I thought it would last my time. I have received word that, without warning, the Uno’s at Union Station has closed.
I don’t understand how exactly this could have happened. The Uno’s was the only full-service bar in one of the largest transit hubs on the East Coast. It wasn’t a very good bar, as conventionally understood, but was it so bad that it could overcome its own monopoly status?
Devoted readers of this column (the few, the proud) may remember it as the occasional setting for observations on the nature of humanity and its watering holes. It seemed to be thriving (relatively) as recently as the week before Christmas. A brief Internet search suggests that these brief notes will be the most substantive monument to an establishment of thirty-five years, which is, I suppose, a suitably gloomy and disreputable sort of posterity. I suppose its place will be taken by some awful fast casual restaurant that serves quinoa, or, more likely in Union Station these days, it will be left empty, and the campy Chicago-themed decor will be left as a warning.
Grimly, this is not the first time. The scythe of Father Time, whom I begin to suspect is a teetotaler, has claimed better bars of mine. The Cock and Bull in Manhattan’s Midtown had much to recommend it—decent service, good pot roast, and, perhaps most importantly, an upstairs dining room in which you could take a genteel lunch that, since my friends disliked the place, was guaranteed to be solitary and quiet. It went the way of all flesh in 2020, I think as part of the pandemic of COVID closures.
Jacob Wirth Restaurant was an ancient Boston institution just off the Common, convenient to the T and the movie theaters. In 1868, Mr. Wirth pere established a German beer hall in the grand style: a vast draft list, dark paneling, black-and-white photographs and paintings of men in mustaches and strange collars, generous portions of schnitzel, pastrami, sausages. And a generous attitude regarding ID, which was important—I celebrated every birthday in my college years in Mr. Wirth’s establishment.
In my time, it was still much as Walter Muir Whitehill described it in his little collection of biographical sketches on Boston characters: “The status quo has always been maintained, within the limits permitted by law. The restaurant is repainted every two years, but as it is always in the same color, nobody notices it. No chrome, no gewgaws have ever been permitted.” (One difference from his description, actually—no more sawdust on the floor.) To crib Larkin again, “In times when nothing stood / But worsened, or grew strange, / There was one constant good” —Jacob Wirth never changed.
What Woodrow Wilson’s anti-German witch hunters and Prohibition couldn’t do, fires in 2018 and 2024 did. The building stands empty and forlorn; when I visit the land of the bean and the cod, I can barely stand to walk past it.
By contrast, the bars I dislike tend to thrive. For reasons that defy human comprehension, Busboys and Poets has blossomed into a beloved local chain. Founding Farmers hurtles forward apparently on the sheer force of nostalgia for the Obama era in my own age cohort. Now with the closure of the pitiable Uno’s, the Dubliner’s tyrannical domination of the neighborhood around Washington’s Columbus Circle grows only stronger.
Some of the old bastions of right sense and right action remain: Charlie’s Kitchen and the irrepressible Kong in Cambridge, the Old Town in New York. I find myself checking with mild anxiety whether the Cactus Beer Bar is still open in the Model Colony neighborhood of Pune, Maharashtra, although I am unlikely ever to return to it. When I see these places after a long absence, I can mutter in relief, “But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.” But with each casualty, I have less conviction. I doubt there is a lesson to this. Fashions, people, governments come and go; there is no reason for bars to be different. Mortal institutions for mortal men. We’re all on the way out, slowly or quickly.
In the meantime, you can find me at the Bottom Line.
