CAPITOL HILL
After-Hours Blaze Scorches Lounge And Book Shop
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 9, 2007; Page B06
A fire damaged two popular businesses on Capitol Hill yesterday. No one was injured, but parts of the neighborhood were shut down during the morning commute.
The early morning fire started outside the Capitol Lounge in the 200 block of Pennsylvania Avenue SE. The blaze spread into the lounge and the Trover Shop next door, causing an estimated $100,000 damage, fire officials said. The cause remains under investigation.
  Adam Manson, co-owner of the Capitol Lounge on Capitol Hill, inspects the lounge after an early morning fire that also damaged the Trover Shop next door. (By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post) |
Officials said the fire apparently started behind the lounge and ignited a tarp covering some wooden patio furniture. It was the second serious blaze in two years to engulf the bar, which is in a converted townhouse.
The Capitol Lounge has long drawn crowds of neighborhood residents and Hill staffers with specials like half-price pizza on Mondays, 10-cent chicken wings on Tuesdays, 25-cent tacos on Wednesdays and daily happy hour price cuts for beer. The Trover Shop sells a variety of books, cards, candies and trinkets.
The fire was reported about 5:15 a.m., and about 120 firefighters responded with roughly 60 pieces of equipment, according to Alan Etter, spokesman for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department. Police closed a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue to accommodate emergency vehicles and rerouted cars onto residential streets.
The lounge and the Trover Shop probably will be "closed for a while" as repairs are made, Etter said.
But a manager at the Capitol Lounge said the staff would be cleaning overnight, and he hoped the tavern would reopen today. He said that the fire two years ago was much worse.
That fire was caused by a cigarette smoldering in a trash can, officials said at the time. It destroyed soccer scarves from around the world and collections of local and national political memorabilia -- especially from the Nixon era -- that decorated the walls.
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