The “crusty old men” who shuffled in to drink at McSorley’s during the Depression

Step into McSorley’s Old Ale House, and you’ll see a range of humanity at this sawdust-strewn watering hole—which right now is celebrating 170 years of pouring ale for thirsty customers on East Seventh Street.

Rubbing elbows at the bar and bantering across tables while washing down liverwurst sandwiches are the young and old, students, business people, bridge and tunnelers, first responders, poets, and politicians.

Now, time travel to the McSorley’s of the late 1930s, when it was an Irish tavern in its eighth decade serving a Bowery-adjacent neighborhood not yet rebranded as the East Village. Mugs of ale are on the tables; plates collect in a corner of the bar. Suits and ties, overcoats, and fedoras comprise the uniform of the men standing and sitting around.

My guides for this trip back to Depression-era McSorley’s are two Berenice Abbott photos from 1937 (above). They showcase the darkness and light of the interior of the saloon, with patrons under gaslights. (McSorley’s had electricity at the time, but ownership preferred old-school lighting.)

What was Abbott (below, in 1921), then in her 30s and already a photographer of renown in New York City art circles, doing a this workingman’s tavern?

Born in Ohio in 1898, Abbott moved to New York City in 1918 to study sculpture. After spending years living in Paris, she changed her focus to photography and returned in 1929 to a transformed New York City that startled her.

“’Old New York is fast disappearing,'” Abbott observed, according to the Museum of Modern Art. “‘At almost any point on Manhattan Island, the sweep of one’s vision can take in the dramatic contrasts of the old and the new and the bold foreshadowing of the future. This dynamic quality should be caught and recorded immediately in a documentary interpretation of New York City.'”

Abbott became the one to document the city’s endangered spaces, securing funding in 1935 ($140 per month) from the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program that employed and paid artists for their work.

Keep in mind that Abbott embarked on her project several decades before McSorley’s (above and below, 1940) was forced by court order to admit women in 1970. Because of the no-females rule, the owner allowed Abbott to take only two photos, stated a 2004 Newsday article.

Abbott went on to publish many of her photos from this time in her book Changing New York, which presented documentary-style, realist images from all across the 1930s city.

Her two McSorley’s images didn’t make it into the book. But I’m still curious about the customers she photographed. Who were these men—some with their backs turned away from the camera, perhaps in protest, others smiling and posing?

Joseph Mitchell offers some idea. Mitchell was The New Yorker writer who penned evocative stories about Gotham’s oddballs and eccentrics, and that included the denizens of McSorley’s. In a 1940s dispatch titled “The Old House at Home” (the original name of the tavern), he described the kind of diverse clientele that drinks there today.

“It includes mechanics from the many garages in the neighborhood, salesmen from the restaurant-supply houses on Cooper Square, truck drivers from Wanamaker’s, interns [sic] from Bellevue, students from Cooper Union, clerks from the row of second-hand bookshops north of Astor Place, and men with tiny pensions who live in hotels on the Bowery but are above drinking on the street.”

Yet the “backbone” of McSorley’s, according to Mitchell, “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.”

These men were old enough to know John McSorley, the Irish immigrant who opened the bar in 1854. “They refer to him as Old John and 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,” wrote Mitchell.

The regulars are known as “the steadies,” wrote Mitchell, and they “shuffle in” in mid-morning. “The majority are retired laborers and small businessmen. They prefer McSorley’s to their homes.” (Below photo, from 2015)

Mitchell paints a portrait of the steadies as forgotten men. “Only a few of the old men have enough interest in the present to read newspapers. These patrons sit up front, to get the light that comes through the grimy street windows. When they grow tired of reading, they stare for hours into the street. There is always something worth looking at on Seventh Street.

“In summer they sit in the back room, which is as cool as a cellar. In winter they grab the chairs nearest the stove and sit in them, as motionless as barnacles, until around six, when they yawn, stretch, and start for home, insulated with ale against the dreadful loneliness of the old.”

[Top two photos: Berenice Abbott/NYPL Digital Collections; third photo: MOMA; fourth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth photo: MCNY X2010.11.5266; sixth photo: John Rooney/AP/REX/Shutterstock via The Daily Beast]

Seventh Avenue as a dark, mysterious canyon

If you’ve never imagined New York as a concrete canyon, this 1935 photo by Berenice Abbott just might change your thinking.

Abbott manages to turn utilitarian 35th Street—not exactly the city’s most picturesque east-west thoroughfare—into a river carrying vehicles and pedestrians surrounded by the shadowy cliffs of buildings.

It looks like Abbott aimed her camera in the Garment District. MOMA’s caption for the photo mistakenly says this is Seventh Avenue at 35th Street, but smart Ephemeral readers pointed out that MOMA had the caption backwards.

The Fall River Line pier: Fulton and West Streets?

Did Fulton Street once run all the way to the Hudson River?

It must have, based on information gleaned from this undated postcard of the lower Manhattan skyline.

The Fall River Line, a steamboat between New York and Massachusetts, ran until 1937. Pier 14 was located at the foot of Fulton and West Streets, according to this 1938 Berenice Abbott photo of the street side of the pier.

And a check of an early 1960s Manhattan map confirms it: Fulton Street’s western end must have been demolished later that decade to build the World Trade Center.

When Lower Manhattan had a “Radio Row”

The Garment District, Flower District, Swing Street—the city has always been chopped into specialty areas.

And in the 1920s with the rise of broadcast radio, Cortlandt and Dey Streets were home to Manhattan’s radio district, aka Radio Row.

The row was more than that; dozens of shops lined local streets.

“Cortlandt once ran from the Hudson River up to Broadway, but now only one block—from Trinity Place to Broadway—remains,” wrote The New York Times in 1981.

“The rest, displaced by the World Trade Center, was a rabbit warren of electrical shops with books on radios stacked up on sidewalks and piles of tubes, condensers, old radios and old radio cabinets set alongside.”

Radio Row adapted to changing times in the 1950s. Stores that sold televisions and hi-fis moved in alongside the radio shops.

Its demise had little to do with the fall of radio and instead can be blamed on the World Trade Center.

In 1961, politicians called for the use of eminent domain to raze Radio Row’s small blocks so the Twin Towers could be built.

Radio Row’s store owners tried fighting it out in court. They lost, getting just $3,000 each from the state to go elsewhere.

[Top photo: Radio Row in the 1960s, copyright Antique Broadcast Classified. Right: a crowd gathers on November 22, 1963, after JFK is assassinated in this Library of Congress photo]

The East Side’s long-gone Gas House District

“The gas-house district is not a pleasant place in the daytime, much less at night,” explained a 1907 article in Outlook magazine.

That’s partly because the neighborhood, centered in the teens and 20s on the far east side of Manhattan, looked pretty grim: dominated by giant gas storage tanks lining the East River.

The streets didn’t smell so great either, considering that the tanks sprang leaks occasionally.

The grittiness of the Gas House District kept tenement rents low and made it a magnet for poor immigrant Irish in the mid-19th century, then Germans, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Armenians by the 1920s.

But it also attracted a bad element. Crime was high, and it was home base of the Gas House Gang, which committed a reported 30 holdups every night on East 18th Street alone around the turn of the century.

Change was coming though. By the 1930s, most of the storage tanks were gone, and the development of the then-East River Drive opened up the ugly streets to development.

Soon, it was deemed the perfect place to put Met Life’s new middle-class housing developments, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

In 1945, 3,000 families were moved out of the Gas House District, their homes bulldozed. By 1947, the neighborhood was paved over and lost to the ages.

[Right photo: East 20th Street looking toward First Avenue by Berenice Abbott, 1938]

A look at Manhattan’s first apartment building

For much of the city’s history, any New York household that could afford it lived in their own single-family home. The idea of sharing a residence with other people? Very declasse.

But in 1870, a developer named Rutherford Stuyvesant tried something new with his Stuyvesant Flats at 142 East 18th Street, near Third Avenue.

Inspired by new multi-family buildings that were all the rage in Paris, Stuyvesant spent $100,000 on his five-story structure, hiring architect Richard Morris Hunt to design 16 apartments and four artists’ studios.

First dubbed a folly, these middle-class rentals near chic Union Square caught on quick. They ushered in demand for more apartment-style dwellings.

“Although lacking an elevator, the building had running (cold) water, a novelty at the time,” states Changing New York, which features a photo of Stuyvesant Flats by Berenice Abbott in 1936 (above).

“Full occupancy followed, and “Parisian Flats” came into vogue. In later years, steam heat and electricity were added, and the building remained fully occupied until its 1958 demolition for Gramercy Green (above right), a 14-story building with 240 apartments.”

The street vendors who fed a growing city

Cupcake trucks, shawarma stands, dumpling carts—New York’s street grub has come a long way from the wares vendors pushed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The potatoes for sale in this 1937 photo, at left, don’t look too appetizing. But it was the height of the Great Depression, and a hot spud for a nickel may not have been such a bad deal.

The lowly hot pretzel is still a popular street eat. But at least vendors no longer have to tote them around in wicker baskets, as this man is doing in a 1900 photo.

Here’s an early hot dog merchant, taken in 1936 by Berenice Abbott. She shot it at the corner of Moore and West Streets, the Lower West Side then but Tribeca today.

There must be a lot of ice in that rickety gizmo to keep the lemonade cold all day.

A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it alley in the Village

Sharp-eyed New Yorkers know about the many courtyards and mews of Greenwich Village, such as Patchin Place, MacDougal Alley, and Charles Lane.

But most residents don’t notice Milligan Place, a triangular alley on Sixth Avenue near West 10th.

No wonder: Milligan Place has only four buildings, all on the far left. The tiny gate that leads inside is as narrow as a shop door.

It’s a lovely glimpse of the old Village, when homes were built along streets derived from cow paths and streams, not the boxy street grid.

Milligan Place is named for Daniel Milligan, whose home once stood on the site. His daughter married Aaron Patchin.

Patchin named the larger alley around the corner for himself and built the three-story homes here around 1850.

Milligan Place commands high rents now. But for most of the 20th century, it was considered a backwater.

“Down in Milligan Place, the little hole in the wall on lower Sixth Avenue, where babies yowl and black cats prowl and pigeons coo in unison with the music of the elevated, and the soul is untrammeled and free, there is a toy shop,” noted The New York Times in 1915.

[Above left photo of Milligan Place in 1936 by Berenice Abbott. Above right, Milligan Place today]

Sixth Avenue and 28th Street: 1938 vs. 2010

“Ride on the Open Air Elevated” commands the side of this Sixth Avenue El station—an attempt to lure New Yorkers away from the IND underground.

Berenice Abbott took this photo in November 1938. The 28th Street station had already closed and was slated for demolition, notes Changing New York, as was the entire Sixth Avenue elevated line . . . and eventually all the els across the city.

Here’s the same view up Sixth Avenue today. This stretch, center of the shrinking flower district, is open and appears wider and brighter.

Nothing from the 1938 photo looks similar, except the decorative border around the building on the left that’s now a McDonald’s.

Could it be the same building with the top floors sheared off? Possibly; back then, this McDonald’s was a Child’s restaurant.

461-463 West 18th Street: then and now

In 1938, Berenice Abbott took this photo of two circa-1880s stables on far West 18th Street.

“In Abbott’s day, the bar-restaurant at 463 West 18th Street was attached to a corner liquor store at 130 Tenth Avenue,” explains Abbott’s Changing New York.

“These businesses and the junk shop at 461 served the seamen and dockworkers of the still active West Side waterfront.” 

Today, the lovely old stables look very much the same. albeit cleaned up and restored. French restaurant La Luncheonette is located on the ground floor of 463, while 461 is a private residence.

And the West Side waterfront? Anchored by Chelsea Piers, it’s the site of lots of leisurely jogging/biking/strolling.