The Great American Saloon Series / The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
Bartholomew, Douglas
"The Great American Saloon Series / The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted" relaxed families window-shopped along a main street that, aside from the sunshine and the plastic, was a mirror image of the idealized Middle America that everyone dreams about but that seldom, if...
...But the McSorley's tradition has attracted the famous as well as the unsung during its century and a quarter of existence...
...When the smoke-stained and cobweb-encrusted paint on the ceiling began to flake off and fall to the floor, several customers complained lest they be choked to death by the flakes they found in their ale...
...Daniel O'Connell Kirwan Present Owner McSorley's Old Ale House, Lower Manhattan The first female to enjoy the illicit and theretofore unfeminine pleasure of quaffing an ale at McSorley's Old Ale House, Manhattan's oldest tavern, was not, as many believe, a skirted member of Betty Friedan's National Organization for Women...
...In a quiet but uncertain tone, he refused their soprano-voiced demands for entry, but to no avail...
...A little bit of sunny paradise is all right, I suppose...
...Indeed, the rich The American Spectator February 1978 29 compost of smells at McSorley's was once described by a Bellevue intern as having more benefit to the mentally disturbed than psychotherapy...
...The former are unwieldy, boxy, gutless examples of Swedish bad temper and the latter are the best argument anyone could ever make as to why George Romney should not have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate...
...read the book, study the (simple) tables, and form your own conclusions...
...Moments later, brandishing a copy of a newly-enacted city law and flanked by a sheepish pair of New York's finest, they burst through the front gates and swaggered across the sawdust-covered floor to down a few mugs of ale and gloat in their victory...
...And smog...
...Ralph Nader dresses like an undertaker who sells Thom McAnn shoes on the side, generally doesn't drive at all, and doesn't teach at an Eastern university (though he studied at two...
...Bill was so stolid in his ways and so strongly attached to the tavern and its customs that when Prohibition came, herefused to allow even a single day's interruption of business...
...On the barroom walls he hung pictures of steamboats, horses, Tammany politicos, jockeys, prizefighters, singers, actors, and U.S...
...If she persisted, he took her gently by the arm and led her off the premises with the admonishment, "Make haste, or I'll be obliged to forget you're a lady...
...The economists who have done the basic empirical work on the superior efficiency of private automobiles drive Volvos, wear knit ties, and teach at Eastern universities...
...Many stand, consuming their mugs of ale while ogling the bits and pieces of history adorning the walls...
...In addition, such illustrious types as Teddy Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, Mayors O'Dwyer and Wagner, Jackie Gleason, Cassius Clay, and David Eisenhower have drunk here, to name a few...
...Forty-six years after his son had been duped by the male-garbed feminist, the first brigade of dressed, skirted, pantsuited, and culotted patrons, representing the Syracuse Battalion of NOW, bellied up to the original mahogany bar to down a few cold ones and lay to rest Old John's most steadfast legacy...
...Likewise, her admiration for him was unbounded...
...One of Old John's closest friends was Peter Cooper, president of the North American Telegraph Company and founder of Cooper Union college a block away...
...The atmosphere is decidedly gloomy, dark, and, especially during the afternoon, tranquil, much to the delight of those seeking sanctuary from the hustle and commotion of the city...
...But I also believe that, whatever one's bias, it is possible to take evidence seriously and make reasoned judgments about the costs and benefits of forms of transportation...
...When Bill realized the utter gravity of what he'd done—he'd sold a drink to a woman—he let out a moan and a howl and began jumping up and down as if he'd been struck a blow with a shillelagh...
...A writer once described Old John as a "rather puritanical man," a teetotaler who insisted that "ale was strong enough spirits for any man...
...Nor are loud altercations or physically uncivil disturbances tolerated...
...Even the cab drivers (with the exception of one would-be political messiah who wanted California, under his leadership, to secede from the Union) seemed to be at peace with themselves and the world—and they are the ultimate stress barometer of any community...
...Now you know the worst...
...The regular fare includes ham, turkey, and liverwurst sandwiches, accompanied by plates of crackers, cheddar, American or Liederkranz cheese, generous portions of raw onions, and the hottest mustard this side of Hong Kong...
...I'll probably never be sure, but I do know that, as I packed my bags to return East, a definite sense of relief swept over me...
...As for women, well, suffice it to say that for Old John, who took his drinking seriously, they were already sufficiently spirited...
...A good place to enjoy it would be while riding on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco, a vast and lovely monument to regressive taxation and engineering incompetence, or on the New York City subways, a vast and ugly monument to the glorious (and at the same time, practical) visions of a bygone era...
...and the unabashed openness and friendliness of the people of all ages,colors, and conditions paid tribute to a voluntary melting pot that seemed to work without giving off as many toxic social side effects as older communities in the East...
...takenly called "mass") transit system and for a very good reason: By almost any measure, the car is a more efficient and more pleasant mode of transportation...
...presidents...
...Kirwan never set foot inside during business hours, except occasionally to venture in from the street to raise a glass signalling a round on the house...
...Galway-born Irishman John Coyne, now a McSorley's waiter, remembers that day...
...Patronage by a regular caucus of Tammany politicos who drank their way through those austere years no doubt gave Bill's establishment a certain immunity...
...She was Mother Fresh-Roasted, a babbling old peanut-peddler who went from saloon to saloon on the Lower East Side hawking her wares direct from her apron, and who claimed her husband had died from the bite of a lizard in Cuba during the Spanish-American War...
...After his father's death in 1910, Bill tirelessly refused to change anything about the bar's customs or appearance unless absolutely forced to...
...But for those seriously interested in McSorley's—or just in saloons, period—it would behoove them to apply the empirical method, an approach which has the added benefit of enhancing the reasoning process via the consumption of a few mugs of ale...
...Located on the ground floor of a red brick tenement on Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues, McSorley's is but a ten-minute cab ride from midtown Manhattan, and it goes without saying that the hack who doesn't know the whereabouts of McSorley's has yet to be licensed...
...Old John plastered the partition between the front barroom and the back room with autographs, starfish, photographs and lithographs of the city, theatre programs, campaign buttons, political posters, and worn-down shoes from the hooves of race and brewery horses...
...But two objections are in order...
...O'Connell died eight years later, and willed the bar to his daughter, Dorothy O'Connell Kirwan, who put her husband, Harry, in charge...
...Conversation isn't merely the chief activity—it's the only one...
...Dutton / $10.95 James Q. Wilson This is a witty, devastating attack on some of the conventional criticisms against the automobile and on some of the favored remedies for its real and alleged defects...
...Beneath an oak frame containing superb portraits of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley he attached a brass tag that reads, "THEY ASSASSINATED THESE GOOD MEN THE SKULKING DOGS...
...When steering a full-sized Chevrolet or a Ford station wagon, I sometimes feel I should make no manuever without first hoisting signal flags warning all other craft that I am about to change, slowly, ponderously, and uncertainly, my course...
...Newcomers from out of town stroll into McSorley's almost daily to order their usual Scotch and waters or bristol cream sherries, only to discover with much consternation that the tavern serves only ale...
...The resoluteness with which McSorley's has maintained its traditions has enabled it to attract much the same breed of patron as it did in the days when Old John was master of the saloon...
...It still looks and feels much the same as it did when it was established in 1854 by John McSorley, an Irish immigrant who, fresh from County Tyrone, modeled his alehouse after a similar saloon back home...
...Most venerable of its clientele, now as always, is a group of gruff and testy, predominantly Irish old men, who, studying their racing sheets and nursing their ales, sit in rickety armchairs around the big potbelly stove, motionless as barnacles...
...30 The American Spectator February 1978...
...Like her, and like Bill and Old John before him, Danny has kept the bar's traditions intact for the benefit of present and future generations of ale drinkers...
...The list of writers to be found in the guest book reads like an anthology of American literature, including the names of Dylan Thomas (whoscribbled poems, here), T.S...
...They are "elitist" and anti-American...
...He'd seen them coming from his guardpost at the door, and quickly threw the deadbolt in place...
...In his onslaught against the critics of the automobile, Bruce-Briggs is determined to take no prisoners...
...never was I more happy to return to the cold, sobering slush of winter Washington...
...relaxed families window-shopped along a main street that, aside from the sunshine and the plastic, was a mirror image of the idealized Middle America that everyone dreams about but that seldom, if ever, existed...
...If women want total equality, I don't see why the concept shouldn't extend to restrooms," says McSorley's current owner Danny Kirwan, who took over its management for his mother (now deceased...
...I will declare my bias at the outset: I am hopelessly in love with good automobiles (of which more are manufactured today than once was the case...
...In fact, the late John Smith, a McSorley's bartender who celebrated his 30th anniversary behind the tap in 1972, kept a "little black book" filled with the names of blackballed brawlers...
...American flag and gave it to him one Fourth of July as a memento of their friendship...
...Needless to say, not even the ghost of Old John could hold back the forces of equality forever...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is referred to as the "Clausewitz of the war on the automobile," drives a Cherokee (you can't get more Middle American than that), wears bow ties, and has a dim opinion of Eastern universities, some of which have gone out of their way to make life miserable for him...
...Bill finally consented, but while the workmen hammered away at the tavern's ancient timbers, he sat at a table in the back room, morose and immovable, and refused to eat for several days...
...Bill was without heirs and had vowed that "when I go, this place goes with me," but in 1931, old and tired, he sold the saloon—lock, stock, and traditions—to a patron, Daniel O'Connell, a retired policeman, with the understanding that nothing about the place be changed...
...she embroidered a miniature Douglas Bartholomew is a free-lance journalist in Princeton, New Jersey...
...Begrudgingly, Bill allowed the ceiling to be painted anew...
...I oppose the 55 mph speed limit and cheer every truck driver who comes up with a new way to evade it...
...Other women who chanced inside the bar received a different treatment from Old John, whose motto was "Good ale, raw onions and no ladies," the latter a condition, he believed, of peaceful, satisfyingly uninterrupted drinking...
...In recent years prior to this occurrence, the entry of a member of the fair sex into McSorley's was heralded by the bar28 The American Spectator February 1978 tender's ringing of a bell (the same bell once used to mark rounds at the original Madison Square Garden...
...A cardboard Santa Claus, complete with sleigh and reindeer, baked impassively in the sun atop the San Clemente Inn, gazing calmly toward the desert as if anticipating the arrival of a good Christmas snow flurry...
...Perhaps McSorley's enduring place in the history of American saloons is most felicitously stated by the simple declaration lettered in white across its front window: "WE WERE HERE BEFORE YOU WERE BORN...
...But in fact, the first woman ever to drink at McSorley's was a guest willingly admitted to the tavern by the founding owner himself...
...When McSorley's habitues are not eating or drinking, they're talking...
...The car has not destroyed our cities...
...Crowds of young men and women pack the place...
...Automotive advertising does not mesmerize the consumer into mindless purchases...
...She ordered an ale, drank it, and thereupon doffed her cap, letting her long brown locks fall down about her shoulders...
...He once banished a drunken local painter "for life" (but later readmitted him) and on one occasion ejected a rowdy pair whom he knew to be Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan...
...Old John's son, William, a gruff and surly sort, took over the day-to-day running of the bar about 1890...
...Ale by the glass stein (light or dark brewed by Rheingold) at two for a dollar, or by the bottle (Carling's Red Cap, Guinness Stout, Ballantine's India Pale), but ale only...
...I know that medical studies fail to show clear evidence of adverse health effects from smog, and I am glad Bruce-Briggs points that out (most people think it is a proven carcinogen...
...Old John McSorley cherished her friendship and regularly served her an ale on hot days...
...Customers simply buzzed a door in the hall beside the tavern, knocked on a door in the back room, and were admitted...
...She was a woman...
...The car has destroyed the collective (misJames Q. Wilson is Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard...
...McSorley's also serves food prepared in a closet-sized kitchen off the back room...
...Instead, the reader should enjoy the critical skills of Bruce-Briggs and his wide familiarity with the literature on the car and its effects on our society...
...For me, at least, there are no such things as deep roots on enchanted isles...
...McSorley's will probably be here when we're gone, too...
...And Disneyland, even more than New York, is a nice place to visit—but I definitely wouldn't want to live there...
...She was a goddamn woman...
...He would rush forward to head them off and say, "Madam, I'm sorry, but we don't serve ladies...
...Old John's taboo was broken on another occasion as well...
...Actually, the admission of women has done little to change McSorley's old world, Irish pub atmosphere...
...Devastating attacks, in literature as in war, are likely to destroy more than just the enemy, however, and this is no exception: Bruce-Briggs' fusillade cuts down everything in its path, but a few stray bullets injure some innocent bystanders...
...In the first seven chapters of his book, Bruce-Briggs gives a lively and on the whole accurate summary of many of the studies of safety, fuel, pollution, and the automobile industry and, in the process, reduces to rubble many of the ideological stereotypes that substitute for thought on these matters...
...For example: Vast areas of the country have not been paved over by the highway lobby...
...Donleavy, and, of course, Brendan Behan...
...By contrast, evenings, especially on weekends, are noisy...
...A pack rat when it came to memorabilia, Old John for years saved the wishbones of Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys and strung them on a rod connecting the pair of gas lamps above the bar (the dusty bones, hoary as tarantula legs, are usually the first thing a new customer asks about...
...He is simply wrong to defend the poor engineering Detroit has devoted to the most important parts of a car—not the engine (Detroit has done marvels with that), but the suspension, steering, and brakes...
...Repose comes easy here amidst the thick, musty odors of tap drippings, pine sawdust, coal smoke, pipe tobacco, and onions...
...Now wait a minute...
...Some American cars today are slightly better than they once were in these respects, but on the whole they still drive like a lobster boat in a following sea...
...They are a pox, a scourge, and besides they wear corduroy jackets and knit ties...
...His homemade product was a brew so strong that he had to weaken it with near beer...
...One is that the long-term health effects from any environmental cause are notoriously difficult to establish by public health research precisely because they are long-term and part of a complex environmental system...
...I drive a Porsche, wear knit ties, and teach at an Eastern university...
...After all, this is an ale house and it takes a certain amount of stamina to down pints all evening long...
...It was produced mysteriously in a cluster of washtubs in the cellar by a retired brewer from the Bronx...
...Over the entrance to the back room he affixed a shillelagh and a sign: "BE GOOD OR BE GONE...
...I do not include in my list of good automobiles the Volvos and Ramblers that are required driving for faculty members at Eastern universities...
...Was it all just a little too good to be true, or am I still suffering from residualdeposits of Eastern jaundice...
...Then she called theson of Old John, Bill McSorley, a chauvinist, proclaimed the equality of the sexes, and ran out...
...BOOK REVIEW The War Against the Automobile B. Bruce-Briggs / E.P...
...These critics are part of the "New Class" of educated professional persons who seek to aggrandize state power by taking the credentials and lessons of Ivy League schools and turning them to the service of their own interests and ideology...
...Except for a few experimental months at the turn of the century, no hard liquor has ever been sold here...
...On weekend nights the college boys who jam the back room get some pretty gamy ideas after downing a few ales, and often a waiter will stand guard at the door when a female customer is inside...
...The other is that smog is damned unpleasant—it makes my eyes water and itch, and I can't drive in a straight line while blinking and scratching...
...True, it was on the heels of a much-publicized court battle that NOW successfully forced the admission of women to the pub in 1970...
...The daily businessman's luncheons are McSorley's own specialties: steaming bowls of chili, homemade goulash, knockwurst with sauerkraut, a hash that has elicited rave reviews from New York food critics, and the "Tuesday Special," a corned beef and cabbage favorite that always draws a hungry crowd for lunch...
...I think some finer distinctions are in order, and until they arrive, I urge the reader to skip chapter eight...
...To her credit, for the 36 years she owned the bar, Mrs...
...But perpetual summer palls fast...
...In the half-dozen years since women were admitted, they have become as much a part of the bar's evening trade as men,and in fact make no protest about having to share its one-room privy—complete with three bathtub-sized urinals—with their male counterparts...
...They are, among other things, "Porsche populists...
...Bruce-Briggs makes, I think, some mistakes...
...Eliot, E.E...
...he bellowed...
...Detroit is not a monopoly...
...With his ale supplier shut down, however, Bill was forced to make other adjustments as well...
...Do not take my word for all this...
...He had it framed and hung on the wall above his brass-bound ale tap, and there it remains to this day, a reminder of Mother Fresh-Roasted's special place in the 123-year history of McSorley's...
...The 55 mph speed limit cannot be shown to have saved many lives...
...The bar is notably different from many of the neighborhood pubs in that no games are played here, no chessmen moved, no darts thrown, no pins knocked down...
...Eventually every square inch of space from the floor to the paint-chipped ceiling was occupied by photos, paintings, and souvenirs...
...On a winter night in 1924, a feminist from Greenwich Village donned trousers, a man's topcoat, and a cap, propped a cigar midlips, and strode confidently into McSorley's...
...Should this have failed to impress upon the lady her errant stepping upon sacred ground, the lights were extinguished and a rhythmic stamping of feet and pounding of steins ensued, accompanied by an equally boisterous chanting: "NO WOMEN, NO WOMEN, NO WOMEN...
...Cummings, Paul Blackburn, Eugene O'Neill, Norman Mailer, J.P...
...Detroit is not being unreasonable in saying that the air quality standards imposed by Congress are unreasonable—it is Congress that is unreasonable...
...One such necessity occurred in 1933, when Bill was informed by a carpenter that the bar suffered from a nasty sag and would collapse without warning one day if something wasn't done to shore it up...
...Bill paid no protection, nor was McSorley's ever raided...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by Douglas Bartholomew The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted Women are not so much interested in actually drinking here as having the right to do so if they wish...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
