The second I walked through the aged wooden doors of McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th Street in New York City, I knew I was among friends. The bartender, dressed all in white with short grey hair, greeted me and my travel companion with a joke and an aggressively amicable smile. His manner was a direct mirror of the unique warmth of the Old Ale House: friendly, comforting, a little raucous, and outstandingly one-of-a-kind.
Fresh sawdust covered the floor and the smell of it blended with beer, cooking meat and, of course, raw onions. The air was heavy with the smell and ultimately homey. The room breathed comfort.
The bartender told me and my friend to sit wherever there was room and the lone waiter waved us on, saying, “The gentlemen in the back are lonely.” The bar was empty of stools, encouraging patrons to either sit and relax at the tables or stand at the bar to talk to the tender and examine the decorations.
As Joseph Mitchell promised in his 1940 article “The Old House at Home,” nearly every inch of the walls was covered in decorations and memories. In fact, much of Joseph Mitchell’s descriptions held true in today’s McSorley’s. As my friend and I moved to empty seats, my eyes were drawn up to the walls, desperately trying and failing to take in every detail. There on the right in the back room was “Duh Goil and duh Polly” – Gustave Courbet’s “La Femme au Perroquet” – with a dull light bulb illuminating it. On the same wall was a sign stating one of the bar’s mottos: “Be Good or Be Gone.” Next to that were pictures of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy with the iconic brass tag underneath: “THEY HAVE MURDERED THESE GOOD MEN THE SKULKING DOGS.”
Though the pictures above the tag are no longer the “excellent portraits of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley” as they were in Mitchell’s day, seeing the small sign still sent cold prickles through my skin. This was McSorley’s! This was history, literature and pure loveliness, despite the few changes.
I sat at the very back table between the door to the ladies’ room and two heavy-set men in casual clothes with eight mugs between them. They sat in silence. Occasionally one would slide his glass mug over the carved-up tabletop, take a slow drink, and put the mug back with a quiet thud that was felt more than heard through the voices filling the bar. After finishing their last drinks, the men rose without a word and left the bar together.
That was another striking reminder of Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s. Those two quiet men embodied the peace and familial solitude that made the McSorley’s of old so endearing. I was glad to feel that peace at our table. The other patrons’ voices hovered around every table, but they were not distracting. I talked with my friend in my normal voice. The sound of conversation and kitchen clattering became a blanketing hum that created a sort of sleepy charm.
In “The Old House at Home,” Mitchell wrote, “It is possible to relax in McSorley’s. For one thing, it is dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place. Also, the barely audible heartbeatlike ticking of the old clocks is soothing. Also, there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue intern once remarked that for some mental states the smell in McSorley’s would be a lot more beneficial that psychoanalysis or sedative pills or prayer.”
It is still the case, though a different sort of relaxation can be found there today. The air lacks the coal and tobacco, but the smell is still like a balm. The clocks can no longer be heard over the conversation and I never felt like drifting off into slumber, but there was nonetheless an undeniable sense of calm in the bar. Time moved with its own laws there. As I worked on my first of two light ales – brought out automatically in twos, in the spirit of old times, for five dollars – I told my friend, “I feel like we haven’t done anything else today.” Odd, considering we’d already taken a cab and a train, walked through the city and visited a few shops. We were so relaxed in the cozy old bar that it really felt as though our day had begun there. Perhaps we had spent our whole lives sipping ale, breathing in onions and examining the old shoes and trumpets screwed into the ceiling above our heads.
It didn’t matter how much time was spent inside the warm confines of this self-contained universe. It seemed as though no one – patron, waiter or bartender – was eager for anyone to go back out into the chilly city. On that dreary day, McSorley’s was like a little beam of light, despite the dim lighting. Who could dream of entering McSorley’s for a quick meal or drink? There was too much to see. People from other tables came up to us while we ate delicious, five dollar burgers – generously topped with raw onion – to explore the wall behind us.
Horse memorabilia occupied many spaces on the walls, which brought to mind the passage in Mitchell’s piece about Old John brushing down his horse outside of the bar back in the 1850s. A framed cloth image of a horse and rider proudly announced “Sir Bevys Winner of the Derby” above my friend’s head. A beautiful painted poster for the 1950 Dublin horse show hung on another wall.
The memorabilia seemed endless and every item was a comment on the bar’s personality. A handsome drawing of Theodore Roosevelt supervised the bar at the front of the building. Behind the bar, a taxidermy jackalope stared back at old Teddy. Above the men’s restroom, a gorgeous pair of antlers were nailed upside down.
The decorations weren’t all old. Though today’s McSorley’s largely resisted change, some modern situations deserved its recognition. Next to the Sir Bevys announcement hung a memorial for the members of the New York Fire Department who volunteered after the 9/11 attacks.
The overall feeling in McSorley’s was that everything was exactly where it should be, whether old or new. After noticing some dust in the corner, my friend said, “Any dirt that’s here, I feel like it’s supposed to be here.” Similarly, when I halfheartedly suggested adding our own carving into the tabletop, she said, “That would be like altering history.” I couldn’t disagree. Even with the comfortable atmosphere, a small part of me felt like we shouldn’t be there: two young women in pink and black dresses, drinking ale in an ale house that refused to serve women for over one hundred years. It felt as though we stirred up history just by walking through the door.
But that feeling dissipated quickly. After all, McSorley’s was first named The Old House at Home. Though times have changed, McSorley’s is still, essentially, a home for anyone who enters. I felt welcome and trusted the whole time I was there. We were never carded for our drinks. The waiter simply saw that we had nothing in front of us, asked “Light or dark?” and returned a moment later with four mugs of light ale. It was amazing to be so easily trusted as adult women worthy of this lovely bar while my friend was wearing a headband with a bejeweled bear on it.
The sense of family and tenderness Mitchell wrote about in his article seemed to carry on through the years into today. There wasn’t just a history at McSorley’s, but a whole world that anyone who walked through the door was welcome to enjoy, and enjoy it I did.
