1. A Tale of Two Bars
In Native American times, Manahatta was a sacred island. Translated, it means ‘place of great inebriation’.
What better place to start our journey than McSorley’s Old Ale House, the oldest bar in the city, at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. ‘Established in 1856, ’ or so the doorway sign claims, and they’ve got the dust to prove it.
A little-known journalist by the name of Joseph Mitchell gave me the keys to old New York and its quintessential East Village saloon and I’d like to pass them on. But let’s try to keep this between you and me. It’s already murder getting a table at Macsorley’s now.
A staff-writer for the New Yorker, Joe Mitchell chronicled the city’s lesser-known institutions, its curios and cranks, with the wit and eye of a young James Joyce. The Chicago Sun-Times called him: ‘A legendary figure…Mitchell may indeed be the best writer in America… reportage is so vivid, so real, that it comes out like fiction of the highest order.’ In 1943, he published a collection of essays mapping the bar’s history entitled McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.
After his beloved Ale House, Mitchell’s favourite subject was Joe Gould, AKA Professor Seagull, the Mongoose or the Bellevue Boy, a garrulous Greenwich Village tramp with claims to aristocracy, whose lifework was the Oral History of the Contemporary World, a sprawling encyclopedia of the twentieth century, the most important book in the world, or so the Professor claimed. Unfortunately, all Mitchell ever glimpsed of it were a few dozen essays about tomatoes and Gould’s days counting Indians in a census. Published in 1964, Joe Gould’s Secret turned out to be Mitchell’s last work.
Unlike Joe Gould, Joe Mitchell couldn’t think of anything to say next and endured what must be the longest period of writer’s block any salaried writer has known. For thirty-two years until his death in 1996, Mitchell clocked into his office every day as usual, but never significantly troubled his typewriter again.
Remembering his colleague in the June 10, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, Roger Angell wrote: ‘Each morning, Joe stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained.’
At least we’ll always have McSorley’s Ale House. Navigate the trip-hammer interchange of Astor Place and Broadway today, and you’ll find the saloon still burrowed in its peaceful, cherry-blossomed street in the West Village (Greenwich’s down-heel, cross-town twin).
The Old House at Home, to use its original name, affords a dark, dusty window into the city’s history and the beer – draught only, ale or porter, served in two small mugs at old-world prices – is as tangily addictive.
McSorley’s is pure living sepia, a clock-stopping cocoon. The pot-bellied stove still hunkers in the middle of the bar, under a Heath Robinson concoction of pipes and cables, dust-furred, thick as cat tails. The waiters wear grey smock jackets and weave their trays with outright disdain, leading the pompous to dub them ‘McSurleys’. A stern, bewhiskered portrait of original proprietor John McSorley guards the backroom. According to Joe Mitchell, for thirty years Old John used to rise every morning at five and walk to the Battery baths in the south of Manhattan, and open the saloon at seven. From the age of thirty to fifty-five, he enjoyed whiskey and ale, and for his last thirty years neither smoked nor drank. He had simply had enough. Perhaps the same could be said of Joseph Mitchell and his beautiful sentences. Old John’s reclining cats flank the walls in canvas form, along with a pair of boots, a life float, Harry Houdini’s handcuffs and a newspaper announcing the assassination of famous one-time patron, Abraham Lincoln. John Kennedy’s bust perches atop the bar like an eagle wearing a Navy cap. The dark mahogany counter is low and unpolished. The boarded walls you can see are etched and scarred, a palimpsest of the years, like Keith Richards in close-up.
I can’t help thinking how much my father, the pub-loving history-nut, would have loved it. By never bringing him here, so far, I feel I have somehow let the old man down. A lot of people have said ‘I owe it all to my dad’. When it comes to the story of my New York obsession, I mean every word of it.
Dad’s been in love with New York even longer than he’d been in love with mum, and they’ve been married forty years now. The canyons of Manhattan must have cast a powerful spell over the small farms of North Wiltshire. He grew up in the Wyvern matinees, watching Guys and Dolls, On The Town and On The Waterfront, back home gulping down tales of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. Like many men of his age, the first album he bought was Frank Sinatra, Songs For Swingin Lovers. (After listening to it the first time, he left it on the window sill and ran out into the glorious summer afternoon to tell his friend to come over. They came back to find the molten vinyl dripping onto the floor. Forty years later I bought it for him again, his first CD. To date, he hasn’t managed to break it). In later years, after his heart attack, triple by-pass and hip transplant, dad talked about New York like it was his old village stomping ground. I couldn’t believe he’d never been.
For my part, New York has been the love of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching Top Cat, Goodfellas and Annie Hall, gulping down Catcher in The Rye and Paul Auster. I always knew I’d get to see Manhattan one day and I wasn’t in a hurry. Call it the promise of delayed gratification. But then two hijacked planes blasted a hole in the horizon of my dream. When the dust eventually settled, going to New York seemed an impossible notion. I’d missed my chance. Like father, like son.
Four years on, we were searching for a novel way to celebrate Dad’s 65th birthday. I’d heard that a revival of one of his favourite musicals, Fiddler on The Roof, was taking Broadway by storm. In one of the Uzzell’s rare fits of spontaneity, we decided to throw caution to the wind and treat the old coot to the trip-of-a-lifetime (with his money) and me as a twenty-four-hour concierge.
I remember every detail of that journey like it was a first kiss. At Heathrow, they forced Dad to strip to his starched white Y-fronts until discovering it was the metal shaft in his hip that was setting off the X-ray machine. At JFK, they forced us back to the end of a three-hour queue because of one misplaced signature on his visa form. Getting into America hadn’t been this hard since the days of Ellis Island.
Outside the airport, the sky had opened up, and a deluge was lashing the terminal. Our pre-booked Shuttle Bus was nowhere to be seen. I found a call box and a nickel (my first nickel !) and phoned to complain. Nobody was going anywhere, Shaquile told me. The wait would be three hours. I promptly exploded.
When I finished my first rant, she said, ‘Have you seen the weather, sir ?’
‘Don’t get sarcastic with me. This is Fucking New York, the City That Never Sleeps!
You’re not telling me the whole island shuts down because of a tiny bit of rain !’
She hung up.
We got to our midtown hotel in four hours, and it was still raining. I watched the news in our room: NEW YORK SINKS! WORST FLOODING IN CITY HISTORY!
Whoops. Sorry, Shaquile.
Eventually, we could wait no longer and decided to set foot outside. Apart from a brief heart-rending flash of skyline as the crowded bus came out of a tunnel, all we’d seen of the city so far was the view from our fourteenth-floor room: a thrillingly dark side street off of Lexington Avenue, and an immense wall of concrete and steel.
We shared the creaking lift down with Sid the wizened Maltese bell-hop, who made a joke about Mad Dogs and Englishmen and midnight rain.
Without umbrellas, we made it as far as the bar on the first corner. We got drunk on Brooklyn Lager and slept like pharaohs.
The next day, the rain was a distant memory. On the streets of New York, I saw my father transformed before me into a giddy teenager. We stormed the city like sailors jumping off the boat on a three-day leave. The holiday worked out perfectly, but we never did make it to McSorley’s.
In his poem ‘i was was sitting in mcsorley’s’, ee.cummings wrote : ‘outside it was new york and beautifully snowing. inside snug and evil.’
You can almost see what he means. The grizzled, defiant boasts, the stern patrician air, the faintly-acrid smell of spilt beer on saw-dust, like my hallway’s cat litter tray, dear little black-and-white Mickey dying next to me as I type these words through a screen of tears, Flogging Molly’s Float on the stereo, ‘A ripe old age, that’s what I am, a ripe old age, just doin’ the best I can.’
McSorley’s is more of a boisterous male enclave now than ever, although, since a District Court ruling of 1970, women can no longer be turned away. McSorley’s embraced the change wholeheartedly, kicking and screaming all the way.
It was an intrepid female voyager I met there last April, one rare and quiet Tuesday afternoon. In England, strangers, if they so choose, may begin a conversation by acknowledging the weather. In New York, it’s all about the burger.
She asks me, ‘Have you had one ?’
I turn around. She is middle-aged, with a round, smiley face that reminds me of my mother, smartly dressed, but not too out of place in the Village. In the streaming sunlight, her hair looks blonde, but I know it’s grey.
‘My friend told me I had to try one,’ she continues. ‘And at these prices, you’d be mad not to.’
She took a notebook out and made a short entry. The burgers were cheap, but worth writing home about? Who was I to talk? I’d been scribbling away sweet nothings for hours by this point.
‘The porter’s enough of a meal for me,’ I say.
‘Well, I haven’t had lunch yet and I’m starving, so I’m going to go ahead and order if that’s OK. You sure I can’t tempt you ?’
‘No, thanks.’
She ordered a cheeseburger and an orange juice.
I asked if she worked locally.
‘I work all over.’
I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.
‘The Consumer Price Index. Have you heard of us ?’
‘It’s one of those things I’ve read about, like subprime mortgages. But I can’t say I know what you are.’
‘We’re an index number.’
‘I see. That doesn’t really help.’
‘Statistics,’ she explains. ‘It’s how they keep track of inflation, the main way. I measure the average price of goods and services purchased by households.’
‘And how do you do that ?’
‘I walk around, counting prices.’
‘Where ?’
‘A lot of shops.’
‘What do you count ?’
‘You name it, I count it.’
‘Don’t you… specialise ?’
‘Nah. Where’s the fun in counting milk cartons all day? I like things the way they are. Keeps me moving, meeting new people, new places. Like this place. Like you.’
I am amazed that a true New Yorker could be as much of a MacSorley’s virgin as I.
‘You mean you haven’t been here before ?’
‘I keep meaning to, but I live in Brooklyn now. Hook Point. I’m Catherine, by the way. Katie. Katie Kirwan.’
We talk about my trip for a while, and my life back home. She’s very interested in what she’s heard of the low British crime rate, and has lots of questions about recidivism percentages, an area I have no knowledge of. I make lots of things up to keep the conversation going, and she seems happy, although I think she knows I’m bluffing.
‘My family are from Ireland.’ She pronounces it Eye-Your-Land. ‘They emigrated during the famines.’
Katie’s burger and chips come; I order another two porters.
‘My grandmother used to run this place,’ she whispers when the waiter had departed.
‘Wow !’ I splutter foam across the table. ‘Really ?’
After reading Joe Mitchell’s history of the bar, this is akin to meeting the Kennedys.
‘Was she a MacSorley ?’ I looked around, as if I might see her portrait.
‘No. The son William was the last. Then it passed to Daniel O’Connell, a former cop.
My grandmother was his gracious granddaughter, Mrs. Harry Kirwan. Dottie, we called her.’ The names were getting a bit confusing, but I was hooked. ‘In those days, they kept things in the family. My grandmother was the last of the line.’
‘When was this ?’
Her expert eyes quickly count the years. ‘Must have been 1939.’
‘Women weren’t allowed in then, right? How did she feel about that ?’
‘Oh, she didn’t mind at all. Nobody dreamt of changing things in those days. She kept well out of the way, never set foot in here during business hours.’
‘What do you mean, she never set foot ?! She was the landlady !’
‘She had husband Harry for the day-to-day runnings. Dottie took care of the books. There’s a whole lot more to looking after a pub than pulling pints, you know.’
Katie Kirwan looks at my empty glasses rather reprovingly, finishes her burger and leaves soon after.
That was April last year. MacSorley’s is as grand as ever, but as I was to discover, there really are eight million stories in the naked city, and the landlord of the Brooklyn Bridge Café knows most of them
2. Spirit on the Water
I’m way down in Manhattan, under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, almost on the waterfront, and definitely on the town. Less than half a mile from the rush-hour maelstrom of Wall Street, but here all is calm. Except for a pair of kamikaze cyclists clattering over the cobbles, it’s just me and the seagulls.
Even the street names evoke another world. Coenties Alley is a ghostly curve back through the ages, Peck Slip a rustic fishing hamlet. A plane darts above me, clearing the financial district’s skyline, and I’m reminded of another day when they came low and didn’t miss.
It’s 5.00 PM. Here I am again, in New York in April, outside the Bridge Café at the corner of Water and Dover, and the only thing missing apart from my father is Richard McDermott.
Richard and I had met here for the first time last year, the day after MacSorleys. My hotel was far south then, opposite the Wall Street Stock Exchange, and I’d planned to walk a direct path home along Water Street after an afternoon exploring the Brooklyn Bridge. When I saw a red painted wooden café at the very first corner – a haute-cuisine shack, really – I allowed myself to get waylaid.
There was an old guy at the end of the bar, on good terms with the waitress. She had nothing but time on her hands. I could tell she liked him, a friend of the family, maybe.
After a couple of pints of fortifying Brooklyn Lager, I joined in.
‘This is one hell of a good bar,’ I say, looking around. Apart from a dapper young Asian couple eating, it is inexplicably empty.
‘Isn’t it?’ the man replies. ‘The oldest drinking establishment in New York, you know.’
‘That’s MacSorley’s,’ I correct him. ‘I was there only yesterday.’
‘Pah.’
The waitress smiles, raises her arms to indicate I should take cover and promptly leaves us to it.
‘I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong ?’
‘You said the ‘M’ word.’
My face darkens to a puzzled crimson.
‘Relax. I’m kidding. Partially. MacSorley’s claim they’ve been there since 1856. Unfortunately, they don’t have a shred of evidence to back it up. They’re charlatans, put simply. This hallowed ground, however, has been serving wine and porter since 1794.’
‘But…’ All I could splutter was : ‘Joseph Mitchell !’
‘I know. The only time that man was guilty of lazy journalism. He should have checked the records. All MacSorley’s have is a sign above the door, and you or I could have made that.’
‘You could maybe. I can’t even change a lightbulb.’
‘British ?’
‘It doesn’t matter where they’re from, I can’t change any of them.’
‘Richard McDermott. Good to meet you.’
We shake hands.
‘The Brooklyn Bridge Café is the oldest bar in New York, my friend. The second is Pete’s Tavern, the third is Fanelli’s Café. MacSorley’s is in fact the fourth.’
My world has been rocked; I am little short of outraged.
‘Have you told them ?’
Richard snorts. ‘I tried. But they don’t like people asking questions. They’re very jealous, you might say. I got myself barred, and I have to say I consider that quite an honour. Mentioning my name these days is enough to get yourself thrown out, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t recommend it.’
OK, I think. Now you’ve gone too far. Who did he think he was, John Pilger? You’re just an old drunk with a chip on your shoulder.
But he has more than that. He has a briefcase full of documentation, photostated A4 Fact Sheets that he was sliding down the bar to me. It’s meticulous research, dates, records, level-headed fact-checking and very hard to argue with, if true. The complete history of the Brooklyn Bridge Café, and the truth about McSorleys.
At the bottom, it says :
‘This information was compiled by researcher Richard McDermott, former publisher of The New York Chronicle.’
His address and email follow.
‘This is amazing,’ I say, still rather wary.
Over the course of the evening, I like to think we become friends. Like me, Richard’s a teacher, Science, now retired. He’d visited London many times with his wife, and we talked about bars I know in Soho, and how they’d changed, or not.
His wife had passed away recently, and I see the raw sadness in his face when he speaks of her, and the loneliness. I understand his research project a little better now, and why he sits around bars with a sackful of fact sheets. Who was I to talk? I’ve come alone with a notepad and now it’s almost full.
On returning to my hotel, I googled ‘Richard McDermott’. Everything he said was quite true. He was indeed at the epicentre of a bar feud that had once gripped the city gripped. His revelatory work had been published by no less august an organ than The New York Times. He even had his own Wikipedia entry: that sealed it.
We kept in touch via email, Richard updating me with another historical watering hole whenever he unearthed one. We’d arranged to meet up today, same place, same time.
But only yesterday I received a sad message informing me of another death in the family and an apology for absence. I decided to keep the appointment anyway, and here I am.
I’ve arranged to go to a Sea Chantey Sing in Fisherman’s Church just round the corner later tonight; a couple of hours in the Bridge Café is the ideal appetiser. Pausing at the door, I notice the discreet chalkboard I’d missed the first time round: Serving Since 1794.
Nice one, Richard.
Inside, all is exactly as I remembered, elegant and unshowy. Bob Dylan is playing, ‘Modern Times’. What better venue in the world to hear Spirit on the Water than this ancient haunt of river pirates and Water Street hags? 19th-century literature states that the strip was a notorious string of brothels; some buildings even housed multiple businesses. The 1855 Census reveals that three prostitutes registered for the floor above the Café; their downstairs bar served all-comers.
In a particularly gripping chapter of Gangs of New York, Herbert Asbury details the murderous exploits along the East River waterfront and its colourfully-named cast of criminals: Slobbery Jim, Sow Madden, Cow-Legged Sam McCarthy and Patsy the Barber. Go ahead and laugh if you want. They’re all safe in their unmarked graves.
I don’t know if it’s all down to Rudy Gulliani (though he’d probably say it was), but the area’s certainly come a long way. The Café is the choice of the highest city brass these days. Mayor Ed Koch used to hold twice-weekly dinner meetings here, and only recently did Mike Bloomberg pop in for a snack and walk off down the street, where he stopped to pick up a solitary piece of litter.
The 1920s interior remains untouched, a bit like The Overlook bar in The Shining: the crowding tin roof, the cream wainscotted walls and long wooden bar where I’d sat with Richard. A couple of out-of-town baby-boomers are sipping cocktails in his place now, schmoozing with the landlord. He has the easy affability of a young Billy Crystal, preppily dressed in pink shirt and blue jeans.
I overhear him use the word ‘finagle’ in conversation, in relation to a ticket he’d managed to score when the Stones and Scorsese were in town to record Shine a Light, and I’m doubly, make that triply, impressed. The spiel turns into a guide on how best to see the film (the Upper Westside Imax) before morphing into a general disquisition on classic seventies rock.
I stare at the whiskey bottles above the bar and try not to giggle at the funny names. Knob Creek. Red Raw Gulch.
Twenty minutes later, the landlord’s still talking about the Grateful Dead. Christ, even their drum solos didn’t last that long.
I’m slowly joined by a few more bodies at the bar, and I realise they’re actually queuing for an audience. The landlord’s delivering the history lecture now, and I hear the words ‘My hero Richard McDermott thinks we might have been here even earlier, but because he can’t prove it, he won’t come out and say it. That’s Richard for you.’
The chalkboard menu looks fantastic, even the desserts. How about Apple Almond Bread Pudding or White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Caramel Cheesecake?
I think to myself, given the lurid psycho-geography of this site, the Café could be excused for being twice as boisterous as MacSorley’s. But it’s a world away from the spit and sawdust, although the prices are more than reasonable. I realise the feud is futile: they’re really not competing.
The landlord’s onto The French Connection now. ‘Pause it, 116 minutes in. The Lincoln Continental is on stakeout, it’s parked right outside that window.’ He points behind me, and I see the moon caught in the white steel webbing of the Bridge.
‘When they’re scouting locations, the cop they based it on, Eddie Egan, he said, ‘I know the perfect place’. Eddie used to bring his snitches here, back in the day.
‘When my family bought it in seventy-nine, we used to have a couple of bookies sit here every afternoon, like their office. One of them, Johhny, imagine Tony Soprano aged by thirty years. All the time they were here, we never had any problems with the cigarette machines, we never had any problems with the garbage collection.’
He’s sounding more and more like Woody Allen as the night progresses, and I wonder if it’s part of the act.
‘We never had any problems at all…. Until one day, one of Johnny’s guys makes a pass at the Maitre D. She really didn’t like him. It was very uncomfortable. We told Johnny. He said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll never see him below 14th Street again.’ Those were the days. The mob in one corner, Ed Koch in the other and the crew of the New York Post in the middle.’
He breaks to put on Exile on Main Street and then it’s onto couple number three, finagling the ticket all over again. I’m just jealous. Besides having impeccable music taste, the landlord’s a real old-school host, with time for everybody. Everybody except me, it would seem. I really need to find an opening gambit. I could always name-drop my pal Richard McDermott, but that seemed cheap…and then I see it.
A neatly framed vintage American Lines poster, four pipe-smoking seamen and a dog staring out at the chugging liner. Underneath, the caption ‘New York – Southampton’.
That’s it: Herbert Uzzell the sailor, my grandfather’s first cousin from the little Wiltshire village of Christian Malford. Dad used to tell me stories about Herbert working on the cruises, Southampton to the Big Apple, right through the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties. I inherited the old man’s love of New York along with his vintage autograph book. Laurel and Hardy, Bogart and Bacall, Marilyn Monroe… Herbert met them all. Maybe, I think, he even drank right where I’m sitting now.
I wait for a pause and motion to the landlord. My story works like a charm; we have our connection. We chat for twenty animated minutes, and only once do I let slip that I’ve actually heard it all before:
‘…this was their second night at the Beacon. They did two, see, but in the film, you’re not meant to know that. The first night was a fundraiser for Hilary Clinton, you see the band meet her Mum at the start of the film. I actually tried getting tickets for that one, too, but they were five thousand dollars and up. I tried to justify it: 4,700 was tax deductible, after all. I could write it off. But, nah. Too much. So the second night, there I am. Front row. And guess what, when you see the film, during Satisfaction, when Keith walks out onto the ribbon, look at that guy in the blue shirt…’
I realise what he’s saying. ‘I’ll look for it right after The French Connection. How many minutes in should I pause ?’
Then I remember he hasn’t actually got to the Eddie Egan part of the conversation yet. At least, not with me. But, gracious to the last, he overlooks my notebook faux-pas and we part with a hearty handshake and exchange of emails.
At the door, I hear the word ‘finagle’ once again as he’s onto the next customer, and I’m gone.
More than slightly drunk, I totter underneath Brooklyn Bridge in the vague direction of my Chantey Sing when I’m stopped by a stubborn lampost.
There’s a Missing poster at eye level. Back in Brighton, you see them all the time, stapled and cellophane wrapped. For cats.
This one’s for a person. Crazily, against all odds, I think I recognise the face in the photograph, but I can’t place her :
MARY MEYER- MISSING FROM THE UPPER EAST SIDE
MARY HAS ALZHEIMERS AND HAS DISAPPEARED BEFORE. SHE IS LIKELY TO BE VERY DISTRESSED, BUT STILL HAS MOMENTS OF STUNNING CLARITY.
SHE IS IN URGENT NEED OF THE LOVE AND CARE OF HER FAMILY.
And then I remember the warm, round face, the long grey hair, blonde no more. I’m face to face again with Katie Kirwan, the ghost of MacSorley’s past, a long, long way from home.