The School Inn Pub, one of many College Districts most beloved haunts — actually, it’s haunted, by a ghost named Howard — will quickly enter the following part of its lengthy life. This week homeowners Jen Gonyer and Al Donohue despatched out a press launch that served as their “commencement announcement”: After 4 years of working the half-century-old basement watering gap, they have been transferring on. If nobody buys the pub, its final day of service shall be June 15, 2025.
Gonyer and Donohue took over the bar at a very dicey second. The School Inn Pub had been a basic campus dive because the ‘70s — darkish wooden, a vaguely English vibe, college students and professors chopping it up within the dim gentle. In 2020 it joined the ranks of companies that closed in the course of the pandemic lockdown period. However Donohue and Gonyer (who labored there as a server and wrote a part of her College of Washington dissertation there) stepped in to rescue it and reopened the next 12 months, after intensive repairs.
“They spent the 2020-21 educational 12 months rehabilitating the bodily house with up to date electrical, plumbing, extra trendy gear, contemporary paint and wooden ending, and a kitchen sink that holds water,” the homeowners wrote on this week’s press launch. However they very consciously determined to vary little or no. In any case, this can be a bar in a constructing that dates again to 1909. “Aside from the suggestions that the pub is ‘brighter’ — because of 35-plus years of indoor tobacco use lastly painted over — the house remains to be the well-loved pub it has at all times been,” Gonyer instructed Eater Seattle on the time.
As she put it on this week’s press launch, “We did what we got here to do. We reopened the School Inn Pub and restored it to the place we have now liked since we have been first regulars within the early ‘90s.”
However the homeowners by no means supposed to make the School Inn Pub their careers. “The purpose was to avoid wasting the Pub from a state of everlasting pandemic demise,” Gonyers says. “June 2025 shall be 5 years for us, so now it’s time for us to deal with a few of our personal private objectives and tasks whereas we’re nonetheless in some state of our prime.”
Because the UW educational calendar kicks off, the School Inn Pub shall be launching what the homeowners name its “senior 12 months” and internet hosting group occasions. For more information on that comply with the bar on Instagram. The complete announcement of the homeowners’ plan to promote may be discovered right here.
