The Kelly Bros Saloon, Harlem, 1915

The Kelly Bros Saloon was the old “corner bar” that sat on the northwest corner of 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue (aka 8th Avenue), 1915. 

Men stand in the shade, while young girls stand in the cobblestone streets near the curb in front of buildings that were designed and built-in 1891. Surrounding the bar were residential row houses built of brick and brownstone buildings by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White designed the homes. Among the styles reflected were Colonial Revival, Renaissance, and Georgian Revival styles.

EphemeralNewYork reports in the article A Prohibition-era ode to the lost corner bar what an old bar for neighborhoods like Harlem:

“The corner saloon was the eye, ear, mouth of the old man.

“It was here that he saw double, listened to wisdom, spoke with boasting and Rabelaisian tongue and tickled his olfactories with the perfumes of Milwaukee and Kentucky,” he wrote in a June 1921 New York Times piece.

De Casseres noted that a rite of spring was no longer: the day when a bar owner put up the swinging “summer doors” at corner saloons.

A familiar summer scene was also gone: no more dogs putting their heads under the doors, sniffing the ground and excitedly barking at customers.

The area is in the St. Nicholas Historic District is a national historic district in Harlem, New York, New York.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975