Chumley's and the Door at 86 Bedford

The door at 86 Bedford Street carries no sign, and that was the point. In 1922 Leland Stanford Chumley, a socialist activist, turned a former blacksmith's shop here into a Prohibition speakeasy, with a second, hidden way in and out through a courtyard off Barrow Street known as Pamela Court. Writers came for decades. A literary landmark plaque placed in 2000 names Willa Cather, E. E. Cummings, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck among its regulars. Chumley's is also one of the places said to have given bartenders the word "86," meaning to throw someone out or strike something off the menu. The story goes that when police tipped off the staff about a raid, drinkers were told to leave by the 86 Bedford door while officers came in through Pamela Court. It is a good story, and there is no way to prove it. A chimney collapse closed the old bar in 2007; it returned as a restaurant in 2016 and closed again in 2020.