MIXING EXCELLENT DRINKS
One thing Mark Twain was wrong about: He considered keeping a saloon to be “the cheapest and easiest way to become an influential man and be looked up to.” Tell that to the New York barkeeper George Augustus Sala described in an 1853 article in Dickens’s popular journal, Household Words:
The bar keeper is a scholar and a gentleman, as well as an accomplished artist, captain of a fire company, and, I believe, a man of considerable property, and unapproachable skill in compounding and arranging these beverages, and making them not only exquisite to the taste, but delightful to the view. His drinks are pictures. [Here I’ve omitted a very long and thirst-provoking paean to one of this paragon’s “Fiscal Agents,” a once-popular drink for which no formula has been recovered; for what it’s worth, it appears to be a fancy Julep.] The barkeeper and his assistants possess the agility of acrobats and the prestidigitative skill of magicians. They are all bottle conjurors.—They toss the drinks about; they throw brimful glasses over their heads; they shake the saccharine, glacial and alcoholic ingredients in their long tin tubes; they scourge eggs and cream into froth; they send bumpers shooting down the bar from one end to the other without spilling a drop; they give change, talk politics, tell quaint anecdotes, swear strange oaths, smoke, chew and expectorate with astonishing celerity and dexerity. I should like to be a barkeeper, if I were clever enough.
Admittedly, Sala might be laying it on a bit thick, but only a bit (and knowing Sala, who always displayed a detailed curiosity in the American mixological arts, he was only half kidding about wanting to be a barkeeper). If the efforts of Willard and Cato and Shed Sterling had established the basic techniques and procedures of mixing individual drinks a la minute, the mixologists of the 1850s lit the afterburners. Clearly, to preside over a bar like this—although the Brooklyn Eagle identified it as the St. Nicholas, the description could apply just as well to the Metropolitan—one needed formidable skills. But one also had to be a sporting character of wide experience and infinite jest; as the Chicago Tribune noted in 1870, a good barkeeper
becomes part and parcel of a saloon, knows all the customers, is on familiar terms with them, learns to call them Tom, Dick and Harry, knows their weaknesses for a particular tipple, and mixes it to suit their tastes. . . . Sporting news is his delight. He is learned on the base ball nines, pretends to forecast the result of the coming prize fight, talks wisely of the last “chicken dispute,” and criticizes actors and actresses with a happy confidence in his own opinions. He is a two-legged sporting journal with a dramatic column . . .
Jerry Thomas was just that. For the next eighteen years, all those skills and the jest that went with them would keep him in the limelight as America’s most famous bartender.
His run at the top started off auspiciously enough when, after a couple years at the Metropolitan and a quick sporting jaunt to London (the Heenan-Sayers fight; according to what he told Alan Dale, this was only the first of many visits), the thirty-year-old Thomas opened his own place, just a couple of blocks up from the Metropolitan at 622 Broadway. This elaborate establishment was in the same building as Laura Keene’s New Theater and probably, as was customary, attached to it. Certainly La Keene (the most popular actress of her day, and the only one to run her own theater company) displayed no conspicuous Temperance proclivities that would have prevented the usual connection being made. In which case Thomas might have noticed, one night in 1861, an intense, dreamy-eyed man on the edge of middle age pop in for a quick Gin Cocktail or Santa Cruz Sour. Some old friends of Stephen Foster’s were in town from Pittsburgh and had managed to extricate the songwriter, then just beginning his final slide into destitution and death, from the East Side liquor groceries where he was killing himself on adulterate rum. After dinner at the St. Nicholas, they treated him to a play at Laura Keene’s. I can’t imagine Foster handling the second half without a bracer.
Foster wasn’t the only celebrity to come within the Professor’s orbit at 622. In October 1860, Queen Victoria’s son Edward, the Prince of Wales, visited New York. The reception he received was overwhelming—for a free people, Americans of the day were shocking royalists. Poor Edward’s hotel, the Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third and Fifth, was so besieged by crowds that he was essentially trapped there.
In 1902, however, an old newshound by the name of George Forrester Williams published an interesting story to the effect that one night during the prince’s visit, he and Mortimer Thomson, a fellow scribe who had achieved a fair degree of fame for the dialect humor he wrote under the pseudonym “Doesticks,” managed to achieve a private audience with His Royal Highness. Upon perceiving how miserable the man was to be trapped in his hotel, they suggested sneaking him out the back way for a quick tour of the neighborhood. He immediately assented (for more on the prince, see the Prince of Wales’s Cocktail, in Chapter 7). Since the crowd was watching the front—royalty doesn’t use the back door—things went off without a hitch. The trio stalked briskly down Twenty-third Street toward Sixth Avenue, a street of saloons, gambling-houses, minstrel theaters, dance halls, and oyster houses. Real New York. As they turned up Sixth, Doesticks posed the question: “Have you ever drunk a mint julep, sir?”
No, the prince had not. Yes, he would. And here’s the kicker: “Thomson led the prince into a famous barroom presided over by the no less famous Jerry Thomas, one of the greatest artists in his line or time.” His Royal Highness watched the “elaborate and picturesque style of manufacture practiced by the mixers of elixirs in those antebellum days with profound curiosity and admiration,” took a sip, said, “Why, it’s only a lemonade, after all,” revised his opinion as the Julep-glow suffused him, and pronounced it “very, very nice.” End of anecdote. Now, if there were ever two people who should have met, they were the Prince of Wales and Jerry Thomas; they had much in common, from a deep curiosity into the composition of drinks to an interest in the operation of the rules of probability to an unshakable personal dignity leavened with humor. But the details, the details. What was Thomas doing up there on Sixth Avenue when his bar down Broadway was open? And why is there no other record of this bar? And, most of all, what the hell was he doing putting lemon in his Julep? Other than that, the story is possible. But Williams might not have told the whole of it (and, for the record, there are plenty of lemon Juleps to be found in the literature).
But according to one Richard Doolittle, a New York businessman, the outing was rather wilder than Williams, who has things ending quickly and sedately, let on. As Doolittle recalled in 1892, the prince and his party ended up downtown, rather worse for the wear, and—as happens in these situations—got separated. “The heir to Britain’s throne wandered, unattended, into a . . . resort and proceeded to make things pretty lively,” whereupon “the bartender started in to squelch him, and would have done so effectually had I not taken charge of the roisterer and piloted him back to his party.”
Jerry Thomas’s bar was downtown, it should be noted, and I doubt he was disposed to take any guff from splificated customers, heirs to the throne or not.
It was while he was at 622 Broadway that Thomas did something no American bartender had ever done before and put the unruly mass of formulae that every skilled mixologist carried around in his head down on paper. Barkeepers tended to regard their recipes as trade secrets, not to be exposed to the vulgus profanum. For whatever reason, though, Jerry Thomas broke the mold. (Rather than clog things up here with a detailed discussion of his book, its genesis and its fortunes, I’ve put all that in Appendix I.) The book certainly didn’t hurt his star power, anyway, on the strength of which he was able to go to the Occidental in San Francisco in 1863, as we have seen. Why he would want to leave a thriving bar of his own to do so is another question. Perhaps the Leland brothers, who ran both that hotel and the Metropolitan and hence knew his work well, simply made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
But I suspect that there was more to it: In the summer of 1863, as the Civil War was raging, th
e draft came to New York, and Jerry Thomas was highly eligible. The sporting milieu he was a part of looked unkindly on the war to begin with, and a bolt-hole in San Francisco must have seemed pretty attractive. Even more attractive, however, was the vast and vulgar spectacle that was unfolding two hundred miles to the east in Virginia City, Nevada, where a city of thirty thousand had sprung up overnight on top of the massive mountain of silver known as the Comstock Lode. By 1864, Thomas was there, either (as local legend has it) at the famous Delta Saloon or at the Spalding Saloon on C Street, where the City Directory found him—or, of course, at both. Wherever he wielded his shaker, he would’ve known local newspaperman Samuel Clemens, who was then just beginning his literary career and didn’t think a Whiskey Cocktail would bite, much. Unfortunately, the Territorial Enterprise , Twain’s paper, burned in one of Virginia City’s frequent fires, and all its archives and most of its back issues with it.
In 1865, as soon as the shooting stopped, Jerry Thomas was back in New York, operating a saloon with his brother, George, at the very fashionable address of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, just south of Madison Square. The space, at 937 Broadway, was “a narrow strip about 15 feet wide and 150 feet deep,” as the New York Times described it, that ran through the block and had a second entrance on Fifth. “It was a great place,” the Professor recalled in 1882.
After two years our bar receipts ran $400 a day, and the way people used to drop in to look at Mr. Thomas Nast’s pictures was a pleasing thing to us, who stood ready to serve them with what they wished to drink when they were done. You remember the Hogarth prints, the full set, without mercy—the fine illustration on steel of Mr. and Mrs. Gyges that—what’s his name?—the father of history—Herodotus—tells about, and the oysters and rarebits, cooked special, to say nothing of the chops, and the fat and lean looking glasses (for the first time), and the tables that ran along all in a row, as cosy as chickens on a roost and not near so crowded.
Between the art and the drinks and the free lunch and the steaks and chops and the funhouse mirrors, for a few years there the Thomas brothers ran what was probably the most famous freestanding bar in America. According to an 1871 article in Appleton’s Magazine, it was a “favorite resort of the American jeunesse doreé” and, after the bar at the nearby Fifth Avenue Hotel, “probably the most frequented place after dark” in the city.
Things were so good that for once the Professor stayed put. In fact, in 1867 he even got married. Henrietta Bergh Waites, a New York City native, was a widow some five years younger than her husband with a teenage daughter, also named Henrietta. Before long, she had another child to take care of: Milton, or Minturn—records differ—was born the next year. A daughter, Louise, followed some three years after that. For a time, anyway, Jerry Thomas was a family man and successful businessman—a proper Victorian. He even took to joining things—he turned up as a member of the stuffy Wine & Spirit Traders’ Society and the rather less tony Fat Men’s Association (at a portly but still mobile 205 pounds, he was one of the lightest members).
As the Professor’s reminiscences suggest, he had more than a passing interest in the contemporary equivalent of pop art—indeed, his place was “a museum as well as a bar,” to quote Apple-ton’s , containing “all, or nearly all, the caricatures of celebrities, painted by Nast for the bal d’opéra a few years ago; to these a good many additions have been made, so that Jerry Thomas’s comic gallery is as well visited and appreciated as the exhibitions of the National Academy.” And well it might be—the walls of his saloon displayed caricatures of all the political and theatrical figures of the day, drawn by the most popular artists. Nast, though, was the star; the most celebrated and controversial caricaturist of his day, through his platform in Harper’s magazine he was a political and cultural force to be reckoned with. When he did your caricature, you’d best make sure you saw it, and many of his subjects—e.g., Ulysses S. Grant—did just that.
It couldn’t have hurt Thomas’s collecting that he was an artist himself. When Hingston encountered him at the Occidental, he noted that Thomas “is clever also with his pencil . . . and behind his bar are specimens of his skill as a draughtsman.” Indeed, according to Thomas his work, “Jerry Thomas’s ‘Original Dream,’ which is a vision of all the famous men and women of America sitting together in three tiers, . . . tickled P. T. Barnum so much that he came and asked me to make him one like it, only having him, of course, asleep in the big, crimson-cushioned, central arm-chair, instead of me.” It’s one of my fondest hopes that this book spurs some talented researcher in American art to track down one or both of these Dreams—and, while he or she is at it, the series of pictures where Nast, according to a contemporary newspaper, “delineated the head-barkeeper [i.e., Thomas] in nine tippling postures colossally.”
In 1872, faced with the kind of massive rent increases that are an eternal characteristic of the New York real estate market, the Thomas brothers moved their operation uptown to 1239 Broadway, near West Thirtieth Street. This was in the heart of the rip-roaring Tenderloin, where New York came to unwind (either within the bounds of the law or without). Apparently, it was business as usual: Thomas was surrounded by his pictures, and the place was, as one history of the New York stage notes, “popular with Wall Street men and members of the theatrical profession”—key constituencies for building a clientele. Finance and celebrities.
In fact, Thomas’s bar was popular enough to become proverbial, the name you would reach for when you were looking for an example of a New York saloon. It appears as such, anyway, in two of the popular dialect humor books by “Eli Perkins” (alias New York journalist Melville D. Landon), and in 1875, it even made it into poetry, when George Augustus Baker, Jr. included a stanza in his “Les Enfants Perdus,” a bittersweet ode to New York’s gilded youth, wherein the “juvenile Comuses” all drink champagne and are “known at Jerry Thomas’s.” But suddenly, thronged as his place was, Thomas was done, broke, and had to sell his store to John Morrissey. That was in 1876, when he was pulling in at least $200 a day, at a time when a bar could turn a profit on $50 a week. (Alas, not even his artistic skills could help him: the patent he was awarded on February 1, 1876, for a kind of signboard “intended to represent a book suspended by the head-band or upper end as is very commonly done with directories or other books for public reference” failed to pull him out of the hole.) His obituaries blamed the closing on financial problems caused by buying stocks on margin. Knowing the Professor’s clientele, and knowing his sporting proclivities, I have little reason to doubt them. Thus ended Jerry Thomas’s run as a star.
EPILOGUE
With the closing of this, his last high-profile bar, Jerry Thomas was relegated to keeping establishments in out-of-the way corners of the city, first at 3 Barclay Street, across the street from the faded glory that was the old Astor House hotel, and then—after a last, Hail-Mary fling at easy money in Denver and Leadville, where gold fever was again running high—on Sixth Avenue and West Tenth Street, under the Elevated tracks across from the Jefferson Market Police Court. In both of these, apparently, he was without his
The Professor’s (enigmatic) card, 1882. (Courtesy John C. Burton)
brother, George, who wisely retired from the saloon trade sometime around then and went into banking, although he still appeared as a member of Thomas’s enigmatic Gourd Club.2
In March 1882, the Professor had to sell out for good. This time the pictures had to go, too—auctioned off to various fellow-bartenders and Sarony, the famous portrait photographer. The highest price paid at his auction was a paltry $26, for a caricature of the editor of one of New York’s second-tier newspapers. All the Hogarths together brought a mere $49.50.
Although the reporter from the Sun had found the Professor full of big plans for reopening on Broadway, he never owned a saloon again. For a time after this, by one account he briefly tended bar in New Rochelle (his wife and children lived in nearby Mamaroneck; I don’t know if he lived with them), and the
n for a good stretch at the quaint old Central Park Hotel, a wooden structure at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West Fifty-ninth Street (while there, he gave a testimonial to the makers of St. Jacobs Oil, a patent medicine, who used it in their advertising; ostensibly it had cured him of his neuralgia). This is where Alan Dale of the Dramatic Mirror found him, tending bar one Sunday afternoon in blatant disregard of the city’s blue laws. “He was a stout, thick, good-tempered-looking, greasy little man, of about fifty-five years of age,” he recalled. While that “greasy little man” hurts (I must confess), it’s true that the Professor was sick and broke, and that never presents you at your best. Nonetheless, “his forehead was bulging, as became a master-mind” and “his aspect was severely respectable” and when he introduced himself, giving Dale the full “Jeremiah P. Thomas,” he expected to be recognized—as well he should have.
He was still full of plans. This time, he was going to go over to London to set up a bar that would straighten out their garbled notions of American drinks:
Then I’ll teach the Britishers what’s what. Then there’ll be no need to brew bogus Yankee drinks. No, sir, for I’ll give them the full benefit of my inventions, and they shall see what kind of a boy a New York bartender is. I’ll revolutionize the bar in England when I go over, you bet your boots!
Instead of London, he went to Brighton. The Hotel Brighton, that is—a rather seedy, gambler-infested joint at Broadway and Forty-second Street, whose “café” (for which read “bar”) he began managing at the end of 1884, supposedly with the intention of turning it into a real attraction. But on December 14, 1885, he left work right after noon, went back to his house at Ninth Avenue and West Sixty-third Street, and dropped dead. His death certificate lists “Vascular Disease of the Heart” as the cause. He was fifty-five years old. His grave, near the northeast corner of the “Poplar” plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, is marked by a stone that reads simply “J P. Thomas”—punctuated exactly like that.
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