The wooden table tops with generations of names scratched into them have been replaced, and signs posted on the back brick wall remind patrons that smoking is forbidden.
But the two little rooms of the Corner Bistro maintain that time-traveling Village taverny feel.
Maybe it’s the pressed tin ceiling that could date back to 1875, when the tiny space on the first floor of 331 West Fourth Street was a saloon run by a man named John Ebers (the site of an interesting crime, below).
Or perhaps it’s the old-timey clock in the corner or the long carved mahogany bar, which could have been installed in the early 20th century, when the Corner Bistro says they began serving customers (above, in 1933).
But the Corner Bistro resounds with what I imagine as the feel of the Village of the 1950s and 1960s, when locals and poets and artists and the men who worked the Hudson River docks went there for alcohol and camaraderie in a neighborhood that hosted lots of corner bars with the same mix, like the Lion’s Head and the White Horse.
To get a sense of what the place must have been like back then, read what the former longtime owner, Bill O’Donnell, had to say about the heyday of the Bistro, as regulars called it.
O’Donnell gave this interview to WestView News in 2012. After college and time spent at sea on board a ship, O’Donnell became a bartender at a place on Greenwich Avenue called Jack Barry’s.
“A few years later, one of the two owners of the Corner Bistro—his name was Curtis—wanted to sell his interest,” he told WestView.
“I scrambled together some money from my brothers and me and that’s how I began at the Corner Bistro. I took over 50 percent interest in February 1967 and ten years later bought the other 50 percent.”
The Bistro back then was “a mixed clientele and an eclectic crowd. You had neighborhood people, beatniks, some longshoremen, and tourists. You also had aspiring actors, writers, poets and the intellectual types. So it was a collision of cultures and sometimes it didn’t mix so well!”
“There seemed to be a lot more drinking then. Today you can’t do anything in a bar because, as soon as someone belches too loudly, people are on their cell phones!”
O’Donnell created the iconic Bistro burger, which Mimi Sheraton gave a rave review in the New York Times in 1978.
“The Bistro still represents something of the past and people like that,” he said. “It’s reminiscent of old New York and it’s maintained its integrity.”
[Second photo: 1933, NYPL; third image: 1875, New York Times]
Ephemeral New York 