Watering hole · 1933 – present
Farrell's Bar & Grill
One of Brooklyn's oldest bars — opened the year Prohibition ended, served men only until Shirley MacLaine ordered a beer, and still pours the 32-ounce container.
A saloon at the end of Prohibition
Farrell's opened in 1933, the year the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, in a space that had been an ice-cream parlor. It sits on the corner of Prospect Park West and 16th Street, at the edge of Windsor Terrace, and for the better part of a century it has been the neighborhood's living room — an Irish-American saloon that outlasted the breweries, the shipyards, and most of the families that drank there.
Men only — until 1970
For its first four decades Farrell's didn't serve women at the bar. Women sat at tables in back, and the men who brought them ordered on their behalf. That ended in the 1970s when the actress Shirley MacLaine simply walked up to the bar and ordered a beer. Her date that night was Pete Hamill — the Windsor Terrace kid who grew up to be one of New York's great columnists and editors. The official policy on unchaperoned women ended in 1980.
The container
Farrell's is famous for serving its beer ferociously cold in a 32-ounce paper “container” you can carry out the door — a tradition that survived New York's foam-cup ban and gave the neighborhood blog Container Diaries its name. The bar didn't sell bottled beer until 2000. It is the kind of place that changes nothing on purpose.
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