1 · Opening
A New York bar was dismantled, shipped across the Atlantic and reassembled on the rue Daunou in 1911. The Library notes immediately what the name suggests and the facts deny: this house has no connection whatever to Harry's Bar in Venice.
2 · Why it matters
If the Savoy's American Bar brought the cocktail into a European hotel, this one brought it into a European street. It became the Paris headquarters of American expatriate drinking — the interwar writers, the pilots, the correspondents — and a set of drinks credited to it entered the canon ⚑.
Its long-running mock US presidential poll, conducted among expatriate customers, is the kind of house ritual that turns a bar into an institution: a joke maintained for a century acquires the authority of tradition.
3 · Signature & ritual
A shipped mahogany interior; drinks attributed to the house ⚑; the straw poll; college pennants and a downstairs piano.
4 · What this house does not solve
A house famous for expatriates depends on an expatriate culture that has largely dispersed; the room now serves visitors who come for a literary idea rather than a community that lives here.
Drink attributions of the interwar period are contested almost universally ⚑, and a bar that markets its inventions must accept the arguments that follow.
And the name is a permanent confusion with a more famous Venetian house — an accident of two Harrys that no amount of explanation resolves.
5 · LHL connections
- LHL-S-071Harry's Bar, VeniceNo connection — the coincidence of names is recorded to prevent it.
- LHL-S-100American Bar, SavoyThe hotel version of the same transplant.
- LHL-S-102Bar Hemingway → xr Ritz ParisThe other Parisian bar in the Hemingway myth ⚑.
6 · Timeline
- 1911A New York bar is reassembled on the rue Daunou.
- 1920s–1930sThe Paris headquarters of American expatriate drinking ⚑.
- 20th–21st centuriesContinuous operation; the straw poll becomes a house tradition ⚑.
7 · LHL story
“Two Harrys, No Relation” — One Harry lent a bartender money in Venice in 1931. Another had a New York bar shipped to Paris in 1911. The Library keeps both, and keeps them apart.
Source framework
- House materials; Parisian and cocktail histories.
- ⚑ Drink attributions are contested; ownership requires two sources.
Sources
What the entry rests on. Each reference records the specific facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.