Hidden doors. Extraordinary nights.
Prohibition history
135 of the bars in this directory occupy a property on the National Register of Historic Places, across 39 states. The Register documents the building, not the bar: a listing is federal proof the structure matters, not proof that anyone was pouring in it in 1925. Every entry below carries its reference number.
The National Register of Historic Places is a federal inventory of 74,636 properties kept by the National Park Service. A listing means a nomination was researched, reviewed by a state historic preservation office and accepted in Washington. It is about as solid as provenance gets in American building history, and it is a matter of public record you can read yourself.
It also proves exactly one thing: that the building was judged significant. It does not prove the bar inside it is old. It does not prove the building predates Prohibition — a property listed in 2024 need only be about fifty years old, which puts 1974 comfortably inside the Register and well outside the era. And it certainly does not prove the room was a speakeasy. Several of these bars opened in the last five years in a shell that happens to be listed.
So that is the claim on this page, and the whole of it: these 135 bars are in documented historic fabric. 124 sit in a named individual property; 11 sit inside a listed historic district, where the protection covers the streetscape rather than the single address. Where we can show a bar actually operated between 1920 and 1933, we say so on its own page and cite the newspaper.
The register name usually carries the original use, and the pattern in it is not subtle. A bank is the ideal speakeasy shell: a basement, a single controlled entrance and a vault door that already looks like a secret. Post offices and firehouses come second for the same reason — civic buildings were built with back stairs and no windows at street level.
Read the left column as the building’s first life, not the bar’s. The bar is usually the fourth or fifth tenant.
| Hotel | 18 bars · The Blind Tiger in the Hotel Russel Erskine, Speakeasy in the Weatherford Hotel, Golden Moon Speakeasy in the Astor House Hotel |
|---|---|
| Theatre | 10 bars · The Speakeasy in the Dickens Opera House, Backstage Speakeasy in the Nu Art Theatre, the Speakeasy in the Strand Theatre |
| Bank | 9 bars · Speakeasy in the Bank of Eureka Building, Blue Room in the Bank of Italy Building, Back Room Wines in the First National Bank |
| Railway | 5 bars · Phyre Steakhouse and Speakeasy in the St. Cloud Depot, 1347 Speakeasy in the Santa Fe Depot, Manhattan Cricket Club in the 79th Street Subway Station (IRT) |
| Post Office | 4 bars · Nucky's Speakeasy in the Anoka Post Office, The Underground Speakeasy and Distillery in the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, Seven Troughs Speakeasy in the US Post Office--Reno Main |
| Church | 3 bars · Speakeasy NYC in the German Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Mark, Sturges Speakeasy in the German Evangelical Zion Lutheran Church, Speakeasy Fifty50 in the First Congregational Church |
| School | 2 bars · Le safari disco club in the Public School No. 25, The Magic Garden in the Wayne, Anthony, School |
Because we cannot source one. We hold 1,424 venues, and our open-data sources — Overture Maps, OpenStreetMap, the National Register, the Library of Congress newspaper archive — carry addresses, coordinates and federal reference numbers. None of them carries a founding year for a bar.
We could scrape it off the venues’ own websites. We looked: of the 952 sites we fetched, exactly two make a pre-1934 claim in their metadata. Both are marketing copy. A bar calling itself a 1920s speakeasy is making an aesthetic statement, not a provenance one, and nearly all of them are doing it about a room that was fitted out after 2010. Printing those years as facts would make this directory worse, not fuller.
The honest route to a founding year runs through the newspapers, address by address, and that is slow work we do in public. Our state history pages link the scanned pages at the Library of Congress so you can read the raid notice yourself.
Every reference number below opens the nomination document at the National Park Service. It is the useful half of the Register and almost nobody reads it. Inside a typical nomination you get the construction date, the architect, the original use, a paragraph of building history and — frequently, for commercial blocks — an explicit note on what the ground floor sold and whether the basement was leased separately during Prohibition.
That document is where a defensible 1920s claim comes from. If you read one for a bar on this page and find the era in it, send it to us: a nomination is a citation, and we will put it on the venue’s page with your note.
111 of these publish a website. The state name links to every speakeasy we hold there, not only the listed ones.
Likely several. The cross-match is geometric — a bar qualifies here when its coordinates land within a few metres of a Register point — so a bar set back from the street, or one whose coordinates are off by a block, drops out. If you know the reference number, that is the whole of what we need.