On the night of December 4, 1783, nine days after the British had finally left New York, George Washington ascended a flight of stairs on Pearl Street to a low-ceilinged room above a tavern, and told the men who had given him a country farewell. Embracing each officer, he went out to the battery and boarded a barge bound for Annapolis to resign his commission. The room upstairs is still there. The bar downstairs is still flowing.
This is the part of America’s 250th birthday that brochures tend to skip. The Founding Fathers were not, by and large, museum people. They were bar people — lawmakers who drafted resolutions on the Hot Ale Flip (a Colonial-era cocktail of beer and rum), generals who stationed their officers inside motel rooms, and presidents who walked the block from the White House to get oysters. The country was grouped into rooms equipped with bars, and a surprising number of these are still in operation. They have survived British torches, Confederate cannons, Prohibition raids, urban renewal, and Grubhub. Unfortunately, not all legacies are meant to last forever. City Tavern in Philadelphia, the founding father’s great canteen, has been closed since 2020. McCrady’s in Charleston, where Washington was commemorated in 1791, has not escaped the coronavirus pandemic. But with these 19 bars, there’s a lot to celebrate before the 4th.