Listen along, my pilgrims, and you shall hear a Canterbury tale.
To be precise, a tale of Canterbury Ale & Eats, the venerable drinkery and eatery on 15th Avenue East.
The Canterbury is one of Capitol Hill's last un-gentrified dive bars. If anything, it's become progressively more dive-y since the I first visited it in the late 1970s. Along the way, employees have come and gone, regular customers have grown older and the place itself has become a neighborhood institution.
One reason for its survival has been a cooperative landlord-the nonprofit Capitol Hill Housing Improvement Program, which operates the Fredonia apartments upstairs. (Yes, Pike/Pine developers, bars and housing units can indeed coexist, as long as the sound emanating from the former is properly insulated from the latter by use of sound construction techniques.)
CHHIP's mission is to preserve and operate affordable housing. The Canterbury's rents over the years have helped support this worthy endeavor; in return, CHHIP has helped preserve the Canterbury as an affordable hangout and entertainment option for Hill residents of all social classes and all (21-and-up) generations.
What's been preserved is a classic of its type. The interior decor is in that pseudo-Elizabethan style so popular in the late 1950s and 1960s, only overlaid with contemporary Bud Light ad posters. The "pub grub" menu emphasizes big, sloppy burgers and cheesy fries. The liquor drinks are cheap and stiff. The beer selection includes a healthy variety of imports and microbrews, along with the more corporate stuff.
But this joint hasn't been preserved as a static, unchanging nostalgia fest. It's changed and grown. It's added hard liquor and, like all Washington bars, subtracted smoking. The latter move has vastly improved the interior air quality, but it's crimped the old time mating ritual of asking for a cig and/or a light as an icebreaker line.
There's now a big auxiliary game room for pool and shuffleboard. This room had been a separate retail storefront, then was added on to the Canterbury in recent years. The longtime regulars still crowd into the original space, with its carved-wood bar and fixtures. More casual attendees are more apt to gravitate toward the more spacious game room.
The game room has a big-screen TV in it. Like most bar TVs, it's always tuned to one sports channel or another. And like most bar TVs, the clientele ignore it when it's showing something deemed unimportant.
A DAY IN THE LIFE
This tale occurred on the Thursday before the Pride Weekend. But it was just a coincidence of post-Mariners scheduling that "Pride Fighting Championships" aired on the game room's TV that night. (It's a statistical fact: The only TV sets ever tuned to non-local programming on Fox Sports Net are in bars whose employees are too busy to change the channel following a local sports event's conclusion.)
As it turned out, this "Pride" show was highly appropriate for the local Pride Weekend. Like most of the made-for-cable "fighting" shows created to cash in on the popularity of pro wrestling, this was a show devoted to pairs of fit male bodies in tight shorts grappling and groping and grunting and assuming various "holds." At any of several other Hill bars, this spectacle would be the subject of fascination, boisterous taunting, or demands for a channel change. Here, it was paid little attention.
SAFE AT HOME
In the part of the game room nearest the main bar, a mixed-gender group of young adults waited patiently for one of their tribe to arrive straight from the airport. She entered the room, just a few minutes late, wheeling her luggage in tow. Shrieks filled the room, outblasting even the TV "fighting" show, accompanied by high-fives, hugs, and long passionate stories of her worldly adventures. It's one of those occasions when the name "Canterbury" seems most appropriate.
At the next table (or rather, at three tables bunched together), another large group of friends gathered for the first time since a Memorial Day barbecue. The bachelor gent who'd hosted that prior event had just attracted the attention of a well-spoken and well-groomed female. On this night, they entered the bar together. Several of the man's friends congratulated him for having been "gotten" by a far more compatible match than his prior girlfriend had been. Congratulations, and drinks, flowed all around.
Back in the main barroom, old-timers grumbled. Frat-boyish young men whooped and hollered. Bartenders repeated, for the umpteenth time, the mantra that everyone not seated at the bar must wait in the same crowded line. Two guys already in the line remarked positively at the obscure brand of Scotch just added to the menu. Smokers trotted outside. Baseball fans argued. A male computer user stared into his laptop while sipping a beer. Two women at a chessboard-pattern table shared hot gossip.
It was another ordinary night at a place that has seen thousands. May it see thousands more.
Clark Humphrey's column appears in the first issue of each month. His long-running Web site on local popular culture is www.miscmedia.com. Reach him at editor@capitol hilltimes.com.
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