Even on the nights he’s not drinking, Kojo Nnamdi still likes to visit the Hitching Post. 

“I’ll drink lemonade or some other nonalcoholic beverage,” says the longtime host of WAMU’s The Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi. He’s been a regular at the hallowed Petworth hub for about 25 of the 54 years it’s been in business. He goes to relieve stress, sometimes several times a week. “It’s the comfort level,” he says. “It’s what it does for my brain.”

“I can relax immediately and have a pleasant, often joke-filled conversation among people I associate with on a regular basis,” Nnamdi adds. “I wouldn’t say everybody at the Hitching Post is somebody I would consider a friend, but they are certainly associates that I enjoy spending time with. It helps me come down from thinking about serious things. Even though serious things may come up at the Hitching Post, it’s in a completely different environment.”

According to research dating back to the 1970s, this is the psychological allure and benefit of being a regular at a neighborhood bar. The practice can help us manage emotions, make friends, maintain relationships, and expose us to new ideas and people.

“[Those relationships] put us in a good mood,” says Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Essex in England. “They help us feel connected to other people, which is this fundamental need we have as human beings.”

A 2016 study conducted in bars around Oxford, England, examined these relationships in-depth. Led by Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar and commissioned by the U.K. consumer organization Campaign for Real Ale, “Friends on Tap: The Role of Pubs at the Heart of the Community” suggests that local bars are among the best venues to meet like-minded people, even comparing them to places of worship, and that moderate drinking can improve a person’s social skills, mental health, and overall well-being.

The report implores us to get off our phones and suggests that people who frequent a neighborhood bar have more friends from different cultures and social classes, are more involved with their communities, more trusting of others, and less lonely than those whose social circles are limited to work and home.

The report also finds that regulars tend to drink less per outing than people drinking on their own or at big downtown bars, citing a group-moderation effect. According to the study, “People are likely to drink less if those around them are behaving in a more measured way, and are, as a result, likely to be less tolerant of socially inappropriate or excessive behavior.”

For a big group out for a night, drinking can be an objective, but for regulars at their neighborhood spot, drinking often is secondary to the fellowship—as it is for Nnamdi at the Hitching Post.

Nnamdi says he first popped in because he found the plain-looking building on Upshur Street NW intriguing. He couldn’t tell if it was a residence or a business. The Hitching Post’s communal confines compelled him to stick around and return ad infinitum. 

“I probably ordered some fried chicken—their fried chicken was always very good—and started striking up conversations with the people at the bar,” he says, referring to his first visit. “I enjoyed it and went back again, and to my surprise, some of the same people who were there the first time I went there were there again.” Nnamdi made a habit of returning and knew he could count on engaging in a good conversation.

When the “Friends on Tap” researchers compared small community bars to their big downtown counterparts—those that tend to be less intimate and have more transient clientele—they found that people typically visit the downtown bars in bigger groups, often on their way to somewhere else, like a club. The interactions within those groups tended to be shorter and not so intimate—and with a lot more phone-checking.

The opposite happens at local bars.

“I always say, ‘Hey, this is cheaper than therapy,’” says Herman Lutz, an IT guy who’s been a regular at Georgetown’s Tony and Joe’s Seafood Place for six years. “You’re in a relaxed environment, and little by little you start saying things. You’re basically venting stuff, but you’re laughing. Laughter’s important. It’s just like you’re communicating more. … With this group of people, you can open up and let loose and walk away.”

In a seminal and oft-cited 1973 paper that helped create this field of study, Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter examined the sorts of relationships and interactions Lutz and Nnamdi are describing.

Called “weak ties,” these seemingly frivolous or non-intensive relationships are low investment and potentially high reward. Take for example the barista you see every morning, making small talk with a work colleague on a serendipitously shared elevator ride, or idly confabulating with two strangers over beers in a pub.

Sandstrom studies this sort of rapport, also known as minimal social interactions. She became interested in the subject while getting her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A woman working at a hot dog stand on campus inspired her.

“Every time I walked past her, I’d smile and wave, and she’d smile and wave back,” Sandstrom says. “It took me a while, but I realized how good it made me feel, and then I started wondering: Maybe lots of people have people like this hot dog lady in our lives—people who make us feel good and make us feel grounded and part of the social fabric and who we don’t really pay attention to.”

Sandstrom doesn’t consider the hot dog vendor a stranger, even though they’ve never spoken or exchanged names. The delineation is mutual recognition, and from there, the relationship can escalate or ebb. Weak ties exist on a spectrum and are predicated on common ground. For Sandstrom and the hot dog vendor, the common ground was simple proximity. At the Hitching Post, it’s something more.

“Back in the day, this business was known as a spot for minorities to hang out,” says owner Barry Dindyal. He bought the business from founders Al and Adrienne Carter in 2012. “This is the one place that they could come and feel like home. We build on that and just keep it going, and we try to build and strive to have our new customers come in and feel the same way. This place should be a home away from home.”

At the more intimate end of the “tie” spectrum are strong ties, which are what we have, notably, with dear friends and family. Both can be naturally cultivated and easily nurtured in local bars, in part, because being a regular renders scheduling all but superfluous. If people are going to the bar anyway, there’s no need to make plans. This guarantees face-to-face contact, with minimal effort.

“Everyone is there for, maybe not the exact same reason, but everyone’s there with lowered inhibitions,” says Mark Menard, who owns Trusty’s, a dive bar in Southeast D.C. “They don’t really have great expectations if they’re hanging out in a dive bar or a neighborhood bar. … Some of them want to be engaged with you. There are those who don’t want to be engaged—just have a drink, no hassle. It totally allows for the level of engagement that you want.”

When Denizens Brewing Co. opened in Silver Spring in 2014, it created a so-called “regulars club” because founders Emily Bruno, Jeff Ramirez, and Julie Verratti wanted to both ensure their new business had repeat customers and create a social locus, just like the owner of the Hitching Post.

“I can’t think of a significant time in my life I don’t associate with some sort of neighborhood place,” says Verratti, who now works for the U.S. Small Business Administration. “I challenge anyone to think about getting together with family and friends over the years and not think about bars and restaurants.”

Like Nnamdi, Susannah Cernojevich pops into the Hitching Post to find conversation, even if she’s not drinking. She first went to the Hitching Post about 15 years ago, not long after moving to Petworth from Capitol Hill. She says an older married couple—veteran regulars—essentially sponsored her incorporation into the Hitching Post’s ecosystem.

“[The wife] would tell me when they were coming, and I would go and sit with them, and they would start introducing me to other people,” says Cernojevich, who has used the bar’s network to return a lost dog and find reasonably priced roofers. “You see families grow, people meet other people and get married. It’s just a nice place to go and touch base.”

Some of those people are now gone. The couple that smoothed Cernojevich’s assimilation died years ago. The husband, a civil rights attorney, is still remembered as the bar’s “resident sage” as well as for his frequent and inflamed debates with another late regular, a career federal employee. Nnamdi says the two often sparred over who knew more about the government, among other issues.

“They would get into fierce arguments using raised voices about the same things over and over again,” Nnamdi says, laughing. “We would look forward to these arguments. I, for one, knew what each one would say almost before they said it, and I knew that they would end up becoming very angry at one another, and then the next night I’d go there and they’d be sitting there again as good friends.”

They never settled the debate.

“That was the whole point,” Nnamdi says. “One of the things about relationships in a place that’s a neighborhood establishment, regardless of how upset people may be on one occasion or another, they are almost certainly going to return, especially if they live in the neighborhood. But also because a neighborhood is more than a building. A neighborhood is really a place where people find companionship.”  

Last October, while commiserating with friends about the pandemic and lamenting what may still be the end of the world, I mentioned that I would soon be losing my job and my apartment. One of my friends, local brewpub owner Bill Perry, a man not unfamiliar with non sequiturs, then asked if I like cats. I told him I do, citing my late cat Buster (1988-2004) and other relevant floofs.

“The pandemic made the bar useless as a bar,” Bill told me when we caught up this month. He and wife, Cathy Huben, own cats Sam and Patty, as well as The Public Option, which has been a Langdon Park fixture for six years. “You were a trusted friend. Someone I knew we could trust. And we were hoping to keep the business alive by doing research and development.” By this, he means drinking beer at breweries. “We just needed someone we could trust to take care of the place and the cats.”

This is how I, a 36-year-old man, ended up living in a bar for six months.

“That was exactly it,” Bill says, laughing. “You asked me what I was going to charge for rent, and I said, ‘Nothing.’ And you asked me how much the utilities were. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ve got that covered.’”

Preferring a bar to my parents’ house and waiting on unemployment, I moved in before Halloween. With my friend Dean’s magnanimous assistance, I schlepped my things to The Public Option from the one-bedroom basement apartment where I had lived since moving to the District in 2015 to become a magazine editor at a local university.

A week after I moved into the bar, Bill and Cathy started their R&D trips. Camping in state parks along the way, the couple visited breweries in North Carolina, Florida, and Alabama. They studied citrus beers and session IPAs, a lower-alcohol iteration of the typically more potent style. The now-reopened Public Option recently debuted a session-inspired IPA of its own.

“I did go into the brewpub business because I like brewing beer and I like drinking beer,” says Bill, a D.C. native who started homebrewing in 1992 and retired in 2015 after 31 years as a photo archivist at National Geographic. He’s also a former advisory neighborhood commissioner and descended from a South Carolina senator. 

“But it’s a serious business and you’ve got to keep up with what’s going on. … We definitely would not have been able to do any of that if you had not made yourself so kindly available.” What considerate phrasing. “You were the birth of our research and development program. We never had time to get out of town before that.”

I got to know Bill and Cathy by making myself a regular at their bar, where the couple treats even the most inveterate barfly like a visiting diplomat. They do plenty to make an outpost neighborhood a destination—The Public Option hosts concert series, movie screenings, comedy shows, open-mic nights, and holiday fêtes.

When COVID-19 forced bars and restaurants into abeyance, or worse, Bill and Cathy gave away their surplus beer instead of selling it, leaving ice-packed growlers to be retrieved from their front porch. They also lent The Public Option’s upstairs to a local alt-country band, Run Come See, on Tuesdays so the guys could practice and record during the pandemic.

It’s so easy to be a regular that a lot of us eventually started working there. I pitched in on New Year’s Eve preparations a few years ago and, before the pandemic, had agreed to help with tickets and crowds during shows. Other notable customers who got promoted to employees are wife and husband Molly and Nick Hoeg. They’re now the head brewer and cellar master, respectively.

Bill says I’m the first longterm bar-lodger, not counting the four years he, Cathy, and their then-teenage son Clayton lived there. They bought the building constructed in the 1920s, as well as the house behind it, in 2010. 

Before moving into the house in 2014, after years of renovation, the family lived in what is now the main bar. In the ’70s and ’80s, it used to be Mr. Y’s Golden Room, one of the jazz clubs that once thrived along that stretch of Rhode Island Avenue NE. “Your bedroom was my son’s room,” Bill says. “We slept upstairs and the bar was our kitchen and living room.”

The taproom served as my living room, too, and it’s retained a homey allure. Decorated by Cathy, The Public Option has the feel of drinking in your most irresponsible uncle’s garage and it must be just about the finest place to first read Trout Fishing in America, as I did.

A wooden sign featuring Satan selling six packs of Natural Light dominates the wall behind the bar, accentuated by red light and heretical feng shui. Hanging between a makeshift chifferobe of board games and the place I set my bookcase is a headless portrait of the martyred St. Expeditus. Aptly, he’s the patron saint of urgency and thwarted procrastination.

There are also calavera pillows in yellow rolly chairs, a drab oil painting of a mid-century banker, and a high, plank ceiling ideal for listening to Sam Cooke at every volume. Bill left the beer taps inert so I could use the keg fridge as my fridge, though some beer was still stored there.

My bedroom was the large, orange room off the main bar, a space that also houses the chapel of the “Matron Saint of Taxidermy.” It’s a lady jackalope staged with Christmas lights in a diorama reliquary, mounted high on the right-hand wall behind an auxiliary bar. She watched over Patty, Sam, and I while we slept on my queen-size bed, and the Virgin Mary helped from above a futon piled high with clothes because I’d repurposed it as my closet.

I cooked on a skinny gas stove in an industrial kitchen, which came with a restaurant-grade ice machine that talked in the night. I showered in the low-slung basement, where a handyman immured, just for me, a shower that looks like four-sixths of a vinyl phone booth. It’s stuffed in a corner under floorboards still charred from a long-ago fire, the exact date and provenance of which remain mysterious.

My pandemic bubble adored my novel living arrangements. We had a proper place to stir Manhattans after midnight and feel almost normal when no one else did.

“Although the bar was set up like your living room,” Dean recalls, “I chose to sit on a barstool, at the bar, because it was the only place I knew I could still do that.”  

A Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington representative says I’m unique, but not in the way my mom does. I asked the trade organization if it’s heard of bars or restaurants using their shuttered storefronts for anything as weird as letting me live there. They hadn’t. 

The closest thing I found to a fellow bar-lodger was at the Neptune Room in Brightwood. Owner Paul Vivari says he let a friend use it as an ersatz motel for three nights around December. The friend slept in a sleeping bag on the floor. 

“Because he had traveled, I was like, ‘I don’t want you to stay with me,’” Vivari explains. “This was before the vaccines and all that stuff, so I was like, ‘You need to get a place of your own,’ and I said, ‘’I have such a place.’”

In the pre-vaccine era, bars and restaurants overwhelmingly tried to keep being bars and restaurants. They moved service outdoors, committed to takeout, and sold adult beverages to-go. A few opened record shops or thrift stores, such as Maketto on H Street NE and Showtime Lounge in Bloomingdale. Others became makeshift markets selling household essentials made scarce by lapses in civic decency.

Like RAMW, Tony Tomelden, a 30-year fixture in the D.C. food and bar scene, says he also hasn’t heard of a place letting a random guy live there. “Some people were trying to set up a remote daycare center [in The Pug] for all the folks who were working from home,” says the owner of the dive, which hosted a Peregrine Espresso pop-up earlier in the pandemic. He’s also a partner at Brookland’s Finest and became a managing partner at The Public Option in this spring. 

“They couldn’t get it going because, even though we both, the school systems and the bars and restaurants, do the deep cleaning and all that, they’re just two different systems and we never could really marry it. You and Bill clearly win the off-duty usage.”

Over the months I lived in The Public Option, most of them cold, inconvenience sometimes smothered the novelty. It is, after all, a bar and not a condo. Elderly wiring, seemingly exacerbated by a city project to refurbish a sidewalk, sent the lights in the restrooms on the fritz. To see at our more important moments, guests and I made use of our smartphones or my LED camping lanterns.

Showering demanded occasional hunching in a stagnant darkness particular to ancient basements. One late night, I convinced my lower brain that the bar’s infrastructure had grown sentient because it seemed to creak only when I felt vulnerable.

A hundred years of weather has beat the old building into being drafty, and the minimal insulation conspires with Rhode Island Avenue NE’s countless divots to make every car, truck and siren feel like diesel-thunder in your cochleas.

And one night, I got up to assure a drunk guy knocking on the front door that despite the lights in the window, the bar was not open. I just lived there. With some cats. 

I left in early May, days after Mayor Muriel Bowser announced the end of COVID-19-related restrictions on bar capacities. The Public Option reopened June 25. You can drink where I slept, Thursdays through Saturdays from 6 p.m. to midnight.

The Public Option, 1601 Rhode Island Ave. NE; (202) 636-3795; thepublicoptiondc.com