My McSorley's Story

The plague of 2020 is raging and we are all doing our part by cowering behind locked doors, avoiding social contact and watching our backs and step to elude an invisible enemy that has been haunting our dreams and fueling a paranoia that relegates almost every unmasked stranger you pass in the streets as a potential vector of pestilence to be avoided.   It has been a strange and disorienting time best treated with alcohol and withdrawal into the safe space of introspection and reminiscence,  time to look toward the past for comfort.  Been missing NYC like crazy and thinking about my times there.  This story about an afternoon at McSorley's a long time ago has drifted into my thoughts lately.

Anyone who has spent any time drinking at McSorley's probably has a story.  This is mine.

Had my first beers here in 1967  with my college friend Billy Eisman (Green man) toward the end of the pre-historic era when McSorley's was still a men's only bar and most of those men were either lonely old guys with no place to go spending fading afternoons nursing beers till it was dinnertime, local craftsmen and small industry workers stopping in for a quick one after work, and college students from NYU or Cooper Union sharing deep thoughts or bawdy tales late into the evening in the dimly lit, creaky cobwebbed mustiness of what was then one of countless beer joints in NYC at a time when working people still lived, worked, and drank in the city.  It was still a time when bars like McSorley's did not serve women and for the most part they had no interest in such places.

Until 1970 or so, when the women's liberation went to court and it was adjudicated that it was their constitutional right to invade the sanctity of a wide variety of men's only establishments and so it was that for the first time in 120 years or so, women could belly up to the bar and a glass of McSorley's pale or dark beer, the only 2 choices available you could get there.  I have the feeling that most of them didn't even care that much for beer, but that wasn't the point.  At the time the world there was turned on its head, and there was still only one bathroom, basically a long galvanized trough about 6 feet long to piss in, and one toilet that you hoped you wouldn't need the use, because if you saw it you'd know why.  That would have to change, but the management was in no rush.

In the summer of 1970, me and my friend Eugene were in the city to an Eisenstein double feature at the Janus theater, Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky.  Loved the power and groundbreaking cinematography of Potemkin, had trouble sitting through Nevsky which came second and felt a little or maybe a lot too long and slow.  Eugene was not a city guy but we needed a place to go and talk and McSorley's was close by so in we went and had some beers.  By this time women were allowed in and although I didn't really notice, at the table next to us in the corner of the front room were 2 kind of intellectual looking guys and a nice looking blond haired woman.  Somewhere around the time Eugene and I were finishing our 3rd or 4th beers, a group of 4 or 5 guys who looked like high school football players from New Jersey, which was no place you wanted to be from back then, came in and sat at the table next to us, which placed me and Eugene directly at the middle table of these two diverse sets of human beings.  For a while all was well.  The Peter Paul and Mary group were engaged in conversation and the football players were swilling beer and starting to get loud.  Soon they were becoming quite verbally abusive toward the blond haired woman who they thought had no right to be at McSorley's and were about as crude as you might imagine in their comments toward and about her which became hard to ignore, so having had enough, the blond stood up told them to go fuck themselves, and heaved her mug at their table, bathing us in beer and hitting one of the football players in the head.

As a well practiced front line, the players came howling over our table like marines storming a hill, knocking our beers all over us and were on top of the threesome in a flash, inflicting minor damage on the group before things were broken up and they were all thrown out.  Eugene and I were happy to have come through this unscathed and to have our beers replaced and to have lived through a bit of NYC history when women earned their hard fought right to have a beer or three at McSorley's.  A few years ago, Jackie and I were down town and although she doesn't care for beer, wanted to see the place, so we went.  It was quite crowded with a young crowd of NYC up and comers who were there because it has become a place to be.  We found a spot at the end of a long communal table of youngsters and talked.  Somehow it came up in conversation that I mentioned that there was a time long ago that women were not allowed in McSorley's, only old lonely solitary men nursing beers killing time and local workmen knocking back a few for the road,  It really was quiet back then and a little depressing.   They had no idea, and told me I was a real historian.  I said no, I'm just old.

This last photo is of me in the late 80's when you could still have a smoke wherever you wanted.  After a long day of cycling through the city taking pictures I met up with Brian Malloy at the end of the day at McSorley's.  In this photo, I happen to be sitting at the very table in the corner of the front room where the intellectual threesome was sitting on that fateful day so long ago.  That shifty looking guy to my left was some Russian who was talking to me and asking a lot of questions that made me feel interrogated, like he was looking for some sort of  nefarious info, I have no idea what, but felt relieved when he got up and left.  We left soon after for the long drive back to Albany.

Pablo