Monday morning, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration abruptly announced a rollback of the city’s phase four reopening plan, scrapping indoor seating for bars that do not sell food.
Monday night, Guthrie’s Tavern, one of Chicago’s oldest and most popular neighborhood bars, announced it would be closing permanently this week, citing the latest regulations as a primary cause. Guthrie’s has occupied the corner of Addison Street and Lakewood Avenue for 34 years.
“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closing of Guthrie’s Tavern. With the new restrictions set today for bars and the ongoing COVID restrictions, we don’t see a way we can survive,” read a Facebook post on Guthrie’s page.
The tavern’s last day of business will be Thursday. It had just reopened July 8.
Bartender and manager Mark Fellows, who has worked behind Guthrie’s bar since 1993, said that when managers heard the rollback news, they were about to sit down for a meeting exploring how to sustain the tavern under phase four regulations.
“We were gonna meet yesterday and discuss how we can move forward. Do we give it until the end of next month? But once that news broke, it was just like, ‘OK, this is just not gonna happen, unfortunately,'” Fellows said.
“It’s tough. It’s almost like a death in the family. All the outpouring right now from customers and people from long ago — I don’t think it has really sunk in yet. We’ll see as time goes on just how much this hurts.”
The Facebook announcement went up at about 7 p.m. Monday, and by early Tuesday morning, had garnered more than 1,000 cumulative likes, comments and shares.
“A lot of the outpouring has been, ‘I met my wife there,’ ‘We had our first date there.’ Fast forward 20 years later, and it’s, ‘Now we have a family, and we’ve shown our kids, this is how mommy and daddy met.’ Things like that,” Fellows said.
He seconded those feelings when asked what he’ll miss most: “It’s just the friendships we’ve made along the way.”
“Getting to know people that way, on a real kind of personal level, I don’t think you really get that in a lot of jobs,” he said. “There’s always kind of a truth that you get in the bar business. You know, people are having a couple of drinks, and they might reveal more than you ever expected them to, so you really get to know some people.”
Guthrie’s is among an increasingly large number of bars and restaurants in Chicago that have been forced to shutter due to the financial difficulties created by COVID-19 and resulting regulations.
Owner Steve Leith, who bought the bar in 1986 with a partner when it was Lil’s Lounge, said Tuesday he remembers opening the place “on a shoestring.”
“We did it on some money, but not a lot of money,” Leith said. “We built the bar ourselves. We built the table ourselves. We pretty much did everything ourselves.”
“We had a vision of just this cozy neighborhood bar, and we maintained it just as it was when it opened,” he said. “We maintained that idea even though the neighborhood changed. Even though we were surrounded by sports bars, we were never that into the sports thing.”
One of the key elements of the bar’s place in the neighborhood, and its success, was its collection of board games.
“We came up with the board game idea and took it to the max,” Leith said. “You’d go in there on a Friday night, and virtually every table would have a board game out. It was absolutely amazing.” But that ended with coronavirus restrictions.
“We had to clear out the game cabinet. We had to clear out the tables,” he said.
Although Leith said he supports the mayor, the rollback was a sign of the end for the bar. He had predicted he would step away if a rollback came: “I said, if we close again, that was it for me. I’m gonna retire. The idea of running a quote-unquote ‘COVID bar’ was so far from what that bar was supposed to be.”
Asked at an unrelated event Tuesday about the closing of the bar, Lightfoot said, “We don’t want to see any business close, obviously,” but she defended the need for the rollback, emphasizing that she was not singling out the bar as a problem.
“I’ve been in Guthrie’s many times to and from Wrigley Field,” she said. Nevertheless, she added that “we know that the bars are a source of potential spread” of the virus.
The tavern offers mostly indoor seating, so it was restricted to 25% capacity. Fellows said the bar had filed through Alderman Tom Tunney’s office for an exemption to create some outdoor seating, but had not yet heard back before yesterday’s news.
There’s nothing special planned for the bar’s final few days. If the copious responses are any indicator, the focus will mostly be on spacing and accommodating as many guests as they (safely) can, Fellows said.
“It sounds like we have a lot of people coming from near and far, so we might have an issue with maybe having too many people — which is a terrible thing to say, but what are you gonna do?” he said.
Fellows also added that there has been little thought about what ownership will do beyond the closing, even in the midst of an outpouring of support: “We’ll give it a lot more thought (over the next few days) and see what’s a practical move.”
Regardless of the circumstances, the Guthrie’s team is simply hoping to share some final moments among the people with whom they’ve shared three-plus decades of drinks and discussion.
“A lot of these mom-and-pop operations, it’s all about the one place. … We’re here to cater to all the neighborhood people, first and foremost, and then it just goes from there,” Fellows said. “But yeah, we’re just hoping to see people over the next couple of days and say our goodbyes, I guess, or our regards.”
