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“I could open Park today, and it would be at capacity. Every day, people call me asking when I’m going to open back up.” That’s what Marc Barnes, owner of the Park at Fourteenth, had to say about the current climate of the nightlife economy in the midst of the Greater Washington DC area’s social restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 16th, DC Government closed restaurants and bars like Park at Fourteenth in an effort to curb the coronavirus spread, and even then, socialites wanted nothing other than to pour up and party. “On the day the city said we had to shut down, I had a group of med students ask me to stay open so they could celebrate their graduation,” he said. He laughed as he told me how they became aggressive after he explained the situation to them. “They left my club to go to another one that night.” Even through social restrictions and shutdowns, Marc believes the pandemic will do little to change people’s appetites for socializing, hanging out with friends and enjoying the amenities of the District’s premiere nightlife venue and standard for safety, cleanliness and quality of service.
Candace Carrington, a DC creative and socialite, told me she was at a DC bar the evening before restaurants and bars were shut down. “Even then, there were about five or six people at the bar,” she said. “That was the first time I felt like, ‘oh shit, this is for real’.” Candace experienced a rapid evolution of her awareness within social settings, a phenomena that came through loud and clear in the output of various surveys I’ve conducted over the past month to understand what people felt social life — like having drinks at a bar or attending a party — could look like after social restrictions are lifted. The demand for the Park at Fourteenth to reopen that Marc has experienced strongly contrasts the sentiments respondents voiced through their feedback, sentiments that I’ll share with you in the next 8 to 10 minutes of reading.
Our public consciousness is changing
Understanding how to best encourage empathy in human experiences is one of my core motivations. It has driven me to refocus my professional…
