“A window to the world shuttering here.”

1803 Connecticut Ave, NW

“Dear PoPville,

Popped into The News Room (or is “The Newsroom”) at Fla. & Conn. Aves. NW this Sat. for for usual copy of the FT Weekend edition (fantab Arts section) and Mexican Coca-Cola in a bottle,
then before I could look for a copy Mad magazine (which I hear is as great as ever w/ all the fodder given them by the Age of Trump; Matt Groenig now advising writers I think) for the 11 yr old away-at-camper in my life, my heart sunk at the sight of this horror! (See pics in next email – sent from my phone.)

Nope, it was’t flooding or a fire. Those shelves were bare b/c the Newsroom will be closing July 24, forever it seems.

There was a scare around 2009, I think, where the store closed briefly before, but eventually reopened under new management.

I first ventured there when it took up the huge space a block down at Conn. Ave. & S St. NW (now TD bank) as an teenage political junkie AU freshman in Fall 1992 to find a copy of this mythical “Roll Call: The Newspaper of Capitol Hill” whose reporting took down Old Bull Members of Congress in the now-mostly forgotten House Check Bouncing Scandal.

I’d heard about “Roll Call” on CNN and “The McLaughlin Group” back in St. Louis before I came to DC/AU, but you couldn’t find a copy out there. (Curiously, not in the AU Library periodicals either.)

The Newsroom’s stuffed shelves carried everything from LeMonde to LA hipster ‘zines, and countless trade mag titles. Almost any newspaper or magazine you could think of.
And they had a big stack of Roll Calls right there below the register with the gum and candy.

A window to the world shuttering here. At least we have the interwebs.”