Recently, fifteen or so Artists Without Walls’ members convened at McSorley’s Old Ale House for an afternoon of good chat, and, as it turned out, some beautiful music from violinist Annette Homann. Ron Vazzano captured the afternoon in this wonderful essay.
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McSorley’s Old Ale House on a Wet Afternoon
“i was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and beauti-
fully snowing.”
reads the first line of an E.E. Cummings poem written in 1925, in that fractured grammatical style as only he could. This historic ale house was only 71 years old at the time.
When I sat there one afternoon last month in its now 160th year, in lieu of poetry, a live violin solo of Bach’s Adagio in G minor broke out at our table. Followed by other classical pieces that cut through the din of voices that spilled across the room. Outside it was New York and beautifully raining.
And where I sit, so too might have Lincoln. He was invited here by Peter Cooper, at whose college across the street,Cooper Union, Abe had given an important campaign speech back in 1860. Or maybe Ulysses S. Grant, known to take a drop or two, had a few in this back room on his visit. Or Teddy Roosevelt. Or John Lennon. Or Woody Guthrie. Or the enigmatic writer Joseph Mitchell, who frequented and immortalized the bar, in a 1940 piece in The New Yorker and in a subsequent book three years later, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. Or those renowned Irishmen of letters from the old sod, Brendan Behan and Frank McCourt. And if here on a cold day, they may have sat near the still working pot bellied stove.
John Sloan was a regular, and among the five paintings he made of the place, his 1912 classic McSorley’s Bar, hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
And I wondered where exactly the New York Rangers had clustered when they drank ale from the Stanley Cup they had won, on that June night in 1994. The cup allegedly got dented in the festivities, causing the National Hockey League to take the trophy back for several days. Boys will be boys and such things will happen when they gather, even though embossed in metal above the fireplace, is the house motto: Be Good or Be Gone.
And here once was a place where only boys and men could be good or be gone, as it also had a slogan which used to boast:”Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies.”
On my first visit fifty years ago—when the legal drinking age in New York was 18—I must admit to a somewhat heady feeling, of being in a place of male exclusivity that wasn’t a locker room— a place of decidedly sweatier feelings. Though any sort of alpha male euphoria coming from standing at the bar (there are no stools) talking “man talk,” man to man, would all end on August 10, 1970 after the National Organization for Women won their anti-discrimination case against McSorley’sin District Court.
The ultimate irony here, was at the time, the place was owned by Dorothy O’Connell Kirwin, who never stepped foot on the premises while it was open for business. When her son suggested that she now be the first woman served following the court’s decision, she refused citing the promise she had made to her father who had left the her the bar, following his death in 1939. Dorothy died in 1974.
The men’s restroom (with urinals to make you weep so dramatically sculptured in fine porcelain are they, and here since only 1910), would go coed for 16 years. Finally in 1986, a women’s restroom was put in. One far less awe inspiring I’m told.
McSorley’s is nothing if not about dates and passing through time. It is nothing if not a preserve of a gritty culture, that tells us by the pictures and artifacts that hang from its walls— an original WANTED poster for John Wilkes Booth— by the sawdust on the floor, by the restrooms themselves, something about who we were and to where we’ve come. And that it is still standing in the same spot it always has, is remarkable in itself
Go to London and stop in a pub that was around in Shakespeare’s time, and it’s no great shakes. In our still young country, establishments boast of being around since Reagan.
But perhaps its most unique and endearing feature, is that in a modern world which revels in its having infinite choices, McSorley’s offers but two: light or dark. The house ale. That’s it. And served two at a time from the tap. No bottled beer, no wine, no Apple Martinis. (A soda for those who insist.). And as Cummings goes on…
“and i was sitting in the din thinking drinking the ale, which never lets you grow old blinking at the low ceiling my being pleasantly was punctuated by the always retchings of a worthless lamp.”
When Annette the violinist put her violin away, our table went back to its eclectic conversations. The guy next to me was a chess teacher, because of course, that’s the sort of profession one runs into every day. And before long, we were talking about the great chess match of Fischer vs. Spassky in 1972. Which was about twenty minutes ago in McSorley time.
When I left, it was still beautifully raining. And I couldn’t get a cab. And I couldn’t care less.
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Here’s a link to Ron’s blog MUSE-LETTER