Chumley's: The Speakeasy with No Sign

Why is it significant?

Stand right here in front of eighty-six Bedford Street, where an unmarked wooden door sits completely flush against the aged red brickwork. There is no brass plaque, no neon sign, and no awning.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand right here in front of eighty-six Bedford Street, where an unmarked wooden door sits completely flush against the aged red brickwork. There is no brass plaque, no neon sign, and no awning. You are standing before Chumley's, the most famous speakeasy of the Prohibition era and the birthplace of one of America's favorite phrases.

In nineteen twenty-two, when the Volstead Act made alcohol strictly illegal across America, a charismatic socialist activist named Leland Stanford Chumley bought this former blacksmith shop. He turned it into a clandestine watering hole for artists, writers, and labor organizers.

Chumley designed the tavern as a fortress of evasion. Patrons entered through an unmarked alleyway off Barrow Street known as Pamela Court, slipping through a hidden garden courtyard and down a discreet basement stairwell. If federal prohibition agents kicked down the front door, bartenders pulled a hidden brass lever that dumped illegal gin bottles down wooden chutes into hidden cellars connected to Minetta Brook's culverts.

Whenever friendly police tipped off the staff that a raid was underway, the head bartender would shout eighty-six it! That was the secret code telling customers to abandon their drinks and bolt out through the discreet residential exit here at eighty-six Bedford Street. That frantic scramble gave American English the iconic slang expression to eighty-six something, meaning to throw it out or get rid of it.

During the nineteen twenties and thirties, Chumley's evolved into the living room of the Lost Generation. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Eugene O'Neill sat at these smoky wooden booths, debating literature over bootleg whiskey. Whenever an author published a new book, Leland Chumley required them to donate a dust jacket to be framed and hung on the dining room walls, turning the speakeasy into a holy shrine of American literature.