Up in the Old Hotel

...their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels...

...Contrast McSorley's with Dick's Bar & Grill, in "Obituary of a Gin Mill," one of those saloons "within...

...Flood (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor (1960), and Joe Gould's Secret (1965...

...If only his parents had told him, "You're wrong...

...Most of us got to know him through Brendan Gill's Here at The New Yorker, in which Gill profiled all the magazine's great stylists—White, Thurber, Benchley, Liebling, Gibbs, McNulty, Maloney, Edmund Wilson—and put Mitchell at the top of the list...

...Nor, by all accounts, is he a very likable man...

...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...

...The eaters wiped their hands on butcher aprons, and wore chef's hats...

...supposed to eat with his hands," writes Mitchell...

...I believe that bar-equipment salesmen have done more to destroy the independence and individuality of New York gin mills and their customers than Prohibition or repeal...

...Writing in 1939, the writer says that when women got the vote and began to he invited to beefsteaks, corruption set in: The life of the party at a beefsteak used to be the man who let out the most ecstatic grunts, drank the most beer, ate the most steak, and got the most grease on his ears, but women do not esteem a glutton, and at a contemporary beefsteak it is unusual for a man to do away with more than six pounds of meat and thirty glasses of beer...

...It might be the "Old Mr...

...Or"Mr...

...The talk when you interview someone for a newspaper article is usually premeditated and usually artificial...

...there is nothing that will make a gin mill look so cheap and spurious as a modernistic bar and a lot of chairs made of chromium tubing...

...Knives, forks, napkins, and tablecloths never had been permitted...

...It is almost as if a hurricane roared through in the 1970s and blew out the picturesque, unthreatening city of Joseph Mitchell, replacing it with one that is almost pornographic...

...The art was in the writing...

...Up in the Old Hotel collects four Mitchell books: McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (1943), Old Mr...

...Flood, who lived in a venerable hotel downtown near Peck Slip, are long, long gone...

...everything's changed now...

...During the lull in the afternoon a stable hand would lead the horse around to a hitching block in front of the saloon, and Old John, wearing his bar apron, would stand on the curb and groom the animal...

...An accomplished classics scholar whose idea of fun is translating Oedipus into colloquial English, a speed-reader who can absorb entire pages at a single glance, and the holder of an almost unprecedented Triple First in Classics and Oriental Languages from Cambridge, Abba Eban is clearly not a man to be taken lightly...

...His son Bill's "principal concern was to keep McSorley's exactly as it had been in his father's time," and to that end, "if the saloon became crowded, he would close up early, saying, 'I'm getting too confounded much trade in here.' " His favorite poem was "The Man Behind the Bar...

...Flood" stories, or the history of New York Harbor, or the profile of the rats on New York's waterfront...

...Mitchell, I hasten to add, is a normal-sized, even smallish, man...

...As he wrote in his first book, My Ears Are Bent (1938): The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about Joe Mysak, TAS 's chief saloon correspondent, is editor of the Bond Buyer and editor of the American Banker...

...They are about life on the margin, desperation and endurance, living by one's wits...

...Yet Mitchell's tales can be appreciated even if the days of such gentle eccentrics as Old Mr...

...Joseph Mitchell is a great eater and drinker, and a great listener...

...Joseph Shattan, Vice President Quayle's former speechwriter, is a writer living in Virginia...

...And since many of these pieces date from the 1940s and 1950s, many of Mitchell's old-timers can just about remember Reconstruction and an East River filled with tall-masted ships...

...As Mitchell wrote in My Ears Are Bent, "I have been tortured by some of the fanciest ear-benders in the world . . . and I have long since lost the ability to detect insanity...

...Those who know the secret of Joseph Mitchell have their own favorites among the pieces here...

...John, Abba Eban is staggeringly fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish and Farsi, as well as English...

...Or perhaps it is the title piece, "Up in the Old Hotel," a history of Sloppy Louie's restaurant near the Fulton Fish Market...

...The first piece in this collection, "The Old House at Home," about McSorley's Old Ale House, hits all of the familiar Mitchell themes, and seems to me to be the finest piece about a saloon and its customers that has ever been penned...

...the craft was in the listening...

...Can there be any doubt that the reader will get to know each of these characters...

...Hunter's Grave," about a Staten Island community of black oystermen, and what happened after oystering died out in New York Harbor...

...a few blocks of virtually every large newspaper in the United States . . . which also functions as a bank, as a sanitarium, as a gymnasium and sometimes as a home...

...He especially liked the last verse: When St...

...Now and then, however, someone says something so unexpected it is magnificent...

...As Mitchell told the New York Times, "I'm a ghost...

...Even St...

...a man was A ccording to his worshipful biographer, Robert St...

...A customer who wanted service would tap on the window and Old John would drop his currycomb, step inside, draw an ale, and return at once to the horse...

...Perhaps it is "The Mohawks in High Steel," which tells why a group of Canadian Mohawk Indians became expert steel workers...

...In eighty-eight years it has had four owners—an Irish immigrant, his son, a retired policeman, and his daughter—and all of them have been opposed to change...

...For my money, though, nothing can top "All You Can Hold for Five Bucks," a history of "the New York Steak Dinner, or 'beefsteak.' " Beefsteaks were thrown by clubs and lodges, and featured slices of steak served up on bread, double lamb chops, and pitchers of beer...

...Old John McSorley, for example, would keep a horse in a stable around the corner, with a nanny goat in the same stall, believing, like many horse-lovers, that horses should have company at night...

...It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in New York City...

...Here is the lead: McSorley's occupies the ground floor of a red-brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends...

...The place apparently went downhill after Dick decided to move, and a salesman for a bar-fixtures concern got hold of him and sold him a bill of goods...

...John reports that his Israeli colleagues considered Eban "exceedingly selfish, somewhat narcissistic, given to pomposity and often guilty of intellectual snobbism...

...There are a thousand stories in Up in the Old Hotel, most of them unexpected and magnificent, told by bartenders, gypsies, street preachers, a bearded lady, fishermen, boat captains, charlatans, cooks, Mohawk steelworkers, police detectives, and bricklayers...

...For anyone who is not familiar with Mitchell—and his work has been out of circulation for so long that it is tough to see how many people could be—this collection is a feast, a staggering repast, a three-day bender...