staff of about eight people. “They’re nice people, and I wish I could have kept it alive for them,” he says. “I saved the Post Pub and just prolonged the death. Ultimately, I just couldn’t keep it alive.”
This story has been updated with the whole plaque thing.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
