The party is almost over for the Baltimore bars that built politicians

Between the lit-up Playboy bunny lamp adorned with an American flag and the impressive shelf of whiskey he always serves neat, lobbyist and Monaghan’s pub owner Jack Milani counts votes and sways state liquor policy.

For decades, Baltimore politicians have come to the Gwynn Oak tavern to work out stump speeches, devour a shrimp salad and a beer after door-knocking, or take the pulse of a rapidly changing precinct on Baltimore County’s West Side.

Yet, last call seems to have come for the Baltimore political bar scene. A few hum along — Costas Inn on the East Side for crabs and campaigning; and Jerry D’s Saloon in Parkville for generous portions, pours and political fundraisers. But many of the taverns that dotted seemingly every corner of city and county neighborhoods have gone out of business on account of deaths, indictments, gentrification or sometimes all three.

That has left social media largely as the place where candidates reach out to voters, craft messages and rally volunteers.

Milani thinks that is a change for the worse.

“Every person running for office would benefit from getting out and talking to regular people,” said Milani, who is also legislative chair of the Maryland State Licensed Beverage Association. “Anyone who surrounds themselves with a bunch of yes people doesn’t know what’s going on.”

We come not to eulogize the corner bar, but to raise a Natty Boh to its role in the Free State’s long and boozy political tradition. For it was in a knotty pine club room somewhere under a dimly lit Tiffany lamp with 10-cent drafts that a political newbie could chat up the steelworker and the teacher, the nuclear physicist and the firefighter. He — or she, but it was mostly he — could refine his message once he understood how it could help real people.

“Nobody was taking a video of you,” recalled Monaghan’s customer and longtime political consultant and fundraiser Colleen Martin-Lauer, who helped Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and former mayor and governor Martin O’Malley win their elections. “If you wanted to talk something through and see what fails on stage, you could.”

Those who did include former Congressman Elijah Cummings, who skewed more liberal than many of the Monaghan’s habitués who were his constituents; former congressman and county executive Dutch Ruppersberger, who never met a room he couldn’t charm; and O’Malley, who still occasionally catches an Orioles game at the bar. One regular explained Monaghan’s staying power: an Irish bar, run by an Italian, in a historically Jewish turned mostly Black neighborhood. A Switzerland, of sorts.

Politics and pubs have long gone hand in hand. Baltimore County Executive Kathy Klausmeier’s father owned a tavern. So did former County Executive Donald Hutchinson. Former State Sen. Thomas Bromwell, according to news accounts, sold his family bar the Bromwell Inn so he could pay his legal fees on a fraud charge that eventually sent him to prison in 2007. Former Del. Joseph J. “Sonny” Minnick ran both the House of Delegates and his tavern, Minnick’s. Police raided it and removed illegal gambling machines in 2011. He later sold it.

Del. Lou Morsberger’s old tavern lives on two decades after his death, with the slogan, “Dive since 1922; live since 2023.” It’s owned by women now.

State Sen. Joseph Miedusiewski officially changed his name to American Joe Miedusiewski to honor his grandfather’s bar, American Joe’s, when he began his political career. The name had taken him from the bar to a state Senate seat, and he thought it could propel him to the governor’s mansion, too. But he lost to Parris N. Glendening in 1994.

The following year, his dad retired and sold the bar the family had lived above for decades.

Now 76 and living in Timonium, Miedusiewski says there was no connection between losing the race and his dad selling the bar. His father was ready to retire; Miedusiewski was not — at least, not quite ready to give up politics. He still thinks he would have made a fine governor and says many a customer cast a ballot for him.

Other politicians had better luck. Bill Clinton stopped at American Joe’s while campaigning for the presidency in 1992; Barbara Mikulski frequently swept through on her rise to the U.S. Senate.

“The tavern is the cradle of American democracy,” Miedusiewski said, “and back then we had a clientele that was fairly up to speed. If you were from out of town and you were smart, you were asking around about where to go — and you came.”

Both Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. and Thomas D’Alesandro III — former Baltimore mayors known as Tommy and Young Tommy — politicked at Sabatino’s and Chiapparelli’s in Baltimore’s Little Italy, according to Hutchinson, a younger D’Alesandro friend.

Hutchinson’s father, Preston, operated The Essex Stag Bar on Margaret Avenue in Essex, open from dawn until 2 p.m. from the 1940s until his death in 1969. During the race for county executive in 1958, Preston Hutchinson painted a line on the floor. One side was for the supporters of incumbent County Executive Michael Birmingham, the other was for challenger Christian Kahl — both Democrats. Customers drank on their side of the line.

In 1967, Preston Hutchinson won his own House of Delegates seat. When he died in 1969, his son, Donald P. Hutchinson, was appointed to finish the term. Donald P. Hutchinson later became a senator in 1975, then county executive in 1978.

That tavern environment, Hutchinson said recently, “made me understand how to run for office, and what it meant to everyday people.”

While Baltimoreans sorted out their differences in taverns, Anne Arundel politicians preferred diners, according to Len Foxwell, who learned these nuances as a neophyte legislative aide to Glendening in the mid-1990s. Democrats headed to Cookie’s in Pasadena; Republicans to Friendly’s on Crain Highway.

When Foxwell asked a Democratic legislator to meet at Friendly’s, she informed him, “we don’t go to Friendly’s.”

Foxwell, now a political consultant, described the old corner bar ethos in one word: dark. Like mushrooms, that’s where politicians of the day thrived.

“It was almost if God himself wanted to have plausible deniability for the political machinations that were to come,” he said.

Beyond a captive and slightly tipsy audience, taverns boasted central locations and would let favored candidates put signs on their roofs or lawns. Owners like Milani are community supporters, the first people called when the local Little League needs uniforms.

Milani presses his own political agenda from behind the bar. His association represents bars and package goods shops like his own, and so far, they’ve been able to stave off competition from grocery stores.

He knows he has a powerful muscle to flex. Yet in the high-profile local race for Baltimore County executive, Milani stays neutral.

It’s better for business. The three councilmen running — Izzy Patoka, Julian Jones and Pat Young — are among his customers.