Farewell, 21 Club: One of New York's most famous Prohibition speakeasies has served its last cocktail

There’s a scene in Sofia Coppola’s recent film, On The Rocks, an unapologetic love letter to New York, that’s shot at 21 Club.

One of the city’s original speakeasys, the cosy, wood-panelled restaurant and bar opened in 1930 and, over its nine decade history, regulars have included John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, Mae West, Gene Kelly and Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

Every president bar George W Bush has eaten at 21 Club, and many have presented their debutante daughters and granddaughters to society there, at its pre-deb ball parties.

In the seminal scene, between Bill Murray and Rashida Jones, their characters discuss Table 30, or ‘Bogie’s Corner’ as it came to be known – Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s table, where the legendary actor proposed to the equally legendary actress.

"I’ve sat at that table myself," Coppola told me, when I interviewed her for the film’s release a few months ago. "And a waiter told me that he remembers seeing Lauren Bacall in more recent years, before she passed away, come to the bar and just stand and look at the table."

Now, sadly, Table 30 – along with the restaurant’s others, and its many colourful fables – are to be packed away and covered with a dustsheet. The pandemic that has already claimed hundreds of New York restaurants and bars, and looks set to claim horrifyingly hundreds more, has forced the 90-year-old classic to firmly shut its iconic iron gates.

The historic restaurant hasn’t served up one of its famous burgers or its potent Southside gin cocktails since the city first shut down on March 16. Now, with New York in the grip of a virulent second wave and restaurants that had reopened once again facing severe restrictions, 21 Club has called it a day, "indefinitely ceasing operations".

"In light of the ongoing global crisis and anticipated extended recovery period for the hospitality industry, it has become clear that it will not be feasible to reopen this business in its current form for the foreseeable future," its owners, Belmond, said in a statement.

"The company is committed to exploring potential alternative and transformative structural opportunities that will allow 21 Club to remain a viable operation in the long term, while retaining its distinctive character."

Ironically, 21 Club opened at the nadir of New York’s – and America’s – fortunes last century, as the country plunged into The Great Depression following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Its original owners, cousins Jack Kreindler and Charlie Berns, reportedly got round the small matter of Prohibition with a system of pulleys and levers which would sweep bottles from the bar shelves and propel the smashed remains down a chute into the New York sewer system.

While the premises were raided several times, federal agents were never able to pin anything on the owners, who had also built a secret wine cellar underneath the neighbouring property, No 19 52nd Street, accessible only via a two-ton brick door, activated by inserting a meat skewer into a tiny hole. The cellar later came to store the private wine collections of John F Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, among many others.

More recently, part of the vault was remodeled into a private dining room for 20.  On a stretch of midtown Manhattan once lined with lairy jazz clubs, the entrance is marked by the line of 21 jockeys on the balcony, the first of which was donated in 1942 by high-living racing enthusiast J Blan van Urk, as a symbol of his private horse farm.

The idea caught on among breeders and the great and good, and jockeys were donated by some of America’s wealthiest families, including Vanderbilts and Mellons. Beyond the iron gate, and past the old wooden coat check, the restaurant’s walls are covered in framed cartoons, while, above the leather banquettes and red-and-white chequed tablecloths, a cavalcade of memorabilia, or ‘tchotchkes’ hangs from the ceiling.

The first item to be suspended, in the early 1930s, was reportedly a model of the British Airways ‘Flying Boat’. Not wishing to be outdone, Howard Hughes arrived with a model of one of his own TWA planes, and the ceiling was fast festooned with trucks, telephones, tennis rackets and ballet slippers, all with a story about a celebrity, a world leader, or a captain of industry attached.

Has 21 Club been considered cool or trendy in recent times, in the merciless, ultra-competitive world of New York dining? Not at all; it still barred diners from wearing jeans and insisted on jackets (‘loaner’ jackets by Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren were available to borrow, should you have left home without one) – the place for edgy Brooklyn hipsters, it was not.

But the tales of raffish bad behaviour transcended fashion, and food – the time Hemingway had sex with a gangster’s moll in a stairwell; the time the noted agent Swifty Lazar smashed a glass on filmmaker Otto Preminger’s head, and the time the owners bought up 750,000 Cuban cigars for their patrons before Fidel Castro assumed control of the country.

New York will recover eventually, of course, as will its restaurant trade, but it’s lost a colourful piece of its culinary and cultural history. And whether the long-serving waiters who remember Bacall’s visits to stare at Table 30 will still be around to share their stories remains to be seen.