Hush Harbor made headlines when it opened last September for its strict no-phones policy. When you arrived at the H Street bar, you were given a Yondr pouch with a magnetic lock so you could carry your device but not look at it. For owner Rock Harper, the goal was get people to be more present and actually engage with one another.
Eight months later, the bar closed. But Harper says the phone policy was not to blame for the shutter. He’s actively searching for a new location—and will be hosting phone-free pop-ups in the meantime.
“Our lease was up there for some time, and I just wanted to move it,” Harper says. “There’s a lot of factors there. On the business side, we need more foot traffic. I don’t want that much square footage. I have to find a staff to run it, and I just need a smaller space.”
It didn’t help that Hush Harbor opened amid an immigration crackdown in DC and the longest government shutdown in history. But Harper, who previously ran Hill Prince in the same space, says people were generally staying longer and spending more money at Hush Harbor. And while there were rare cases of pushback at the door, the vast majority of people knew the bar was phone-free and were often seeking it out because of that.
If anything, Harper says interest in phone-free spaces seems to be catching on. A dance club coming to Union Market called Tigres de la Noche plans to ban cell phones. A phone-free cocktail bar called Antagonist recently opened in Charlotte, also employing Yondr pouches. And even Chick-Fil-A recently introduced a promotion at one of its Maryland locations where customers get a free ice cream for locking their phones away during their meal. At his own fried chicken joint, Queen Mother’s in Arlington, Harper could see a future where there’s a “phone and no phone section, like smoking and non-smoking.”
Meanwhile, Harper is looking for a new home—and possibly new format—for Hush Harbor across DC or Virginia, including at apartment buildings, hotels, college campus, and even airports (making sure people don’t miss flights is a challenge). He’s also had conversations about licensing the brand in other parts of the country.
“There’s a movement going on, and I want to be a part of it,” Harper says. “It needs to be in the right space to do that.”
In the interim, Harper will be hosting a phone-free pop-up dinner on June 21 at Manifest—a barber/retail/restaurant space in Union Market—alongside Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam and Jessica Nabongo, the first Black woman to visit every country.
“Any space that is phone-free and humans are connected with one another without distraction, I want that to be labeled as a Hush Harbor,” Harper says. “I want folks to have Hush Harbors at their dinner table, board meetings, assemblies, concerts.”
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind DC’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
