Hidden doors. Extraordinary nights.
About
SpeakEasyGuides is a national directory of American speakeasies and hidden bars, built from public records and each venue’s own words, then checked by hand. We publish where a bar is, what kind of door it has, and the date we last confirmed it — and we never publish a bar’s password.
There are a great many articles about hidden bars in America. Most of them are three years old, most of them repeat each other, and a fair number send you to a door that closed before the piece was written. That was the gap worth filling.
This is a directory rather than a listicle. Every venue has its own page, its own address, its own record of what we have confirmed, and its own date. The point is not to be clever about it. The point is that when you stand in front of the door, it is open.
We start from open data. Venue locations come from the Overture Maps Foundation and OpenStreetMap, both open-licensed and freely redistributable. Geography — state, county, city — is resolved against US Census boundary files rather than taken from a text field, because text fields are wrong about a third of the time.
Historic buildings are matched against the National Register of Historic Places, maintained by the National Park Service. Where a bar sits on a listed property, its page carries the federal reference number so you can read the nomination yourself.
Then a person reads it. Every listing that reaches publication has been looked at by a human, and the ones that have not stay as drafts rather than being quietly published to pad a number.
We do not publish passwords. We do not invent opening hours, entrance instructions, or history. We do not fabricate reviews or ratings, because we do not collect them. We do not repeat a venue’s marketing as though it were documented history — most “Al Capone drank here” claims are marketing, and we label them as such.
And we do not sell a verification badge. Paid placement is always labelled, editorial selections are never for sale, and no amount of money removes a factual correction or a closure report.
Anyone over 21 who would rather have a good night than a loud one. Locals who want to know what opened six streets away, travellers who want to feel like locals, and people who simply enjoy the small pleasure of knowing where a door is.
It is also for the bars. Claiming a listing is free and always will be, and a venue that would rather we said less about its entrance only has to tell us.