The Historic American Bars That Have Seen It All

On the night of December 4, 1783, nine days after the British finally cleared out of New York, George Washington walked up a staircase on Pearl Street into a low-ceilinged room above a tavern, and told the men who had won him a country goodbye. He embraced each officer, walked out to the Battery and boarded a barge bound for Annapolis to resign his commission. The upstairs room is still there. The tavern downstairs is still pouring.

This is the part of America’s 250th birthday that the brochures tend to skip. The Founding Fathers were not, by and large, museum people. They were tavern people—legislators who drafted resolutions over a Hot Ale Flip (a Colonial-era beer-and-rum cocktail), generals who quartered their officers inside inn rooms, presidents who walked a block from the White House for oysters. The country was assembled in rooms outfitted with bars, and a surprising number of those rooms are still in business. They survived British torches, Confederate cannon, Prohibition raids, urban renewal and Grubhub. Alas, not all legacies are meant to last forever. City Tavern in Philadelphia, the great Founding Father canteen, has been closed since 2020. McCrady’s in Charleston, where Washington was fêted in 1791, didn’t survive the coronavirus pandemic. But with these 19 bars, there’s plenty to celebrate leading up to the Fourth.