Step into the Raven Grill at 3125 Mount Pleasant Street NW and the booths under your hands are the same ones that were here ninety-one years ago.
The bar opened in 1935, two years after Prohibition ended. It has not closed since.
The neon Cocktails sign in the front window. The six built-in wood booths along one wall. The defunct tabletop jukeboxes still bolted to every table. The cash-only register. None of it has changed in any way that matters.
Long-time Washingtonians know the Raven the way they know the Tune Inn on Capitol Hill and the Big Hunt off Dupont Circle. It is a Washington DC dive bar that has refused to become anything else.
The story of the Raven Grill is not how it almost closed. It is how it has been here, doing the same small things, for ninety-one years.
Before the Raven
The Raven Grill was not the first thing at 3125 Mount Pleasant. It was not even the second.
In 1909, the address was a private house. On a March night that year, Engine Company 11 was sent up Mount Pleasant after a chimney fire at “the house of L. J. Juhlin,” as the Evening Star recorded the next morning. The damage was nothing. The Star noted it because that is what the Star did.
For the next fourteen years, 3125 was a detached residence on grounds large enough that the people living there took in boarders on the second floor. The classifieds from 1912 through 1914 all use the same pitch. “House detached; choice location; Mount Pleasant cars pass the door.”
Henry N. Shedd lived here in 1912. Charles Oscar Fourche died here in November 1917 and the funeral was held in the parlor. Iona Swinnerton lived here in 1922 and represented Lansburgh and Brother at the Tidal Basin bathing-beauty contest. She won second prize and was photographed in the Washington Herald holding her silver cup.
Then in September 1923, the Star’s real-estate column ran a one-line notice. The dwelling was sold, the paper said, “to a local investor, who plans to remodel for investment purposes.” Within a month, the departing tenants were running “we are leaving the city, all of our furniture for sale” ads in the Star.
The remodel produced the building the Raven sits in today. The clean fix on its dimensions comes from a 1932 foreclosure-sale notice. The auctioneer’s listing called it “a three-story and basement brick building containing twelve apartments and two stores.”
Twelve apartments above. Two ground-floor storefronts at street level. One of the two stores was already home to a tailor called Broadway Tailors and Furriers, listed in the Washington Times business directory in February 1932.
The other store would, three years later, become the Raven.
Two Years After Prohibition Ended
When the Raven opened in 1935, Mount Pleasant was a streetcar neighborhood on the north edge of the city. Rows of brick storefronts. A downhill walk to the cars at 14th and Park Road. A grid that had grown up around the 1860s estate of Samuel Brown, who named the area Mt. Pleasant Village for the high ground on the old Pleasant Plains tract.
For the long version of how the name landed there, see our piece on the history of Mt. Pleasant, which also happens to mention the Raven.
Vintage matchbooks from the 1940s tell you what the Raven sold itself as in those early years. The cover reads, in red script, “The Raven Grill, 3125 Mt. Pleasant St., Washington, D. C.” Up the side runs the slogan: “Anything You Are Cravin’ You’ll Find At The Raven.” On the back: “The Best in Food and Drinks.”
Cheeseburgers were fifteen cents. Pickled eggs were on the menu. Gretchen Georgiadis, the bar’s general manager in the early 2010s, told WAMU in 2012 that workers found an original menu inside the walls during a renovation.
Originally, when the Raven opened it did have a grill in the back.
Gretchen Georgiadis, general manager, to WAMU, 2012
The Washington Post’s 1995 reporting tells a slightly different opening story. Dana Hull wrote that the Raven “began after Prohibition as a liquor store” and evolved into a restaurant and bar over the following years. Both accounts agree on the underlying fact: in the bar’s early decades, food mattered more than it does today.
The 1942 photograph above shows shoppers boarding a Mount Pleasant streetcar downtown at 7th and F Streets NW. That was the era the Raven was getting going. The streetcars are gone. The Raven is not.
Mrs. Warren and the Iron Fist, 1958 to 1994
In 1958, Murray and Pauline Warren bought the Raven. Mrs. Warren was a seventh-generation Kentuckian. The Washington Post described her as a “staunch and upper-crust Republican” who eventually bought out her husband’s share because he was a gambler.
She ran the place for thirty-six years. She would walk in wearing high heels and a mink stole and run a white-gloved finger along the bar to check for dust. By Mary Gregory’s account in 1995, Mrs. Warren ran the Raven with what the daytime bartender called an iron fist.
It is to Mrs. Warren that you owe the fact that nothing in the Raven Grill has changed. She would not let it. She kept the booths. She kept the broken tabletop jukeboxes. She kept the gold curtains in the front window. She kept the framed sketch of a raven above the bar that some regulars said gave the place its name. Others swore Mrs. Warren named it because she was an Edgar Allan Poe fan.
Mary Gregory was the daytime bartender for thirty-four years by the time the Post profiled the place. She had served Burt Lancaster two beers in 1969 and never forgot the five-dollar tip he left her. She remembered the time a belligerent drunk threw his coffee in her face and the time she chased a man to Hobart Street for stealing six dollars from the register.
William Hawkins, age 68, drank Miller Genuine Draft. Everyone called him Hawk. He told the Post why he and the other regulars showed up at ten in the morning.
Mary is the best bartender around. That’s why we come here.
William “Hawk” Hawkins, Raven regular, to The Washington Post, 1995
One former bartender from the 1980s remembers the staff and the regulars watching the Kentucky Derby with her every May. Pauline Warren would put out fried chicken and ham and biscuits and deviled eggs and her own derby pie, and the room would toast a framed photo of Secretariat that hung above the bar. The Berea College motto hung up there too.
Mrs. Warren died in the summer of 1994 at age 84. On the first anniversary of her death, the night bartender Jesse Roman called off his usual mid-August birthday party out of respect. One of the regulars kept her death notice clipped from the paper, folded inside his wallet.
Merid Admassu Buys the Bar, 1995
When the Post arrived in August 1995, the Raven had a new owner. Merid Admassu, an Ethiopian-born regular who had been drinking at the bar for years, bought it from Mrs. Warren’s estate.
Most Washingtonians do not know him by name. He has now owned the Raven for thirty-one years, longer than the Warrens did.
Admassu kept the place the same. He replaced the tattered gold curtains with Venetian blinds and that was about the extent of it. The booths stayed. The neon stayed. The Sam Cooke and Count Basie singles stayed in the broken jukeboxes. The Declaration of Independence hanging on one wall stayed. So did the framed photographs of Ray Charles and Jimi Hendrix that watch the room from eye level.
In October 2012, Admassu opened a second neighborhood bar, Lyman’s Tavern, up the road at 3720 14th Street NW, with two partners. Washingtonian covered the announcement and named him as the Raven’s owner in the process. The Raven kept doing what the Raven does.
The Bar That Survived 1968, 1991, and Whole Foods
Survival is the actual story of the Raven Grill. Mount Pleasant has been through a lot since 1935 and the Raven has been through every block of it from the same six stools.
When Washington burned in April 1968 after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Raven was on the upper edge of the unrest. When Mount Pleasant erupted in May 1991, after a District police officer shot a Salvadoran man at a sidewalk arrest a few blocks down Mount Pleasant Street, the Raven stayed open through it.
Dana Hull, writing for The Washington Post in August 1995, put the Raven’s record in fourteen matter-of-fact words.
has survived the 1968 riots, the 1991 disturbances and the continuing onslaught of gentrification.
Dana Hull, The Washington Post, August 5, 1995
In between, Mount Pleasant Street became one of the Salvadoran and Central American spines of the city. Pupusas down the block. Latin grocery stores along Mount Pleasant. A neighborhood that the 1990 census made look like a different place than the 1950 census did. The Raven was still the Raven through all of it.
By the time WAMU’s D.C. Dives series aired its Raven episode in June 2012, gentrification had thoroughly arrived. A Target had opened in nearby Columbia Heights. Adams Morgan was being recolonized by twenty-five-dollar cocktail bars. The Raven Grill, somehow, was still pouring Bud and Miller and Michelob, with Heineken as the token import.
A Grill That Serves No Food
Walk into the Raven today and ask the bartender for hot water and lemon to make a hot toddy. You will not get one. Gretchen Georgiadis told the WAMU story she had a young woman ask exactly that, and her answer was a flat list of everything she did not have to make it with: no honey, no lemons, no sugar, no teabags, no hot water.
WAMU’s Trey Pollard asked Georgiadis what food the Raven Grill serves now.
Bags of Utz potato chips.
Gretchen Georgiadis, general manager, to WAMU, 2012
Other things the Raven Grill does not have: a credit card reader, beer on tap, tequila, a working table jukebox, or a phone other than the pay phone the regulars memorize. The Cocktails sign in the window is leftover decor. The bar does not really make cocktails.
What the Raven does have is the small set of things almost no other bar in Washington has anymore. Original built-in wood booths from the bar’s first year. A working corner jukebox heavy on classic soul. Two small televisions on opposite ends of the room. A bartender who has been there for decades and remembers your name.
One of DC’s Oldest Active Liquor Licenses
Whether the Raven Grill holds the District’s single oldest active liquor license is a claim worth handling carefully. The Tune Inn on Capitol Hill, founded in 1947, sits on what its current operators call the second-oldest post-Prohibition liquor license in DC. That math implies an oldest, and the Raven is the most commonly cited candidate.
What is documentable, in the WaPo’s 1995 reporting and WAMU’s 2012 reporting, is that the Raven has been a Washington DC dive bar continuously at 3125 Mount Pleasant Street NW since 1935. Scoundrel’s Field Guide, which catalogs dive bars across the country, calls the Raven “the longest continuously operating bar in the city.”
The safest framing is the one we will hold to here. The Raven Grill holds one of the District’s oldest active tavern licenses, and the establishment behind it has not closed in ninety-one years. The “oldest in DC” superlative is widely accepted in the local bar press. ABRA’s license files are where it lives or dies.
Why the Raven Is Still the Raven
Bonnie O’Neal, a retired District police officer who watched the place for three decades, told the Post in 1995 something about the Raven that explains a lot about why it is still here.
It’s the closest thing to a home-town, main street bar Mount Pleasant has.
Bonnie O’Neal, retired DC police officer, to The Washington Post, 1995
That has not changed. The customers in 2026 are not the same customers who were there in 1995, but the function of the place is the same. People come here to drink with people they know.
Derek Brown, the cocktail-bar owner WAMU brought to the Raven for its 2012 piece, said something else that holds up. He said he had been in the Raven nights with Ethiopians and Latinos and hipsters and old white guys, everything under the sun. The Raven, he said, was a confluence of so many different kinds of people that it made the case for what DC actually is.
Hawk, the 68-year-old regular Dana Hull wrote about in 1995, told the Post how long he planned to keep coming.
Unless I’m dead, I’ll be here.
William “Hawk” Hawkins, Raven regular, to The Washington Post, 1995
Hawk would be 99 years old this year.
Ninety-one years on, the neon still says Cocktails, the grill still serves no food, the booths are the same ones, and the door at 3125 Mount Pleasant Street NW is still unlocked at ten in the morning.