The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Although by no means a handshaker, Old John knew many prominent men. One of his closest friends was Peter Cooper, president of the North American Telegraph Company and founder of Cooper Union, which is a half-block west of the saloon. Mr. Cooper, in his declining years, spent so many afternoons in the back room philosophizing with the workingmen that he was given a chair of his own; it was equipped with an inflated rubber cushion. (The chair is still there; each April 4th for a number of years after Mr. Cooper’s death, on April 4, 1883, it was draped with black cloth.) Also, like other steadfast customers, Mr. Cooper had a pewter mug on which his name had been engraved with an icepick. He gave the saloon a life-sized portrait of himself, which hangs over the mantel in the back room. It is a rather appropriate decoration, because, since the beginning of prohibition, McSorley’s has been the official saloon of Cooper Union students. Sometimes a sentimental student will stand beneath the portrait and drink a toast to Mr. Cooper.

  Old John had a remarkable passion for memorabilia. For years he saved the wishbones of Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys and strung them on a rod connecting the pair of gas lamps over the bar; the dusty bones are invariably the first thing a new customer gets inquisitive about. Not long ago, a Johnny-come-lately infuriated one of the bartenders by remarking, “Maybe the old boy believed in voodoo.” Old John decorated the partition between barroom and back room with banquet menus, autographs, starfish shells, theatre programs, political posters, and worn-down shoes taken off the hoofs of various race and brewery horses. Above the entrance to the back room he hung a shillelagh and a sign: “be good or begone.” On one wall of the barroom he placed portraits of horses, steamboats, Tammany bosses, jockeys, actors, singers, and assassinated statesmen; there are many excellent portraits of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. On the same wall he hung framed front pages of old newspapers; one, from the London Times for June 22, 1815, contains a paragraph on the beginning of the battle of Waterloo, in the lower right-hand corner, and another, from the New York Herald of April 15, 1865, has a single-column story on the shooting of Lincoln. He blanketed another wall with lithographs and steel engravings. One depicts Garfield’s deathbed. Another is entitled “The Great Fight.” It was between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan, both bare-knuckled, at Still Pond Heights, Maryland, in 1849. It was won by Hyer in sixteen rounds, and the prize was $10,000. The judges wore top hats. The brass title tag on another engraving reads, “Rescue of Colonel Thomas J. Kelly and Captain Timothy Deacy by Members of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood from the English Government at Manchester, England, September 18, 1867.” A copy of the Emancipation Proclamation is on this wall; so, almost inevitably, is a facsimile of Lincoln’s saloon licence. An engraving of Washington and his generals hangs next to an engraving of a session of the Great Parliament of Ireland. Eventually Old John covered practically every square inch of wall space between wainscot and ceiling with pictures and souvenirs. They are still in good condition, although spiders have strung webs across many of them. New customers get up on chairs and spend hours studying them.

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  Although Old John did not consider himself retired until just a few years before he died, he gave up day-in-and-day-out duty back of the bar around 1890 and made his son, William, head bartender. Bill McSorley was the kind of person who minds his own business vigorously. He inherited every bit of his father’s surliness and not much of his affability. The father was by no means a lush, but the son carried temperance to an extreme; he drank nothing but tap water and tea, and bragged about it. He did dip a little snuff. He was so solemn that before he was thirty several customers had settled into the habit of calling him Old Bill. He worshipped his father, but no one was aware of the profundity of his worship until Old John died. After the funeral, Bill locked the saloon, went upstairs to the family flat, pulled the shutters to, and did not come out for almost a week. Finally, on a Sunday morning, gaunt and silent, he came downstairs with a hammer and a screwdriver and spent the day painstakingly securing his father’s pictures and souvenirs to the walls; they had been hung hit or miss on wires, and customers had a habit of taking them down. Subsequently he commissioned a Cooper Union art teacher to make a small painting of Old John from a photograph. Bill placed it on the wall back of the bar and thereafter kept a hooded electric light burning above it, a pious custom that is still observed.

  Throughout his life Bill’s principal concern was to keep McSorley’s exactly as it had been in his father’s time. When anything had to be changed or repaired, it appeared to pain him physically. For twenty years the bar sagged in the middle like a plough mule’s back. A carpenter warned him repeatedly that it was about to collapse; finally, in 1933, he told the carpenter to go ahead and prop it up. While the work was in progress he sat at a table in the back room with his head in his hands and got so upset he could not eat for several days. In the same year the smoke- and cobweb-encrusted paint on the ceiling began to flake off and float to the floor. After customers complained that they were afraid the flakes they found in their ale might strangle them to death, he grudgingly had the ceiling repainted. In 1925 he had to switch to earthenware mugs; most of the pewter ones had been stolen by souvenir hunters. In the same year a coin-box telephone, which he would never answer himself, was installed in the back room. These were about the only major changes he ever allowed. Occasionally one of the pictures his father had hung would fall off the wall and the glass would break, and he would fill in the gap. His contributions include a set of portraits of the wives of Presidents through the first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, a poster of Barney Oldfield in a red racing car, and a poem called “The Man Behind the Bar.” He knew this poem by heart and particularly liked the last verse:

  When St. Peter sees him coming he will leave the gates ajar,

  For he knows he’s had his hell on earth, has the man behind the bar.

  As a businessman, Bill was anachronous; he hated banks, cash registers, bookkeeping, and salesmen. If the saloon became crowded, he would close up early, saying, “I’m getting too confounded much trade in here.” Agents for the brewery from which he bought his ale often tried to get him to open a checking account; he stubbornly continued to pay his ale bills with currency, largely silver. He would count out the money four or five times and hand it to the driver in a paper bag. Bill was an able bartender. He understood ale; he knew how to draw it and how to keep it, and his bar pipes were always clean. In warm weather he made a practice of chilling the mugs in a tub of ice; even though a customer nursed an ale a long time, the chilled earthenware mug kept it cool. Except during prohibition, the rich, wax-colored ale sold in McSorley’s always has come from the Fidelio Brewery on First Avenue; the brewery was founded two years before the saloon. In 1934, Bill sold this brewery the right to call its ale McSorley’s Cream Stock and gave it permission to use Old John’s picture on the label; around the picture is the legend “As brewed for McSorley’s Old Ale House.” During prohibition McSorley’s ale was produced mysteriously in a row of washtubs in the cellar by a retired brewer named Barney Kelly, who would come down three times a week from his home in the Bronx. On these days the smell of malt and wet hops would be strong in the place. Kelly’s product was raw and extraordinarily emphatic, and Bill made a practice of weakening it with near beer. In fact, throughout prohibition Bill referred to his ale as near beer, a euphemism which greatly amused the customers. One night a policeman who knew Bill stuck his head in the door and said, “I seen a old man up at the corner wrestling with a truck horse. I asked him what he’d been drinking and he said, ‘Near beer in McSorley’s.’ ” The prohibition ale cost fifteen cents, or two mugs for a quarter. Ale now costs a dime a mug.

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  Bill was big and thick-shouldered, but he did not look strong; he had a shambling walk and a haggard face and always appeared to be convalescing from something. He wore rusty-black suits and black bow ties; his shirts, however, were surprisingly fancy—they were silk, with candy stripes. He was nearsighted, the
saloon was always dimly lit, and his most rigid conviction was that drink should not be sold to minors; consequently he would sometimes peer across the bar at a small-sized adult and say, “Won’t sell you nothing, bud. Get along home, where you belong.” Once he stared for a long time at a corner of the saloon and suddenly shouted, “Take your foot off that table!” Evidently he had been staring at a shadow; no one was sitting in the corner. Bill was tyrannical. Reading a newspaper, he would completely disregard a line of customers waiting to be served. If a man became impatient and demanded a drink, Bill would look up angrily and shout obscene remarks at him in a high, nasal voice. Such treatment did not annoy customers but made them snicker; they thought he was funny. In fact, despite Bill’s bad disposition, many customers were fond of him. They had known him since they were young men together and had grown accustomed to his quirks. They even took a wry sort of pride in him, and when they said he was the gloomiest, or the stingiest, man in the Western Hemisphere there was boastfulness in their voices; the more eccentric he became, the more they respected him. Sometimes, for the benefit of a newcomer, one of these customers would show Bill off, shouting, “Hey, Bill, lend me fifty dollars!” or “Hey, Bill, there ain’t no pockets in a shroud!” Such remarks usually provoked an outburst of gamy epithets. Then the customer would turn proudly to the newcomer and say, “See?” When prohibition came, Bill simply disregarded it. He ran wide open. He did not have a peephole door, nor did he pay protection, but McSorley’s was never raided; the fact that it was patronized by a number of Tammany politicians and minor police officials probably gave it immunity.

  Bill never had a fixed closing hour but locked up as soon as he began to feel sleepy, which was usually around ten o’clock. Just before closing he would summon everybody to the bar and buy a round. This had been his father’s custom and he faithfully carried it on, even though it seemed to hurt him to do so. If the customers were slow about finishing the final drink, he would cough fretfully once or twice, then drum on the bar with both fists and say, “Now, see here, gents! I’m under no obligod-damnation to stand here all night while you baby them drinks.” Whenever Bill completely lost his temper he would jump up and down and moan piteously. One night in the winter of 1924 a feminist from Greenwich Village put on trousers, a man’s topcoat, and a cap, stuck a cigar in her mouth, and entered McSorley’s. She bought an ale, drank it, removed her cap, and shook her long hair down on her shoulders. Then she called Bill a male chauvinist, yelled something about the equality of the sexes, and ran out. When Bill realized he had sold a drink to a woman, he let out a cross between a moan and a bellow and began to jump up and down as if his heels were on fire. “She was a woman!” he yelled. “She was a goddamn woman!”

  Bill was deaf, or pretended to be; even so, ordinary noises seemed to bother him unduly. The method he devised to keep the saloon tranquil was characteristic of him. He bought a fire-alarm gong similar to those used in schools and factories and screwed it to the seven-foot-tall icebox behind the bar. If someone started a song, or if the old men sitting around the stove began to yell at each other, he would shuffle over to the gong and give the rope a series of savage jerks. The gong is there yet and is customarily sounded at a quarter to midnight as a warning that closing time is imminent; the customers grab their ears when it goes off. Bill was consistent in his aversion to noise; he didn’t even like the sound of his own voice. He was able to go for days without speaking, answering all questions with a snort or a grunt. A man who drank in McSorley’s steadily for sixteen years once said that in that time Bill spoke exactly four intelligible words to him. They were “Curiosity killed the cat.” The man had politely asked Bill to tell him the history of a pair of rusty convict shackles on the wall. He learned later that a customer who had fought in the Civil War had brought them back from a Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia, and had given them to Old John as a souvenir.

  Bill would sometimes take an inexplicable liking to a customer. Around 1911 a number of painters began hanging out in McSorley’s. Among them were John Sloan, George Luks, Glenn O. Coleman, and Stuart Davis, the abstractionist. They were all good painters, they did not put on airs, and the workingmen in the saloon accepted them as equals. One night, Hippolyte Havel, the anarchist, came in with the painters. Havel was a long-haired, myopic, gentle-mannered Czech whose speeches often got him in trouble with the police. Even Bill was curious about him. “What’s that crazy-looking feller do for a living?” he asked one of the painters. Playing safe, the painter said Havel was a politician, more or less. Havel liked the place and became a steady customer. Most nights, after making a fiery speech in Union Square, he would hurry down to McSorley’s. To the amazement of the old-timers, a strong friendship grew up between him and Bill, who was a Tammany Democrat and an utter reactionary; no one was ever able to figure out the basis of the friendship. Bill called the anarchist Hippo and would let him have credit up to two dollars; other customers were not allowed to charge so much as a nickle cigar. Bill had an extremely vague idea about Havel’s politics. Charles Francis Murphy, the Tammany boss, occasionally dropped in, and once Bill told Havel he was going to speak a good word to the boss for him. “Maybe he’ll put you in line for something,” Bill said. The anarchist, who thought no man was as foul as a Tammany boss, smiled and thanked him. A police captain once took it upon himself to warn Bill against Havel. “You better keep your eyes on that long-haired nut,” he said. “Why?” asked Bill. The question annoyed the police captain. “Hell fire, man,” he said, “Havel’s an anarchist! He’s in favor of blowing up every bank in the country.” “So am I,” said Bill. Bill’s friendship for Havel was extraordinary in every way. As a rule, he reserved his kindness for cats. He owned as many as eighteen at once and they had the run of the saloon. He fed them on bull livers put through a sausage grinder and they became enormous. When it came time to feed them, he would leave the bar, no matter how brisk business was, and bang on the bottom of a tin pan; the fat cats would come loping up, like leopards, from all corners of the saloon.

  Bill had been married but was childless, and he used to say, “When I go, this place goes with me.” In March, 1936, however, he changed his mind—why, no one knows—and, to the surprise of the veteran customers, sold both saloon and tenement to Daniel O’Connell, an old policeman, who, since 1900, had spent most of his leisure at a table in the back room. O’Connell retired from the Department two days before he purchased the saloon. He was the kind of man of whom people say, “If he can’t speak a good word about you, he won’t speak a bad one.” He was almost as proud of the saloon’s traditions as Bill and willingly promised he would make no changes; that was one of the conditions of the sale. Almost from the day Bill sold out, his health began to fail. He took a room in the house of a relative in Queens. Sometimes, in the afternoon, if the weather was good, he would shuffle into the bar, a sallow, disenchanted old man, and sit in the Peter Cooper chair with his knotty hands limp in his lap. For hours he would sit and stare at the painting of Old John. The customers were sure he was getting ready to die, but when he came in they would say, “You looking chipper today, Billy boy,” or something like that. He seemed grateful for such remarks. He rarely spoke, but once he turned to a man he had known for forty years and said, “Times have changed, McNally.” “You said it, Bill,” McNally replied. Then, as if afraid he had been sentimental, Bill coughed, spat, and said, irrelevantly, “The bread you get these days, it ain’t fit to feed a dog.” On the night of September 21, 1938, barely thirty-one months after he quit drawing ale, he died in his sleep. As close as his friends could figure it, his age was seventy-six.

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  The retired policeman made a gentle saloonkeeper. Unlike Bill, he would never throw a quarrelsome drunk into the street but would try to sober him up with soup. “If a man gets crazy on stuff I sold him, I can’t kick him out,” he said one day. “That would be evading my responsibility.” He was proprietor for less than four years. He died last December 8th a
nd left the property to a daughter, Mrs. Dorothy O’Connell Kirwan. A young woman with great respect for tradition, Mrs. Kirwan has chosen to remain completely in the background. At first customers feared that she would renovate the place, but they now realize that this fear was groundless. “I know exactly how my father felt about McSorley’s,” Mrs. Kirwan said recently, “and no changes will be made. So long as I am owner, the rule against women customers will remain in force.” She herself has visited the saloon only twice, and then on Sunday nights after hours. She appointed a brother-in-law, Joe Nida, manager and retained the old bartenders, Eddie Mullins and Joe Martoccio. Mike, the cook, a Ukrainian, was also retained. The most important member of the staff of McSorley’s, however, is not actually an employee. His name is Tommy Kelly, and he is called Kelly the Floorwalker. He is not related to Barney Kelly, the prohibition brewer. Since around 1904, Kelly has acted as a sort of volunteer potboy and master of ceremonies. During prohibition, Bill had him on the payroll, but most of the time he has worked for the pleasure of it. When business is brisk, he totes mugs from the bar to the tables; also, he makes an occasional trip to the butcher for Mike. In the winter he keeps a fire going. When he shows up, around 8:30 a.m., he is just an average, sad-eyed little man with a hangover, but by noon lukewarm ale has given him a certain stateliness; by six he is in such a good humor that he stands near the door and shakes hands with incoming customers just as if he were the proprietor. Strangers think he is the proprietor and call him Mr. McSorley. Technically, Kelly is a truck-driver, but he always says business is slow in his line. Once, for a brief period, he took a job as night clerk in a funeral parlor in Brooklyn, quitting because a corpse spoke to him. “This dead guy told me to take my hat off indoors,” Kelly says. In one way or another, death pops up repeatedly in Kelly’s talk. Each morning, Mullins, the bartender, asks him how he feels. If he doesn’t feel so good, he says, “I’m dead, but I just won’t lie still.” Otherwise he says, “For a old drunk with one leg in the grave and not a penny to his name, I can’t complain.”