On February 28, 2015, Rhino Bar and Pumphouse poured its last beer at the corner of 33rd and M Street in Georgetown. The bar had been there for 18 years. The address had been a bar for 63.
Three bars in sequence. The Shamrock opened in 1952. Winston’s took over in 1972. Rhino opened in 1998.
One long-term lease moved from owner to owner across two generations of Georgetown nightlife. When the lease finally lapsed, the building got a clothing store.
The plastic rhino head that hung above the bar sold for $1,500 at the closing auction. The marble downstairs bar sold for $110, mostly because the buyer had to chop it out and haul it away. Everything else, from the beer taps to the Red Sox neon, went the same way. By March 2, 2015, the place was hollowed out and waiting for retail.
Before Rhino: The Shamrock and Winston’s
By Rhino’s own account, the first bar at 3295 M Street was “a small little place called the SHAMROCK,” opened in the early 1950s as Georgetown was reverting from a federal-government overflow zone back to a neighborhood with a nightlife. Newspaper accounts and the Georgetowner’s reporting consistently date the lease back to 1952 or 1953. Either way, the bar opened at the tail end of the Truman administration and was a “hole in the wall” for “many a thirsty businessman.”
The Shamrock sign hung inside the bar for the entire 63-year run. So did the sign from its successor, Winston’s. When Rasmus Auctions catalogued the contents in 2015, both signs were listed as standalone lots. They were among the most-watched items in the auction.
In 1972, the Woodward Brothers took over the Shamrock lease and rebranded the place Winston’s Bar. (It was later retroactively styled Winston’s Pumphouse, hence the “Pumphouse” Rhino kept on its signage.) The Woodwards reoriented the bar around the Georgetown University and George Washington University crowd. According to Rhino’s house history, Winston’s was “the first establishment in the Georgetown area to offer a nightly DJ and party every night.”
The bar ran two floors, upstairs and down, jammed both. A regular on the Georgetown Metropolitan’s 2015 closure thread described mid-80s Thursdays at Winston’s under Marcus as Georgetown/American University nights with the place “jammed packed, upstairs and down.” In the early 1990s under Knoll, the bar ran a $1 hamburger night flipped by a bar-back named Gregorio.
Another former bartender remembered the bar’s house event: “No Skin No Win,” a Monday-night naked dance contest pulling in college-age women from Marymount, Mount Vernon, Georgetown, and Maryland. Buddy Jenkins was the manager. Mike Nardello DJ’d.
By the late 1990s, Winston’s needed work. The Woodwards closed the bar for several months of renovation. When the doors reopened, the name had changed.
1998: The Rhino Is Born
Rhino Bar and Pumphouse opened in 1998. The layout, as Rhino’s own about page described it: “A traditional Georgetown saloon on the main level and a second floor with a warehouse ambiance.” The downstairs ran a marble bar. Upstairs ran the DJ booth, the dance floor, the pool table, and the rhino head.
The bar was a Britt Swann project, in partnership with David Nelson. Swann was a serial Washington and Texas saloon investor with stakes in Sign of the Whale downtown. Nelson ran the floor and built the brand.
The bartender of record was Jeff Stiles, who had been pouring drinks in Georgetown for 23 years as of February 8, 2015, the Georgetowner called him the longest-tenured bartender in Georgetown. He had worked at Sports Fans before moving to Rhino.
The bar’s first Monday Night Football game was in fall 2000. By Rhino’s own count, the kitchen sold more than 25 million chicken wings between that night and the 2015 closure. 25-cent wings and $10 domestic pitchers were the standing weekly special. The kitchen ran them seven days a week.
The Rhino’s pitch to Georgetown undergrads was simple. Cheap pitchers, lax door, every game on every screen. Stuff magazine named Rhino one of the nation’s 20 best bars in its February 2004 issue, a ranking the GW Hatchet covered approvingly. By the late 2000s it was the dominant sports bar in Georgetown.
Red Sox Nation South
The Rhino’s defining identity was Red Sox. The team’s name went up in building-wide signage on the M Street facade. The pennants and World Series banners ran along the upstairs walls. Every Sox game played on the main screen.
David Nelson, who owned the floor, was a Boston transplant and built the bar’s Sox loyalty into a brand. In a 2005 Boston University student journalism dispatch from Washington, Nelson claimed there were more Red Sox diehards in Washington than fans of any other team and said he had refused entry to anyone not visibly supporting the Sox during the 2004 American League Championship Series.
When the Sox finally broke the Curse and won the 2004 World Series, the team’s trophy made its national tour. Rhino was one of the stops. It was hoisted at Rhino Bar in front of a packed house of Red Sox fans who, until that fall, had nowhere in DC to drink that meant anything, at least as the bar told it.
Eagles fans got the second-favored treatment. Rhino’s wordpress site listed the bar as “the Official Philadelphia Eagles Headquarters on game day,” and a Facebook commenter who ran the District Eagles Nest fan group confirmed it. Penn State and Ohio State got their own days for college football. The crowd self-sorted by jersey color, and the staff worked the rotation.
When MTV Showed Up
In late 2009 and early 2010, MTV’s The Real World: DC filmed in Georgetown. The cast lived in a Dupont Circle townhouse and did their nightlife runs on the same circuit Georgetown undergrads worked. Cast member Josh Colon had a bartending job at Rhino Bar during the filming, and other cast members were regularly photographed there, including a Washington Post Express recap that put Andrew and Ty inside Rhino on a Wednesday night.
Rhino made its way onto DCist and the Hoya in low-grade ways for the next few years. A 2014 Philip Seymour Hoffman retrospective on the upstairs screens, hosted the weekend after the actor’s death. A 2013 underage drinking incident that drew a five-day liquor license suspension in 2014 (held on appeal). A 2013 promotion in which Meridian Pint offered free beer to anyone who could find a person in a rhino suit walking the city.
None of this was Bayou-tier rock and roll. Rhino was a college sports bar in the era after Georgetown stopped tolerating college sports bars. It survived as long as it did because the lease was old, the rent was below market, and the Woodwards weren’t trying to upgrade.
The Closure, February 2015
The lease ran out at the end of February 2015. Britt Swann told the Georgetowner he had been willing to sign a new lease at double the rent. The building’s owner declined. The block had become high-end retail, and the next tenant could pay more than any bar at any price.
“Georgetown has changed,” Swann said. “It’s all about high-end retail.”
The Georgetowner broke the closing news on February 9, 2015. DCist followed the next day. Within a week, Eater DC, the Washington Post Going Out Guide, PoPville, and the Hoya all had it. The Georgetown Metropolitan ran a piece called “The Death Knell of Georgetown College Bars,” walking through the recent closures of Third Edition, Garrett’s, Mr. Smith’s, Chadwick’s, the Guards, Champions, and Georgetown Billiards, and listing Rhino as the last of the M Street and Wisconsin Avenue college bars to go.
Rhino threw a reunion party on Sunday, February 22, for old timers and former staff. The last night of regular service was Saturday, February 28. The Rasmus online-only auction of the bar’s entire contents began closing on the afternoon of Friday, February 27. Sports memorabilia, the pool tables, the marble bar, the kitchen, the TVs, and both vintage Shamrock and Winston’s signs went under the gavel.
On Monday, March 2, WTOP’s Michelle Basch went inside while the auction winners hauled out their lots. A worker was running a circular saw through the downstairs marble bar to break it into removable pieces.
Empty kegs were rolling out the back. A man walked out with a TV under his arm. The big stainless prep sink ended up on the M Street sidewalk waiting for a pickup truck.
The rhino head sold for $1,500. The marble bar that had cost the building’s owners thousands sold for the marginal cost of demolition labor. After 63 years of continuous bar use, the address went dark for the first time since Eisenhower.
What 3295 M Street Is Now
Club Monaco officially opened at 3295-97 M Street on December 4, 2015. The Ralph Lauren-owned clothing brand was returning to Georgetown four years after closing its previous location. It took the entire two-story building.
The first floor became womenswear. The second floor became menswear.
There is, in a small irony, still a bar inside. Club Monaco kept a functioning second-floor bar, stocked with local DC spirits including Green Hat Gin and One Eight Distilling, with the drink list curated by former DC bartender of the year Derek Brown. It serves as a checkout counter during normal retail hours and as a real bar for private events.
The bottles are different. The crowd is different. The fact that there is a bar at all, on the second floor of 3295 M, is a real estate footnote that traces back to the Woodward Brothers.
The Block That Lost Its Bars
Rhino was the last of the M Street college bars. By the morning of March 1, 2015, none of the rowdy spots within walking distance of campus were still open.
The Tombs, the GU underground that inspired the interior set of St. Elmo’s Fire, was still there on 36th Street. But it was never the M Street college dive Rhino had been.
Third Edition, the bar whose facade actually appears as the bar exterior in St. Elmo’s Fire, had closed in 2013. Garrett’s closed in 2011. Mr. Smith’s of M Street closed in 2014. Chadwick’s in the old Mr. Smith’s space was still hanging on but going.
A few blocks south at the foot of Wisconsin Avenue, the Bayou had been gone since New Year’s Eve 1998, the same year Rhino opened. The two closures bookended a 17-year window in which Georgetown nightlife was an actual scene with destination venues. By 2015, only the historic neighborhood-anchor restaurants like Clyde’s of Georgetown were unchanged.
The Georgetown Metropolitan put it cleanly the day after Rhino’s closing was announced: for the two main commercial drags of Georgetown, the era of college bars was now closed.
63 years. Three names over the door. One long-running lease.
A plastic rhino head that ended up in someone’s garage for $1,500. That is the story of 3295 M Street, NW.