This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m again flipping through the Emil. A. Press collection at the DC Historical Society. This one comes from 1965 and shows the legendary Crazy Horse bar at 3261 M St.
Crazy Horse was a rowdy bar that was open for decades until finally closing in the late 90s. Excerpts from the Post article from the 80s gives a good sense of the place:
THE CRAZY HORSE has gone upscale? Thankfully, not really. A few changes have been made by management to weed out the rowdies and defuse antagonism in the surrounding Georgetown area, but it’s basically the same beer-and-boogie bar that opened its doors on M Street almost 20 years ago. The Crazy Horse still fits one man’s definition of a good rock’n’roll club: a place in which most of the patrons have never opened an IRA.
Rodzilowski says that along M Street, only the nearby Paul Mall also offers live music, and that club attracts more of a suit-and-tie crowd. That’s something you haven’t seen much of at the Crazy Horse, which for years had the reputation of the bad boy of genteel Georgetown. Hard rock and wet T-shirt nights were among the elements that at times made the Crazy Horse a pretty rowdy spot.
“There’s no question about that,” Rodzilowski says. “When I came here 16 months ago, it attracted a much rougher crowd. You had a lot of fights, a lot of bums and guys with leather jackets. I remember when I first started here, I’d be working the door and I’d see some young women looking inside, like they’d like to come in. I’d say, ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ And they’d look at me like I was nuts.”
This sort of rowdy behavior was what eventually inspired the liquor license moratorium, which began the long slow death knell of these sort of bars.
After hosting the Coach for many years, this building now holds an Everlane, which is not nearly as much fun as Crazy Horse was:
You must be logged in to post a comment.