Downtown Easton Isn't Getting Two New Bars This Fall. It's Getting Two Old Ones Back.

Grand reopening season usually means new paint, a new sign, maybe a new name over an old door. What's happening on Centre Square and two blocks north on Northampton Street this fall is a different kind of story. Both projects are, in their own way, undoing something that got closed off a long time ago. One is a bar coming back under a new name after three decades under the old one. The other is a bar that was never supposed to reopen at all, because the city itself ordered its entrance sealed nearly a century ago.

Pearly's Turns Its Lights Back On

Pearly Baker's Alehouse has occupied 11 Centre Square since 1994, when founders Jonathan Davis and Greg Schuyler opened it as a gathering spot with pub fare, a full bar and live music. Thirty-one years is long enough that most people who grew up in Easton have a Pearly's story, and the original owners said as much when they announced the sale earlier this year, describing the bar as a place that had become more than a restaurant for the friends, families and neighbors who kept coming back.

New owners, brothers Philip and Joseph Simonetta, are holding the grand reopening at 7 p.m. on October 3, under new ownership but at the same address, with the same name still on the door. Their stated plan is to keep the parts of Pearly's that made it a fixture, the history and the room's built-in sense of familiarity, while updating the entertainment lineup, the menu and the bar program. They spent September 24 through 26 conducting walk-in interviews at the space itself, building a staff before the doors reopen rather than after.

That's a meaningful distinction from a typical restaurant flip. Nothing about the building or the block is being replaced. What changed hands was the operation inside a space that has anchored the square since the Clinton administration.

A Basement That Was Sealed a Century Ago

Two blocks north, at 431 Northampton Street, a different kind of reopening is further along. Tony Austin and Aaron Coleman bought the property in 2024 and spent the two years since renovating it top to bottom, including the upper floor where they now live. What they've built downstairs is Easton Speakeasy & Dining Room, a multi-level event venue with a main floor dining room finished in black-and-white marble, chandeliers and a coffered ceiling, and a lower-level speakeasy bar centered on a decades-old backbar salvaged from a former Easton bar, complete with arched mirrors and detailed wood trim.

The basement isn't a themed reproduction. During Prohibition, the same lower level functioned as an actual speakeasy, and Austin has described how people would slip into the basement from an adjoining lot to drink, until the city eventually forced the connecting entrance to be blocked because the two spaces sat on separate property lines. The door is still there. So are the names people etched into it before it was sealed.

Austin and Coleman also run Platinum Star Cleaning out of the same building, a residential and commercial cleaning company that was named to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's 2026 CO-100 list of the country's top small and midsized businesses. That's a separate line of work from the speakeasy, but it's worth knowing if you're trying to place the names behind the project. These aren't first-time operators experimenting with a concept. They're local business owners who bought a building, found a piece of it that had been closed for a hundred years, and decided to give it back its original job.

The Same Season, Two Blocks Apart

Put the two projects side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. Pearly's is a known quantity returning to public use after a change in ownership. The speakeasy is an unknown quantity, at least to anyone under retirement age, returning to public use for the first time since Prohibition ended. Neither is a ground-up build. Both involve owners who bought into an existing structure and chose restoration over replacement, whether that meant keeping a name on the awning or reopening a room the city itself had shut.

Here's how the two compare on the specifics:

What's Actually on the Calendar

If you're planning a fall weekend downtown, both venues have dates worth knowing now rather than finding out about after the fact.

Pearly's grand reopening is set for 7 p.m. on October 3. Given the interest around the sale, a reservation or an early arrival is a reasonable bet if you want a seat rather than a spot at the bar.

The speakeasy's first public event is Mimi's Drag Brunch Melodies, hosted by Mimi Sashimi, starting at 11:30 a.m. on October 18. It's structured as a three-part series:

• October 18
• November 15
• December 20

Each date includes live singing, a brunch buffet and a cash bar with bottomless mimosas and specialty bloody marys. Private bookings for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations and corporate events open at the venue starting in late November or early December, once the ticketed series has had its first run.

Neither business has published standing weekly hours yet, which tracks with where each project stands. Pearly's is stepping into an established rhythm with new hands at the wheel. The speakeasy is building its calendar from a single event outward, testing the room with something ticketed before it opens the doors for private use.

Why the Timing Matters

Centre Square and lower Northampton Street have absorbed a lot of turnover in recent years, vendors changing hands at the Public Market, storefronts shifting near the Marquis building, restaurants opening and closing along the restaurant row that's grown up around downtown. What's different about this particular stretch of fall is that both headline projects are explicitly about continuity rather than turnover. Pearly's new owners have said outright that they're not trying to erase three decades of identity, just build on it. The speakeasy's owners spent two years restoring a room instead of gutting it for something generic.

For a downtown that's used to hearing about who's leaving, that's a fall worth paying attention to, because it's two blocks of the same neighborhood proving that what closes doesn't always stay closed.

If you're weighing what a stretch of downtown like this means for property values or timing a move near it, that's a conversation BHHS Paul Ford Realtors is glad to have, grounded in what's actually happening on the ground rather than a listing sheet.