Saying Goodbye to The Wellington (from afar)
It bothers me that I'll never know exactly when I had my last drink at The Wellington, but it was probably during the summer of 2016, my last summer in Indy. By then The Welly had become like an old reliable friend that you've stopped hanging out with regularly but whom you still go out of your way to visit. The days when I could show up at the bar and reliably find one or two of my friends there, or a familiar regular, or someone I knew behind the bar, were long gone.
The first time I heard about The Wellington was on my very first night in the city, a rainy July evening in 2009. My new housemates had very graciously offered to take me out to Average Joe's for wing night (Wednesday), and later that night they suggested we go over to The Wellington. "It's a little hole-in-the wall type place with no sign outside. You'll love it," they said. I never found out on that particular night because The Wellington was closed, naturally...
The Wellington, God love it, was often closed at inopportune times, such as when you had a friend visiting from out of town and wanted to show them your favorite bar, or late on a weeknight when you just wanted to have "one more" before you went home and went to bed. The feeling of standing, forlorn, outside the locked Wellington saying, "But it's only [blank] o'clock!" is so familiar in my memory, I can't even single out one particular time that it happened.
As with a lot of things in life, the best years are the earliest years. My prime Wellington days were 2009 through 2012, basically the years that I and my friends were in graduate school, getting our MFAs at Butler University.
How do you sum-up what was probably the best era of your life in just a few sentences? We were all broke graduate students, we all lived within walking distance of one another and within walking distance of Butler. We were all writing a lot and hanging out a lot, and the Wellington was our hang-out.
I remember specifically one Friday afternoon, in the Spring semester, when we all bumped into each other as we were heading to the financial aid counter to get our student loan disbursements. As a student, this is the day that the University gets your tuition money and you get the leftover money to use for your "living expenses," all in one lump for the semester. In other words, even though you know that the few thousand dollar check you're holding in your hand must pay for your next four months' rent, food, cell phone bills, and whatever else, you still, for a long beautiful moment, feel like you've suddenly become rich.
We were all standing there with our checks in our hands and smiles on our faces and, without anyone actually saying it, because it did not need to be said, we knew that within approximately 10 minutes we were all going to be sitting around a table at the Wellington with beers in our hands.
The Wellington was as close an approximation of an English or Irish style pub as I've ever seen in this country. Come to think of it, I've never actually seen one in England or Ireland; however, such was The Wellington's snug, old-timey charm that it actually reminded you of a place you'd never been before. It was a narrow bar with a small seating area in the back, where the actual bar was situated, parallel to the right side wall. In the front was a bigger but still somewhat cramped seating area with a dart playing area (very English), a no-longer-working fireplace, and room for about fifteen people to squeeze in (maybe more if they were good friends or trying to become good friends) along the padded bench seats or small round tables.
The interior of the bar was all done in dark wood and stained glass, with cream-colored walls and artwork that you somehow never took much notice of but which looked antique enough that it accomplished what it was supposed to do, create the appropriate atmosphere.
Along the walls in the seating area were bench seats, padded in lovely cracked and peeling vinyl upholstery, which I may have hastened the decay of through my nervous tick of picking at things (sorry). The tables were iron-legged and wood topped, and probably the smallest size of bar table that is currently in production, barely room enough for four pint glasses and an ashtray. The Wellington, it should be noted, was a "smoking" establishment, like many of Indy's great bars, until the Spring of 2012. And thank god that era ended, because although I have nothing against smoking and even indulge in it occasionally, The Wellington was so small that when enough people started smoking in there you were liable to have difficulty seeing your friend's faces three feet away from you, let alone breathing. I swear one time they had to open the front doors to let fresh air in.
I have to admit that the smoking, however unwelcome at times, added something to the charm of the place. And when in 2012 the smoking ban kicked-in, the then-owners peeled up the soot, tar, and dirt-blackened carpet, leaving exposed a strange combination of bare hardwood floors and carpet glue (which they curiously never attempted to scrape up). Although this is seemingly a trivial thing, the removal of the carpet severely altered the character of the place in some deep, not-properly-explainable way that hurt us all. Though there were still many good Wellington years left, the bar never quite felt the same way after that.
The Wellington was a great place to bring a date. The small, limited space inside the bar assured that you would have to end up sitting close to the person, and something about the bar's atmosphere was -- how should we say -- conducive to intimate conversations. Probably why it became the home-base for our close group of friends and dozens, maybe hundreds of others through the years. It was dimly lit, you couldn't really see outside and no one could see in, and there was only one TV, way up in the corner of the bar serving area, so unless you were actually sitting at the bar you could not see it. There was even a sort of "love-seat" area, a little nook only big enough for two people, tucked into the wall by the short end of the bar, but it was so difficult to actually sit in that it was more of a novelty than anything. It was better suited as a place to squeeze into on very crowded nights when there were too many people at that corner of the bar and someone had to get by, or maybe so an extra party of four could have a place to chat.
Furthermore, The Wellington was nice because you only had a limited chance of having to deal with "strangers" or people not in tune with the bar's vibe. Sure, occasionally a group of loud, drunken bros would stumble in and, more often than not, turn right back around and leave when they saw the lo-fi, indeed often almost sullen, vibe inside The Wellington on whatever random Tuesday night it happened to be. Sometimes they would stay, hopelessly altering the delicate, "artistic" atmosphere inside the bar and many times causing regulars, like me, who had come inside for a quiet, contemplative pint, to flee and lick our wounds elsewhere.
But in general, and probably because the place was so difficult to find, people rarely went to The Wellington unless they already knew about it, which means they had probably been introduced to it by a friend or someone who liked it. Personally, I'm proud to say I was the curator of a few people's "first ever" Wellington visit, what would, in some cases, become the first of many, many visits. Almost everyone I ever took there or met there fell immediately in love with the Wellington.
Occasionally you'd meet someone at the bar who did not fancy the civilized, European atmosphere, and seemed like they were counting the minutes until they could leave. This would seem almost as incomprehensible to me as if they'd said they did not like water or sitting in chairs, and this simple difference of opinion would make any further conversation impossible, as though we spoke different languages.
Wellington-hating randos aside, I did meet some really interesting characters at The Wellington. In a day-and-age in which the idea of going to a bar to just "chat with random people" is starting to seem ever more foreign, the Welly was a great place to go by yourself and strike up random conversations. If there were a list of the most interesting people I've ever met in bars, the locations of the Top 10 meetings would all be The Wellington. It seemed almost as though it was a place where other people went looking for conversation as well, and you rarely had someone "snub" you or refuse to talk, sticking their head back down to their phone. There seemed to be almost an unspoken agreement that if you came to The Wellington, you were at least willing (if not always eager) to be sociable.
It would take me 100 more paragraphs to tell you every story or incident I remember about The Wellington, about everything that happened in the dart-playing area, about the chalk board on which they wrote the beers of the day, about my favorite corner in which to sit (up in the front seating area, wedged in the corner by the entrance to the stairs, and facing the bar), about our favorite bartender Michele (Sheli) whom we knew for so long it seemed as though she'd gone to grad school with us, about the years when my buddy Sam worked there, about all the birthdays and congratulations parties we had there, about all the times we had to leave because it closed and go to the Alley Cat or to Connors (which we almost always had difficulty finding), about the occasional Sunday afternoon spent in the basement at "open mic," and about Friday night Bluegrass night which, amazingly I only went to twice in seven years.
I took my parents there many times, I took friends there, I took dates there, I took strangers there, I went by myself in times of despair, or in times of plenty, or in times of just not wanting to go home and finding that my car had automatically pointed itself toward the corner of Guilford and Westfield or because I was bored and it was pint night (the price of crept up from $2 to $3 in 25 cent increments by the time I left Indy) and I knew some of my friends or at least some people I knew would be there. I went there to start out many a great night and I ended many a great night there.
When my buddy texted me that The Wellington was closing, it was almost the equivalent of hearing that a friend from that period in our lives had died. I did not hang my head and cry, but I did feel a sense of loss inside me, as I know others did. At least four old friends texted me with the news. Maybe if there had been more notice, a few months or even weeks to get used to the idea, it would not have seemed as tragic. But there would be no "one last drink" at The Wellington for me, and I will have to rack my brain to think of the last time our group of friends got together there, each of the "Four Horsemen" as we called ourselves Chris, Andrew, Doug and me (five, counting Luke, who came along a little later), but I think it was for Chris's 30th birthday. Who knows.
It's weird because The Wellington will still be there, as long as they don't tear down the building, it just won't be The Wellington any more. Part of the human condition -- perhaps the biggest and most difficult part -- is having to accept that nothing lasts forever, and therefore learning how to let go. Will I ever go back and stand wistfully in front of the location of the old Wellington in an attempt to commune with the past? No. But I may find myself stumbling down Broad Ripple Ave. some day on Indy 500 weekend with some friends, half-drunk (or fully drunk), and say, "Hey let's go see what the Wellington looks like now!" And we will. And it will suck. And we might stay and have a drink there and share a few memories while we unfairly criticize the current establishment to death. Or we will, like the frat boys who used to stumble into The Wellington, step inside and take one look at the place, sense by the looks of the faces on its regulars that we do not belong there, and turn on our heels and flee, as quickly as we came.
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