Tale of the tee: Miracle Bar
This Harrisburg tavern poured its last drinks decades ago. Its building was razed, its street address wiped off the map.
But it has risen from the dead.
It was called the Miracle Bar, after all.
Family in hospitality business
One vestige of it that remained was a vintage matchbook, found on eBay. It featured an illustration of a stout man standing next to an even more robust alcoholic drink. The Miracle Bar, it said, “known from coast to coast.”
Perhaps word traveled by way of patrons who coiffed a few cold ones right before hopping on a train bound for the West Coast. At 506 Market St., the Miracle Bar abutted the Market Street underpass and was across the street from the Pennsylvania Railroad station in downtown Harrisburg.
More likely, it was just clever marketing that made the Miracle Bar play bigger than it actually was. Besides honoring it with our Miracle Bar Tee, inspired by the matchbook design, we wanted to know more of its story.
Whatever level of renown the bar enjoyed, details about it are hard to come by. But thanks to online newspaper archives and an assist from the Historical Society of Dauphin County, we have pieced together a bit about the Miracle Bar, a sister tavern, and the man who owned both of them, Morton Kay.
But first came his father, Louis W. Kay. Born in Russia, he came to America as a young man. He lived in Virginia and New York and worked for a while in wholesale liquor, according to the Harrisburg Evening News.
He was in his early 20s when he started in the hotel business. He purchased Harrisburg’s six-story Metropolitan Hotel in 1909, adding a seventh floor in 1912. The hotel fronted Market and Fourth streets.
In 1921, Kay sold a half ownership to Fred Aldinger. The owners rebranded the hotel in 1922, a newspaper ad boasting that the Governor Hotel was “Harrisburg’s newest and one of its finest and most complete ‘Home for Travelers.’ ”
The hotel had 65 rooms with baths, 30 without baths, and 10 “sample rooms,” which dictionary.com defines as “suites in which merchandise is displayed for sale to the trade.” All rooms had phones “to help traveling men make quick appointments with their clients,” a newspaper ad noted.
In 1926, only four years after the Governor’s debut, Louis Kay, 59, died after an operation in Baltimore. The Telegraph described him as a Harrisburg resident of 41 years and a “hotelman for the past thirty-five years.”
He was survived by four sons, including Morton Kay of Bethlehem. It’s not clear what Morton’s career was there, but in the years after his father’s death, Morton moved back to Harrisburg and assumed part-ownership of the Governor Hotel.
We found one photo of Morton, taken in 1928 at a ground-breaking ceremony for the Beth El Temple synagogue in Harrisburg, on whose building committee he served.
Morton Kay, above left, at a 1928 groundbreaking ceremony for the new Beth El Temple in Harrisburg. (Photo: Harrisburg Telegraph)
Morton Kay, above left, at a 1928 groundbreaking ceremony for the new Beth El Temple in Harrisburg. (Photo: Harrisburg Telegraph)
On its second floor, the Governor Hotel featured The Tavern, described in the Harrisburg Sunday Courier in 1932 as re-creating the look of “an ancient tavern with log walls,” with room for an orchestra and dancing.
The hotel barber shop, with 17 barbers making it the biggest in the city, was open around the clock.
In 1934 came a hair-raising announcement: the two estates that now owned the Governor — Louis Kay’s and that of Alice and Patricio Russ — would be splitting the hotel in two. A dividing wall would leave 32 rooms on the Kay side, 40 on the Russ side. (The building lives on today as Harrisburg University student housing. A reference to its Metropolitan days, painted in red, is still visible at the top of its western exterior.)
But neither estate owned the building. Alexander Realty Co. did, and by 1938 it wanted to combine the Russ Hotel and Governor Hotel once again. Kay, as president of Governor Hotel Corp., said he ignored eviction notices since April in the belief that his lease would be renewed.
His court-ordered vacating of the hotel came in July, bankruptcy in November.
‘Three deep’
If Morton Kay was out of business, it wasn’t for long. It’s unclear when the Miracle Bar opened, but we found references to the bar in newspapers from the period of 1938 to 1942.
The address itself came up in a 1928 story about a “wild cat cabaret” operating there. The Evening News reported the arrest of four men and three women after a raid that resulted from, “Complaints that young girls were accompanying men to the place, where, it is alleged, they drank, sang, danced, played slot machines and engaged in other disorderly practices until long after midnight.”
A decade later, the Miracle Bar had moved into the address. A September 1938 Telegraph ad for Wrigley’s chewing gum listed among its local dealers one “Governor Tavern Miracle Bar” at 506 Market St.
This is the first newspaper reference to the Miracle Bar we found. It’s speculation on our part, but did Kay walk away from the hotel with “The Tavern” that had operated on the second floor and set up shop at 506 Market St.? Or did he simply seek to stoke confusion between his bar and the hotel as payback for being forced out?
It was referred to as just “Miracle Bar” in a couple of 1939 news briefs: That March, someone stole a wheelbarrow from the bar (the same newspaper account also noted the filching of a stuffed chicken from the rear porch of a house elsewhere in the city); in September, it was the robbery of three pin ball machines, the bar’s owner misidentified as “Martin” Kay.
A “Reviews and Previews” column in the Telegraph in May 1941 noted that “they’re three deep in the Miracle Bar,” suggesting that business was good seven months before the United States entered World War II.
And it was good enough that Kay opened a second tavern: K Bar celebrated its grand opening on New Year’s Eve 1941, anadvertisement in the Telegraph noting that it was “operated by the owners of Miracle Bar.”
The two bars featured “the same prices and policy,” including hot turkey, ham, beef or pork sandwiches for 25 cents. They ran help-wanted ads together.
Morton Kay owned the Miracle Bar and, one block away on the opposite side of the street, K Bar. This 1942 newspaper ad notes the common ownership.
Morton Kay owned the Miracle Bar and, one block away on the opposite side of the street, K Bar. This 1942 newspaper ad notes the common ownership.
Personal tragedy
Whatever challenges he faced in business, Kay suffered great tragedy in his personal life.
A February 1945 headline in the Evening News delivered word that Lt. Stanford A. Kay, 24, a navigator on a B-17 Flying Fortress, was reported missing in action over Germany (his death was confirmed in April). He was further identified as the son of Mr. and Mrs. Morton Kay, 433 Market St.
That, of course, also was the address of K Bar, which the Kays apparently lived above. By 1946, K Bar was ready for a remodel. An ad noted red leather, chrome chairs and “deep upholstered lounges” among the new amenities.
It’s unknown how long the Miracle Bar and K Bar operated.
In June 1948, “Hotel Governor Tavern” at 506 Market St. that had its license suspended by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board; the Evening Newsnoted that the tavern “has no connection” to the Hotel Governor but didn’t refer to the Miracle Bar or Kay, if he was even involved by that time.
In September 1948, the state granted a charter to a legal entity known as Miracle Bar Inc., 506 Market St. Its three incorporators did not include Kay, who died in Harrisburg in 1959 at age 63, according to the genealogy website geni.com.
Ken Frew, research librarian/archivist at the Historical Society of Dauphin County, said city directories give the last listing for the Miracle Bar as 1958.
“However, the building appears to have stood until at least 1968 when the address was listed as ‘vacant’,” Frew wrote in an email.
It’s not clear when the building was demolished, but Frew noted that Greenberg’s Clothiers, at 500 Market St., was torn down sometime after the 1972 flooding caused by Hurricane Agnes.
As for K Bar’s razing, eBay again proved fruitful as we found an archived listing for an undated black-and-white newspaper photo print showing the demolition of 433 Market St. The automobiles in the background place the photo in the 1970s or 1980s.
A vertical sign hangs from the corner of the second and third floors. B-A-R is clear; however, a watermark on the photo obscures whatever is written at the top of the sign.
Perhaps it’s a K.