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]