On the night of December 4, 1783, nine days after the British finally cleared New York, George Washington climbed a staircase on Pearl Street into a low-ceilinged room above a tavern and said goodbye to the people who had won him a homeland. He embraced each officer, went out to the Battery, and boarded a barge bound for Annapolis to resign his commission. The upper room is still there. The tavern downstairs is still poured.
This is the part 250th anniversary of the birth of America which brochures tend to overlook. 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 housed their officers in inn rooms, presidents who walked a block from the White House for oysters. The country was packed into rooms equipped with bars, and a surprising number of those rooms are still in business. They survived British torches, Confederate cannons, Prohibition raids, urban renewal and Grubhub. Alas, not all legacies are meant to last forever. Philadelphia’s City Tavern, the Founding Father’s great canteen, has been closed since 2020. McCrady’s in Charleston, where Washington was celebrated in 1791, did not survive the coronavirus pandemic. But with these 19 bars, there’s plenty to celebrate until the Fourth.
