Chumley's

Legend has it that the term "86" began at Chumley's, when an unruly guest was escorted out of the Bedford Street door¹, which opened onto the sidewalk and was unmarked¹. It's a rumor, but it's the kind a speakeasy earns. The building dates to the 1830s and was first a blacksmith's shop². Leland Stanford Chumley, a socialist activist, established the bar in 1922¹, as a speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street¹.

Writers tied to it include Willa Cather, E.E. Cummings, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ring Lardner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck¹. The walls held the covers of books supposedly worked on there¹, and it was placed on a Literary Landmarks Register¹.

Then, on April 5, 2007, the chimney in the dining room collapsed, and Chumley's closed¹; when we listed it, two walls were standing, with no ceiling, no floors and plans to rebuild by fall 2008. In 2011 the bar said it was restoring one of the city's oldest and most beloved speakeasies³, and that it had absolutely no intention of becoming a sports bar³. It reopened on October 18, 2016, under a new owner, Alessandro Borgognone, as a reservations-only dinner restaurant¹. So: not a sports bar.

It closed on March 22, 2020, for the pandemic¹, and in July 2020 announced it would close permanently, unable to recover^{1, 2}. Frog Club opened in the building in February 2024¹ and closed that December⁴. Catch Hospitality Group took over the space in 2025⁵. In September 2025 The Eighty Six, a steakhouse named for the address, opened there^{1, 6}, and it was still there in January 2026⁶. At that door, the name was always going to double as a pun.