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Until 1986, 18-year-olds could legally buy beer in Washington, and Georgetown drew teens from Maryland and Virginia. Then came one week in September.
The lost and untold stories of Washington, DC. The buildings, blocks and people the city and region forgot.
The Beatles played their first American concert here. Sharks turned up in the Potomac in 1911. Ford’s Theatre collapsed in 1893 while government clerks worked inside.
Since 2012, Ghosts of DC has been digging through old newspapers, maps and archives for stories like these, from Georgetown to Anacostia and across the whole DMV. Now they’re a podcast.
Short episodes, most around ten minutes. Each one is built on the historical record and tied to a full post with photos and sources at ghostsofdc.org.
Something for the Metro ride or the walk to work.
Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.
Did you know that until the fall of nineteen eighty-six, an eighteen-year-old could walk into any bar in Washington and legally order a beer? Not a whiskey. That took twenty-one. But beer and wine? Eighteen. And on the last Saturday night before that changed, Georgetown was packed. So how did a city that held out for years finally give in, in about a week? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.
I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. This one has a packed bar strip, a nervous city council, and a message on a high school marquee.
It's Saturday night, September twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-six. In four days, the drinking age in D.C. goes to twenty-one. A student named John Lyon, eighteen, had come up from Radford University in Virginia with his friends. He told the Washington Post, there's a lot of talk about it at school, and we just wanted to see what it was going to be like this weekend. Because D.C. didn't just slam the door. If you were already eighteen when the new rule kicked in, you could keep drinking beer and wine. That's called a grandfather clause. Which made the doormen sweat. One told the Post he was thinking about quitting. From now on, he'd have to sort kids by birthday. Born by the end of September, nineteen sixty-eight, you're in for beer. Born after that, you're out. And at Houlihan's on M Street, a Georgetown freshman named Michael Flanigan, eighteen, beer in hand, summed it up. I feel lucky as hell.
To understand that night, you have to know what D.C. had become. For decades, the city ran a split system. Eighteen for beer and wine, twenty-one for liquor. Plenty of states did it that way. But in nineteen eighty-two, Maryland went to twenty-one. Virginia raised its beer age to nineteen the next year. So if you were eighteen and lived anywhere around Washington, the city was the only place nearby where you could legally order a beer. So they came. In May of nineteen eighty-five, the Post found the line for Winston's stretching down M Street, nearly running into the crowd at the Crazy Horse. One group of high school friends from near Annapolis piled ten into a van once a month, and drove forty miles to drink legally. A bar owner near George Washington University told the Post that eighteen to twenty-year-olds were about forty percent of his customers. Raising the age, he said, would probably put him out of business. Congress, and officials in Maryland and Virginia, had a word for what the city had become. A magnet.
In July of nineteen eighty-four, President Reagan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. It didn't order anyone to do anything. It just made holding out expensive. Any state that held out, and that included D.C., would lose part of its federal highway construction money. Five percent at first. Then ten. And there was a deadline. October first, nineteen eighty-six. Pass your law by then, and you could let the people who were already drinking keep drinking. Virginia went to twenty-one in nineteen eighty-five. D.C. didn't budge.
The first D.C. bill to raise the age was filed in February of nineteen eighty-three. It went nowhere. When a new version came before a council committee in nineteen eighty-five, it lost four to one. Part of it was the bars' money, and part of it was principle. An aide to one council member put it simply. A lot of people see it as a home rule issue. Home rule. The idea that Congress shouldn't be writing the city's laws. By the summer of nineteen eighty-six, Mayor Marion Barry's own advisory panel was backing twenty-one. And in September, he sent the council an emergency bill to get it done before October first. But an emergency bill needed nine of the thirteen council members. A week before the vote, the mayor's aides could count five. Then came the weekend of September twentieth.
In Bowie, Maryland, the marquee at Bowie High School carried the same message every summer and holiday. Be a Friend. It was part of the town's campaign against drunk driving. Don't drive drunk. Don't let your friends drive drunk. Three friends from Bowie High, nineteen and twenty years old, knew it well. They lived within blocks of each other. The driver had made a pact never to drink and drive. And one of the others had told his mother that when they went out, one of them wouldn't drink. That Saturday night, they went to Georgetown. A little before two in the morning, on the Beltway near the Mormon Temple in Kensington, their car slammed into an abandoned flatbed truck on the shoulder. Witnesses said their car had been racing another car, at about seventy miles an hour. The other car didn't stop. All three were killed. The driver's blood alcohol level was nearly double the level Maryland used for intoxication. As the state's medical examiner put it, none of them really should have been driving. On Monday morning, the principal at Bowie High stepped up to the microphone. His voice shook, the Post reported, as he told the students he hoped this tragic waste of young lives would serve as an example.
That same Monday, the president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving spoke at a news conference at the District Building. Let's close those blood borders, she said, and save our teenagers' lives. And council members started to move. Three who had opposed the idea in committee now said they'd vote for it. One of them said the tragedy had made members like her reflect that their action could save lives. Tuesday evening, the council chairman, David Clarke, was telling reporters he had eight and a half votes, when an aide handed him a note. The ninth vote was firm. It came with a deal. The mayor hadn't wanted a grandfather clause. But to win over the holdouts, his aides wrote one. One council member who still opposed the higher age explained her vote like this. I just thought, as long as it was inevitable, we might as well make the best deal possible. Just before midnight on Tuesday, September twenty-third, the vote was ten to three. And in that same late-night session, the Post reported, the council also approved a pay raise. For itself.
So was it the crash? The Post's first story said the deaths helped change at least three minds. Two days later, another Post story said it was years of pressure from Congress, and that the crash was the backdrop. Probably both. Congress had made it feel inevitable. But a week before the vote, the council didn't have the votes. After that weekend, it did.
Which brings us back to that last Saturday night. One eighteen-year-old on the street showed a reporter his fake I D. Beer was legal for him. Liquor wasn't. His fake, a Virginia license with a friend's picture on it, said he was twenty-two. It works every time, he said. The grandfather clause had no residency test. So some young people from Maryland and Virginia kept drinking beer legally in Georgetown until they turned twenty-one. The last of them aged out in nineteen eighty-nine. And back in Bowie, the marquee at the high school kept its message. Be a Friend.
That's the story of Georgetown's last call. It's built on twenty-one sources, from a nineteen eighty-two Washington Post story about Georgetown after dark, to The Hoya in twenty fourteen. They're all in the blog post at Ghosts of D C dot org. If you remember Georgetown in the eighties, or know someone who does, send this one their way. Last call. This has been Ghosts of DC.