Velvet Lounge’s window.

Lorie Shaull / Flickr

Velvet Lounge and Dodge City, neighboring establishments near 9th and U Street NW, have closed for good, according to an owner, a manager, and Velvet Lounge’s social media posts.

The bars, which were under the same ownership, became staples on U Street over the years, known for their late-night DJ sets, dance parties, graffiti-tagged walls, less-than-savory toilets, outdoor patios, and — as one fan put it — being “a whole ‘nother party. DC at its finest.”

“Thank you so much for all the years of love,” Velvet Lounge posted on Instagram Thursday evening. “We are closing the physical establishment for good but we’d just like to say thank you and leave you with this. Please keep [your] head up and continue to try your best, you gave us some of your most beautiful years so thank you @velvetloungedc and everyone who was ever apart of that experience. The end of an [era].”

Velvet got its start as a dive bar in the late 1990s, and shifted ownership in 2008 to two former bartenders, Abdul Kayoumy and Haile Berhane. In a text, Kayoumy told DCist he didn’t sell the bars (as some had rumored), but that COVID was at the root of the closure. He declined to go into further detail, but said the close was “very emotional for me.”

Dodge City opened in 2011 and was a popular U Street haunt that ranged from “enlightened dive to boisterous dance party.” For nearly a decade, the bar was the site of a monthly summer dance party that made people feel at home and featured a rotating cast of queer DJs. “OverEasy is a trans-positive, all-gender-inclusive, anti-racist, pro-makeout space,” its organizers wrote. (Those parties and its tiny patio landed it on a couple of DCist’s “best of” lists over the years.)

Velvet Lounge felt like a second home to its beloved manager Dwight “Juice” Jones, who said he found out about the closure on Twitter. Jones started as a security guard at Velvet eight years ago and became the manager two years later. During his run at the bar, he says he met countless strangers who became friends, drawn in by the intimate music space and the dive bar feel. He saw plenty of musicians get their first shot at performing live at Velvet.

“There’s not a lot of places in D.C. that are a music space and an actual, legit dive bar,” Jones says. “When you come in, you’d see the DJs. When you would get drinks, the prices would be low.”

Asked about the culture at Velvet, Jones said it was a place that “gave everyone a fair chance no matter what your background was. It was about your experience and being treated as a person and enjoying that moment.”

But like all restaurants and bars, Velvet fell on hard times over the past year. The bar started a GoFundMe to help out its employees in April 2020. In a mini-documentary last November, Jones shared his thoughts on the struggles the service industry faced during the pandemic. “There’s a good chance that we’re not going to exist after this is all over,” he predicted of Velvet’s future.

Even before the pandemic, though, Jones saw the place struggle to keep up financially as new restaurants and bars came in to D.C. and charged higher prices.

“The numbers for the establishment weren’t where they needed to be for the last couple of years,” he says, “so every day for us was really trying to figure out, ‘How can we keep this place alive?'”

Velvet wasn’t alone. Other popular bars on U Street have closed permanently or indefinitely in the past year and a half, including Marvin, El Rey, Codmother, and U Street Music Hall.

Musicians, employees, and patrons began sharing a flood of reactions to the Velvet/Dodge news on social media.

https://twitter.com/ElScumbagg/status/1417624895341531137

https://twitter.com/Chris__Richards/status/1418230988577165313

Filed Under: dodge city, U street, velvet lounge,