When it’s always closing time
As coronavirus shutters bars, our cities lose something special — their soul
There are bars where you can get a drink and bars where you can get something more. Such bars offer refuge, in the original sense of the word, “the state of being sheltered from pursuit, danger or difficulty.”
A city’s mainstay bars are its way stations, fixtures of comfort where we can find relief from mundane turmoil, where the challenges and obligations of the day are temporarily discontinued, held briefly apart from the pleasure of the moment. The best bars are where you want to be when you’re having a great time or a hard time, where you retreat in the face of a day’s turbulence or head to celebrate its minor wins. When things look really bleak — when the entire world is in the throes of catastrophe, when our borders are closing and we are sent home from work, isolated and frightened — the warmth of our favourite bars would be hugely reassuring.
Yet it’s precisely to these sanctuaries that, for the time being, perhaps indefinitely, we cannot go.
Our bars are closed. The order first came down on Tuesday, as a recommendation from Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, soon to turn into a directive. Then the directives began rolling out in cities and provinces across the country. Although we’d been advised to practise social distancing as early as last week, no one seemed to be taking it seriously; bars and restaurants were still full, people couldn’t help themselves. So they were ordered shut. In Ontario, as of midnight on March 17, every bar, live music venue and restaurant must either convert to a takeout operation or close — or face a $25,000 fine.
It’s already completely transformed the look and feel of our cities. Take a walk through downtown Toronto and witness the eerie calm: the shuttered storefronts, the windows curtained or grimly barred. Along Queen Street West, at dives that seem eternal, there are bar stools that haven’t gone an hour without someone sitting on them in decades, and patios that draw enthusiastic crowds even in the bitter midst of a Canadian winter. There’s a diner where an old Greek couple have been serving bacon and Budweisers to the same dozen men every afternoon for something like a half-century, and an upscale speakeasy nearby that makes the best martinis in the city. All of this vanished overnight.
When Germany instructed its bars to close last week, it seemed an oddly drastic measure, one that was difficult to imagine other countries adopting. Days later, it was the new normal, everywhere. Bars are closed in Florida and Texas, in Los Angeles and New York, in Halifax and Vancouver. France suspended even its immortal cafés. Everywhere from Phuket to Mumbai has followed suit with similar directives, while cities across the United Kingdom have been slowly doing the same. It’s an easy way to restrict people from congregating and to promote the kind of social distancing that is our only chance of mitigating the spread of the disease. But it’s also had an unavoidable effect on the tenor of our cities — and has temporarily eradicated something indelible.
Of course, the urgency with which these measures were enacted in Ontario and other parts of Canada was intensified by the arrival of St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday synonymous with drink. But
St. Patrick’s Day drinking has always had an almost-fanatical quality, and indeed is so extreme that it could probably stand to be postponed or cancelled entirely. The comfort bars provide on a day-to-day basis has nothing to do with that kind of extremism. A pint of bitter at an intimate pub, an Aperol Spritz on a patio when the weather turns, an Old Fashioned made with expertise at a vintage cocktail bar — these are so infinitely pleasurable that they practically constitute essential services. It’s not about the alcohol itself, not really. We can drink alcohol at home. It’s about the camaraderie and the fellow-feeling, the sense of intimacy and belonging that bars arouse.
What is Dublin without a Guinness at Mulligan’s, drawn in the traditional glass, not the newer ones they have elsewhere? What’s Paris if you can’t sit beneath on awning at a café near dusk in the gentle rain, waving away a plume of cigarette smoke as you take in another cheap but indispensable Bordeaux? I can hardly imagine Mexico City with no salt-rimmed margaritas, couldn’t dream of L.A. without somewhere to sip Chardonnay. London without the American Bar at the Savoy wouldn’t really be London at all.
A city’s bars are its lifeblood, its soul, its music. Coronavirus has silenced them, snuffed them out, and left us forlorn and stranded. This is a time of great uncertainty, when the seriousness of the situation will only get more severe — there are worse casualties of the coronavirus, to be sure. But the absence of our bars is a reminder of how quickly everything has changed, how radically. And in the quiet of isolation we can feel this silence all the more.