Prohibition history
Prohibition in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania had no statewide prohibition before 1920. The 18th Amendment, which the state ratified, closed its legal liquor trade on 17 January that year. Today we list 71 speakeasies and hidden bars in Pennsylvania.
Prohibition in Pennsylvania, in order
| 1917–19 | Congress passes the 18th Amendment and sends it to the states. |
|---|---|
| 16 January 1919 | The amendment is ratified nationally. Pennsylvania ratified it. |
| 17 January 1920 | National Prohibition begins. |
| 7 April 1933 | The Cullen–Harrison Act legalises 3.2% beer. |
| 5 December 1933 | The 21st Amendment repeals Prohibition. |
What Prohibition looked like here
Pennsylvania came to Prohibition late, with a legal liquor trade still running on the day the amendment took effect. States in that position lost a visible industry overnight — breweries, distilleries, saloons, the men who worked in them — and the resentment that followed shows up in how little local enforcement there was to speak of.
It also meant there was plant. Breweries that had made beer in 1919 could make it again in 1920 if anyone was willing to risk it, and a good deal of what the federal agents found in the first years was simply the old industry carrying on quietly.
Where the word comes from, and Smedley Butler’s year
The American use of “speakeasy” is usually traced to the Pennsylvania saloon trade of the 1880s, when the state licence became expensive enough that plenty of small operators stopped buying one. The story most often attributed is Kate Hester’s, in McKeesport, telling her customers to speak easy; treat it as reported rather than documented, and note that the phrase is certainly in print in roughly that sense by the 1880s.
Philadelphia in 1924 tried the most conspicuous enforcement experiment of the period. Smedley Butler, a serving Marine Corps general, was seconded to run the city’s Department of Public Safety and conducted raids with military planning and considerable publicity. Thousands of places were closed. He lasted two years, concluded the job was impossible given the politics, and went back to the Marines.
The state’s response to repeal was equally characteristic: Pennsylvania created a state liquor monopoly in 1933 that still exists, designed, in Governor Pinchot’s own words, to make buying liquor as inconvenient and expensive as possible.
What Pennsylvania’s own newspapers printed
Very little of Pennsylvania’s 1920s press has been digitised in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive, so we have no newspaper evidence to show you for this state yet. That is a gap in the archive, not a finding about Pennsylvania.
We re-run this search as the archive grows. If you know of a digitised Pennsylvania title from the period, we would like to hear about it.
Where to drink in Pennsylvania now
We currently list 71 speakeasies and hidden bars in Pennsylvania. The densest are Philadelphia (13), Pittsburgh (5), Bethlehem (2), State College (2), Harrisburg (2), Stroudsburg (2). Those are present-day licensed bars — nothing on this site is illegal, and a modern hidden bar is a design decision rather than a legal necessity.
A handful of rooms in most states genuinely date to the period and can show it. Far more claim to. Where a venue’s page makes a historical claim, we label it Documented, Reported, Legend or Venue marketing, and we do not promote marketing into history because it makes a better paragraph.
Where they are in Pennsylvania
Listings cluster where the building stock and the licensing both allow it. These are the Pennsylvania cities and towns with the most in the directory today.
| Philadelphia | 13 listed |
|---|---|
| Pittsburgh | 5 listed |
| Bethlehem | 2 listed |
| State College | 2 listed |
| Harrisburg | 2 listed |
| Stroudsburg | 2 listed |
The documented buildings in Pennsylvania
5 of our Pennsylvania listings sit on property recorded on the National Register of Historic Places. That is a federal nomination document with a reference number, written by somebody who had to show their working — a very different kind of evidence from a bar saying its building has a past.
It does not make the bar historic. It makes the building documented, which is the most we can honestly claim and more than most directories claim at all.
| Easton Speakeasy | State Theatre, Easton · NRHP ref. 82003804 |
|---|---|
| JL Sullivan's Speakeasy | Philadelphia Stock Exchange, Philadelphia · NRHP ref. 82003812 |
| Sturges Speakeasy | German Evangelical Zion Lutheran Church, Harrisburg · NRHP ref. 75001637 |
| The Magic Garden | Wayne, Anthony, School, Philadelphia · NRHP ref. 86003344 |
| The Varsity Room Speakeasy | Hotel Fauchere and Annex, Milford · NRHP ref. 80003626 |
Where this state fits
We group Pennsylvania with the Mid-Atlantic for editorial purposes — regions tuned to drinking culture and Prohibition history rather than to Census divisions, because those are the lines that actually explain what happened. Its neighbours here: New York · New Jersey · District of Columbia · Maryland · Delaware.
The parts of the national story that bear most directly on Pennsylvania: Moonshine and backwoods stills · Near beer and the breweries that survived.
How to read these pages
Each state chronology sets the local dates against the national ones, because Prohibition was never one story. Thirty-three states had already banned liquor before the federal government did; two refused to ratify the amendment at all; and repeal in 1933 handed the question straight back to the states, which is why American liquor law is still fifty systems rather than one.
The newspaper evidence is drawn from Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s archive of digitised American newspapers. It is public domain, it is free, and we link to the scanned page rather than quoting it, so you can check us.