Management of the pub was handed over to Settlers Hospitality Group less than a year ago…
Ale Mary’s is done.
The downtown Scranton gastropub, black facade, brick bones, beer lists, wing-night loyalists and a speakeasy tucked in the back like a half-lit secret, served its final day Sunday, April 26. The building at 126 Franklin Ave. is not necessarily going dark forever. Owner and developer Art Russo told the Times-Tribune he wants a new tenant to take over the space.
But Ale Mary’s, as Scranton knew it, is finished.
Russo opened Ale Mary’s in March 2014 inside the historic Bittenbender Building, a downtown property with a long memory. Before Ale Mary’s, the space housed Whistles Pub & Eatery, a name that still gets invoked around Scranton with the weird tenderness people reserve for old bars, old bands and old trouble. Whistles closed in 2010. Ale Mary’s arrived a few years later and gave the room a new uniform: gastropub, sports bar, craft beer stop, wing-night machine.
For a long time, it worked.
Ale Mary’s sold the kind of food that makes sense in Scranton when the weather is lousy, the game is on and nobody wants a lecture. Wings. Burgers. Fries. Nachos. Beer. Big, salty, sticky things. The Wing Men, who take wings more seriously than most committees take public policy, scored Ale Mary’s 83 out of 100. They praised the draft list, the game-room feel, the Monday half-price wings and the sense that Ale Mary’s was a place built for regular use, not special occasions.
Then there was Madame Jenny’s, the speakeasy-style room inside the property, originally opened in 2019 and named for Jennie Duffy, a Scranton figure with the kind of bawdy backstory marketing departments usually have to fake. Madame Jenny’s gave the place another gear: jazz, comedy, cabaret, drag, burlesque, cocktails, plush shadows. You could eat wings under a television, then slip into a room pretending Prohibition had just been repealed.
In July 2025, Russo turned over management to Settlers Hospitality, the Wayne County-based group behind The Settlers Inn, Glass, Cocoon Coffeehouse and Bakery, The Dock on Wallenpaupack and Kōl Grill. Settlers came in with polish, a portfolio and promises of new “craveable and affordable” options, according to the Times-Tribune screenshots.
The public reaction now suggests a lot of regulars heard “new” and eventually decided it meant “not ours.”
That is the ugly little truth under the closure. Restaurants do not live on menus alone. They live on recognition. A bartender who knows your drink. A special you complain about until it disappears, then mourn forever. A wing sauce with a ridiculous name that somehow becomes part of your week. A place where the staff feels like connective tissue. A room polished enough to bring a date, loose enough to watch a game and familiar enough that you stop noticing how much you need it.
The Facebook reaction to the closing was brutal in the way only local Facebook can be brutal: funny, sentimental, half-informed, occasionally unfair and probably closer to the emotional truth than anyone wants to admit. People asked for Whistles back. People said they loved Ale Mary’s before the management change. People complained about the new menu, lost weekly specials, fewer beer options and the disappearance of gluten-free choices. Others pushed back against blaming downtown Scranton, pointing out that restaurants are closing everywhere and that plenty of truly local spots are still packed.
That part matters. It is too easy to turn every closing into a referendum on downtown, parking, politics, rent, crime, the mayor, the weather or whatever else people were mad about before breakfast. Restaurants die for complicated reasons. Labor. Food costs. Timing. Concept drift. Regulars who vanish quietly. New customers who never arrive. The math is vicious, and the math does not give a damn how many memories are stored in the bar top.
Still, Ale Mary’s closing feels like more than math.
For more than a decade, it gave downtown Scranton a reliable kind of pleasure: beer and wings in a handsome old building, with just enough ambition to keep things interesting and just enough looseness to feel like Scranton. That matters in the 570, where people do not simply eat at restaurants. They adopt them, defend them, roast them, abandon them and talk about them for years after they close.
Now the Bittenbender waits for its next act.
Maybe another restaurant comes in and figures out the room. Maybe someone remembers that Scranton likes polish, but only up to a point. This is still a city that can smell a phony concept through brick walls. It wants good food, fair prices, a decent pour, a little personality and the sense that whoever is running the joint gives a damn.
Ale Mary’s had that once. Enough people remember it to make the closing sting.
