The Palace Restaurant and Saloon: The Bar That Survived Whiskey Row’s Great Fire

Push through the swinging doors at 120 South Montezuma Street and the first thing you notice is the bar. It runs long and dark along one wall, carved oak worn smooth by more than a century of elbows. Across the street sits the courthouse plaza, where that bar once rested while Whiskey Row burned.

The Palace Restaurant and Saloon calls itself Arizona’s oldest frontier saloon, and it wears the title comfortably. But the real story, the one Prescott historians have pieced together from old newspapers, is a little more tangled and a lot more fun than any plaque.

How old is the Palace, really?

The date you will see everywhere is 1877. That year, according to the Sharlot Hall Museum, the Arizona Weekly Miner reported that a pair of partners, Shaw and Standefer, had fitted up a saloon called the Palace. Other accounts push the origin earlier still, though none of those claims has been proven.

Local historian Bradley G. Courtney dug deeper in a 2023 Days Past series and found a twist. That 1877 Palace stood on Gurley Street and lasted only about a year. The building you visit today descends instead from the Cabinet Saloon, which D.C. Thorne and William Hutchinson opened on the same Montezuma Street lot in the summer of 1874. A later Palace moved onto that lot in 1884 after fires on Goodwin Street, and the two saloons eventually merged. So the Palace may be even older than its sign says, just by a different name.

The night they carried the bar across the street

Fire was a constant threat on a street of wooden saloons. One in 1883 leveled much of Montezuma Street, and owner Robert “Bob” Brow rebuilt with a stone foundation, brick walls and an iron roof he hoped would hold.

It did not. On July 14, 1900, the Great Fire swept Whiskey Row. As the flames came on, patrons hauled the heavy oak bar out the door and across to the plaza, along with whatever liquor they could save. Then, as the story goes, they set up shop and kept pouring while their side of the street burned. The museum’s historians say the bar in the Palace today is the very one that made that trip.

Brow teamed up with Ben Belcher and Barney Smith to build again, this time for roughly $50,000. The new Palace opened on July 3, 1901, a two-story showpiece of granite, iron and ornamental brick that spread across three lots and folded the old Palace and Cabinet together. A newspaper description from that summer praised its 24-foot front bar of solid oak topped with cherry. Tradition holds it is a Brunswick, the famous back-East bar maker, and the Palace proudly calls it that today.

Earps, Doc Holliday and a few tall tales

No Palace story is complete without the Earps. Virgil Earp did live in Prescott in the late 1870s, running a sawmill and serving as town constable, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Local lore says he drank here, that Wyatt stopped in on his way to Tombstone, and that Doc Holliday enjoyed a lucky run at the poker tables.

It is a great picture, and it may well be true. But Sharlot Hall Museum writers are careful to call these famous patrons likely regulars rather than documented ones, and wilder tales of gunfights and knife fights are best enjoyed with a grain of salt and a glass of rye.

What is better documented is the Palace’s staying power. It outlasted the territory’s 1907 crackdown on saloon gambling and the dry years of Prohibition, leaning on its kitchen and its atmosphere, and a speakeasy reportedly operated in the brick basement. After decades of ups and downs, Dave and Marilyn Michelson leased the building in 1996 and restored the room to its 1901 look. Scenes from Steve McQueen’s Junior Bonner were filmed here too.

The Palace today

Today the Palace is a full restaurant as much as a saloon. 12News once described it as a kind of time capsule, and that still holds up. The pressed tin ceiling still shows what are said to be bullet holes, the floors creak, and the booths carry the names of famous patrons.

The menu runs to hearty Western comfort food: burgers, steaks, fish and chips, country-fried steak and cheese curds, as Tasting Table noted in 2025. The whiskey list is deep, with plenty of bourbon and rye. Some nights bring dinner theater, including the one-man show Wyatt Earp Returns.

How to do the Palace right

• Belly up to the bar. Even if you plan to eat in the dining room, start with a drink at the old Brunswick. It is the one piece of the room that saw the 1900 fire up close.
• Order a rye. Frontier saloons ran on whiskey, and the Palace keeps a long list.
• Look up and around. Check the tin ceiling, the historic photos on the walls and the named booths.
• Cross the street after. Walk over to the courthouse plaza, where the bar sat on that July night in 1900, and take in the whole length of Whiskey Row.

Plenty of places claim a piece of the Old West. The Palace has the bar to prove it. Whether Doc Holliday really won big here or not, you will leave with a story of your own.

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This spotlight draws on reporting from the Sharlot Hall Museum’s Days Past archive, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 12News and Tasting Table. Top photo: Marine 69-71, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.