The Most Famous Bars In The US

American history did not happen only in marble halls. A fair amount of it happened on a bar stool, somewhere between the first round and the one that seemed like a great idea at the time. The bars below have been pouring long enough to have served gangsters, presidents, poets, and at least one cowboy who exited through a plate-glass window. Every one is still open, still has a house drink worth ordering, and still flatly refuses to act its age. Pull up a stool.

Green Mill Cocktail Lounge - Chicago

The Green Mill got its start in 1907 as Pop Morse's Roadhouse, a watering hole conveniently placed to catch mourners drifting out of two nearby cemeteries, which is either grim or excellent marketing depending on your mood. By 1910 it had a green windmill on the roof and a new name meant to evoke Paris's Moulin Rouge while quietly sidestepping any "red light" implications. Then came Prohibition, jazz, and Al Capone, who favored a booth angled so he could watch both doors at once. You can still sit in it and practice your own trust issues. The bootlegging tunnels beneath the floor are real, though the part where mobsters used them for dramatic getaways is mostly legend. Today the Chicago institution runs on live jazz, a strict cash-only policy that has stranded many a confident visitor, and a Sunday poetry slam that happens to be the original one. There is no cocktail menu. You just ask for what you want, like an adult.

Tonga Room - San Francisco

In 1945, an MGM set director was handed the indoor swimming pool in the basement of the Fairmont Hotel and told to make it tropical. He turned the water into a lagoon, floated a band on a thatched barge in the middle of it, and built a tiki paradise around the edges, and somehow it has survived every decade since. The headline feature is the weather: roughly every half hour an indoor thunderstorm rolls through, complete with rain falling into the lagoon and a band that gamely keeps playing. Order a Mai Tai in a faux coconut, settle in, and understand that a 1946 newspaper columnist already documented patrons stripping down and cannonballing into that lagoon after a few too many. Anthony Bourdain once called the Tonga Room "the greatest place in the history of the world," and he was not entirely joking.

Vesuvio - San Francisco

Opened in 1948 by a bohemian art lover named Henri Lenoir, Vesuvio sits in North Beach directly across an alley from the City Lights bookstore, which made it the unofficial clubhouse of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac loved it so much that in 1960, on his way to finally meet the writer Henry Miller for dinner in Big Sur, he stopped in for a drink, then several, and simply never left San Francisco. Miller waited. Kerouac drank. The alley outside is now officially named Jack Kerouac Alley, which is a generous tribute to a man who once stood up a literary legend to stay on this exact stool. Bartenders here still field the daily question of which seat was his, somewhere between pouring drinks named things like the Loop Hole, invented specifically to keep you from getting flattened by martinis.

King Cole Bar - New York City

The King Cole Bar, set just off the lobby of the St. Regis in Manhattan, is presided over by a giant Maxfield Parrish mural of Old King Cole painted in 1906, with the merry old monarch modeled on hotel builder John Jacob Astor IV. Look closely at the jesters' expressions and you will meet the bar's favorite legend, which holds that the king has just, regally, passed gas, and his court is too polite to react. It is the most dignified fart joke in American art. The bar is also where bartender Fernand Petiot popularized the spicy vodka-and-tomato drink we call the Bloody Mary, rechristened the "Red Snapper" so it would suit the well-heeled clientele. Whether Petiot truly invented it here in the 1930s or merely perfected a recipe he had picked up at Harry's Bar in Paris is a debate that cocktail historians will happily have with you until last call.

Green Dragon Tavern - Boston

Here is the honest version, because the history is too good to fudge. The original Green Dragon, on a nearby lane in Boston, was the basement room where the Sons of Liberty plotted, the Boston Tea Party was hatched, and Paul Revere was dispatched toward Lexington. Daniel Webster later dubbed it the "Headquarters of the Revolution." Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren all bent an elbow there. That building, sadly, was torn down in the 1800s. The Green Dragon you can drink in today opened in 1993 on Marshall Street, a short walk from the original site, and it cheerfully trades on that pedigree while offering plumbing the actual revolutionaries could only have dreamed about. Think of it as a tribute act with very good source material, where the eavesdropping has, management assures everyone, officially stopped.

McSorley's Old Ale House - New York City

By its own proud count, McSorley's has been pouring on East 7th Street since 1854, which makes it the oldest continuously operating saloon in New York City. The menu has exactly one decision in it: light or dark. Either way you get two small mugs, because that is simply how it is done, and has been since before your great-grandparents were born. The floor is covered in sawdust, the walls are buried under more than a century of newspaper clippings and dusty wishbones left by soldiers shipping out for World War I, and a pair of handcuffs said to be Houdini's hangs near the bar. Abraham Lincoln stopped in after his 1860 Cooper Union speech. The house motto is "Be Good or Be Gone," an upgrade from the old one, "Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies," which the bar clung to until a 1970 court ruling finally pried the doors open for women. Progress, eventually, over two mugs at a time.

Round Robin and Scotch Bar - Washington, DC

Two blocks from the White House, inside the Willard hotel that has hosted so many presidents it is nicknamed the Residence of Presidents, the Round Robin has been serving the powerful and the merely thirsty since 1847. Its namesake is a literal round bar, which is the ideal shape for the local sport of watching who is whispering to whom. The house drink is the mint julep, which by Willard legend was introduced to Washington right here by Kentucky senator Henry Clay, a man so devoted to his home-state bourbon that he reportedly shipped in a barrel of it. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and a long parade of presidents have leaned on this bar. It has been called the Oval Office of cocktails, and given how much dealmaking has happened over its juleps, your life may have been quietly altered by something decided here.

Carousel Piano Bar and Lounge - New Orleans

Yes, it really spins. The Carousel Bar opened inside the Hotel Monteleone in 1949 as the only rotating bar in New Orleans, and it still turns today: 25 hand-painted seats riding 2,000 steel rollers, nudged along by a quarter-horsepower motor through one full, dignified revolution every 15 minutes. The bartender, mercifully, stays put in the center. The signature pour is the Vieux Carré, created by the hotel's head bartender Walter Bergeron in the late 1930s as a liquid map of the French Quarter, blending rye whiskey, cognac, sweet vermouth, Benedictine, and two kinds of bitters. Hemingway, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote all took a spin here. A word of advice: pace yourself, because the bar moves whether or not you are ready, and the room will lap you before you notice.

Tootsie's Orchid Lounge - Nashville

Tootsie's owes both its name and its unmistakable purple paint job to an accident. When Hattie Louise "Tootsie" Bess bought the place in 1960, it was called Mom's. She hired a painter, gave him vague instructions, and came back to find the whole building slathered in orchid. The name wrote itself. What made it legendary was the back door, which sits across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium, then home of the Grand Ole Opry. Country stars would slip out mid-show for a quick one, and a teenage hopeful named Willie Nelson got one of his first songwriting breaks after singing here, thrilled simply to hear his tune on Tootsie's jukebox. Patsy Cline, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson all passed through. Three floors of live music still run nightly, the walls are papered with the famous Wall of Fame, and the house drink, an Apple Pie Shine, is exactly as advisable as it sounds.

The Mint Bar - Sheridan, Wyoming

If one bar could be bottled and sold as "Wyoming," it would be the Mint, which has anchored Sheridan's Main Street since 1907 and has never housed any other business. The bar itself is built from gnarled pine burls, the walls carry more than 9,000 cattle brands burned into the wood, and out front a neon cowboy rides a bucking bronco that locals will tell you is one of the finest cowboy neons in the country. During Prohibition the Mint kept up appearances as a cigar and soda shop while the real business carried on in a back room. Ernest Hemingway drank here, and Kenny Rogers was famously hurled through the front window during the filming of a Western, which is a sentence that could only be true in Sheridan. "Meet you at the Mint" has been local shorthand for generations, and it still works.

What Keeps These Old Rooms Standing

The thread running through all of them is a stubborn refusal to update. While the rest of the country chased 50-page beer lists and bars that get gutted and rebranded every two years, these places leaned the other way. McSorley's still offers two choices. The Carousel still spins at the same lazy speed it did in 1949. The Mint still glows in neon, and the Tonga Room still rains indoors on a schedule. Each one earned its fame with a single signature, whether a drink, a ritual, a mural, or a very famous regular, and then simply declined to mess with it. They have outlasted Prohibition, pandemics, urban decay, and the craft-cocktail arms race by doing the one thing most businesses cannot manage, which is to stay exactly, gloriously, the same. Order the house drink. That is the whole point.