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| McSorley's, by John French Sloan. Detroit Institute of Art |
Back when we were young journalists just getting started in New York, we were consigned to working “the overnight,” the midnight shift. It was fertile ground for news, but rough on your sleeping, eating and social schedule.
Like all rough-and-tumble reporters, the first thing we thought about when turned loose at daybreak was - “where can we get a drink!?” At nine o’clock in the morning, even in New York, that was a bit of a problem. But luckily we had a solution, and a good one: McSorley’s Old Ale House. At that hour, it was just us and the derelicts at McSorley's. But we’ve recently discovered that with us in spirit, forever handcuffed to the bar, was our hero Houdini.
McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a red brick tenement at 15 East Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in the city. In 156 years it has had just five owners and all of them have been opposed to change. It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls—one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves—and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox. It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years. The clientele is motley. It includes mechanics from the many garages in the neighborhood, salesmen from the restaurant-supply houses on Cooper Square, truck-drivers from Wanamakers’s, interns from Bellevue, students from Cooper Union, clerks from the row of secondhand bookshops north of Astor Place, and men with tiny pensions who live in hotels on the Bowery but are above drinking in the bars on that street. The backbone of the clientele, however, is a rapidly thinning group of crusty old men, predominantly Irish, who have been drinking there since they were youths and now have a proprietary feeling toward the place. Some of these veterans clearly remember John McSorley, the founder, who died in 1910 at the age of eighty-seven. They refer to him as Old John, and they like to sit in rickety armchairs around the big belly stove which heats the place, gnaw on the stems of their pipes, and talk about him.
McSorley’s bar is short, accommodating approximately ten elbows, and is shored up with iron pipes. It is to the right as you enter. To the left is a row of armchairs with their stiff backs against the wainscoting. The chairs are rickety; when a fat man is sitting in one, it squeaks like new shoes every time he takes a breath. The customers believe in sitting down; if there are vacant chairs, no one ever stands at the bar. Down the middle of the room is a row of battered tables. Their tops are always sticky with spilled ale. In the centre of the room stands the belly stove, which has an isinglass door and is exactly like the stoves in Elevated stations. All winter Kelly keeps it red hot. “Warmer you get, drunker you get,” he says.
Oh, how we wish we had written the two beautiful paragraphs you’ve just read. They were honed with love by one of the immortals, Joseph Mitchell, writing in The New Yorker. He, too, was drinking at McSorley's on many a rainy morning. And a whole generation of writers have got his hangover.
We’ve recently discovered that our hero Harry Houdini liked to visit McSorley’s back when he was frequently downtown teaching at the Police Academy. He went in for lunch one day - they are still famous for their liverwurst and onion sandwiches, on rye with mustard - and the Police Commissioner, Harry's friend Richard Enright, challenged him to try to escape from the NYPD's new, improved “Peerless” handcuffs. Houdini took the challenge and Enright cuffed him to the bar rail. The handcuffs are still there, along with the original sawdust.
(We're told that the originals were tin-snipped and stolen by drunken frat boys who should themselves be tin-snipped into little pieces. But authentic Peerless cuffs remain, now padlocked into history.)
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