Photo by Kevin Harber.

Bummer news, fancy cocktail enthusiasts: The Passenger and the Columbia Room are closing on January 1.

The Post was the first to break the news, with the silver lining that the Columbia Room already has plans to reopen at a space in Blagden Alley, above soon-to-open restaurant Dabney, from chef Jeremiah Langhonrne. The Passenger’s future isn’t looking so bright at the moment, however. Owners Derek and Tom Brown are having trouble finding a new, proper home for The Passenger in Shaw.

But The Passenger—which is home to some of our favorite cocktails and nachos in the city—and Columbia Room’s upcoming closure isn’t a surprise: the 7th Street block the popular bar is located at, across from the Convention Center, was always slated to be turned into office buildings. The question that lingered was when. From the Post:

“When we shook hands with [landlord] Paul [Ruppert], we always knew there might be an end to the Passenger and the Columbia Room,” Derek Brown said. The block of Seventh Street NW has long been slated for development by Douglas Development, but the developers were happy to let the buildings stay occupied while they finalized plans for an office building on the land.

As the bar is getting ready to celebrate its fifth anniversary this weekend, Tom says he’s hard at work trying to find a new space to open the bar at. “I’ve been looking at spaces for a while,” he told the Post, “but it didn’t work out, or it wasn’t the right situation. You can’t do the Passenger in a new buildout. Right now, unless someone comes up with the magic space in Shaw, I’m not ready to jump into anything.”

The Columbia Room—which is currently located in the back of The Passenger—is tentatively scheduled to reopen “by the end of 2015” in a space that’s “five times larger than the current setup”