The Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York had a bar that was one of the most influential in America and the world from the early 1890s until it closed for Prohibition in 1919, and again from Repeal in 1933 until well into the postwar years.
When the large, modern Waldorf hotel opened at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street in 1893, it had no traditional, stand-up American-style bar: drinks were served only at tables, in the then-fashionable cafe format. In 1897, however, the Astoria hotel opened next door, occupying the rest of the block up to Thirty-Fourth Street. The hotels were soon joined, forming the Waldorf-Astoria, known by regulars as the “Hyphen.” It was the largest hotel in the world, and New York’s most advanced. The Astoria part had a real barroom: an extravaganza in brass and mahogany, as was typical of the time, with a rectangular bar occupying the middle and heavy wooden cafe tables on one side. Dominating the central back bar were twin bronze statues of a bull and a bear.
The bar was an instant success. Where Jim Grey’s bar at the Fifth-Avenue Hotel drew politicians and the bar at the Hoffman House gamblers and the sporting set, the Waldorf-Astoria bar catered more to industrialists and financiers such as J. P. Morgan, a daily visitor. See Hoffman House. It got its share of celebrities as well, including the Wild West showman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a regular, and William Butler Yeats.
Where the Hoffman House’s bar showed a strong German influence, the Hyphen’s was an Irish bar. Its head bartenders until Prohibition were mostly Irish-born or at least of Irish extraction, among them John E. “Curly” O’Connor, Johnny Solan, Phil Kennedy, Michael Killackey, and Edward Murnane. The bar’s mixology may have reflected that distinction; in its bar book (kept by Solan and preserved by the hotel’s press agent, Albert Stevens Crockett, who used it as the basis for two books and the unpublished manuscript for a third), there were even a few Irish whisky–based cocktails, a rarity at the time.
The Waldorf-Astoria’s bar was cradle to several popular cocktails, including the Bronx, the most popular newcomer of its day, and the Clover Club, invented in Philadelphia but made at the hotel’s bar since at least 1901. See Bronx Cocktail and Clover Club. In general, the bar specialized in strong, simple drinks, and indeed was a pioneer in the streamlining of American mixology that occurred in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
During Prohibition, the Waldorf-Astoria moved to Park Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street, leaving the old edifice to be replaced by the Empire State Building. With Repeal, in 1933, the new hotel added a large barroom on the Park Avenue side, presided over by the bull and bear from the old one. O’Connor and a few of the old bartenders were even behind the bar (now an oval), to preserve continuity. To further preserve that continuity, the new bar was for men only. For the next twenty-odd years, it maintained its prestige and influence, but by the mid-1950s it started stumbling. Men were less interested in cocktails and more in women. In 1959, as if admitting defeat, the hotel moved the bar to the less prestigious Lexington Avenue side and began admitting women soon after. The bar persisted, although it was no longer a temple of mixology. At the time of this writing, the Waldorf Astoria, which dropped its hyphen in 2009, is closed for extensive renovation. It is not known what will become of the bar, some of whose fixtures date back to the Waldorf days.
Crockett, Albert Stevens. Old Waldorf Bar Days. New York: Aventine, 1931.“Waldorf’s Bar Courting Fame.” New York Sun, December 11, 1934, 48.
By: David Wondrich