In his time, Old John catered to the Irish and German workingmen-carpenters, tanners, bricklayers, slaughter-house butchers, teamsters, and brewers-who populated the Seventh Street neighborhood, selling ale in pewter mugs at five cents a mug and putting out a free lunch inflexibly consisting of soda crackers, raw onions, and cheese present-day customers are wont to complain that some of the cheese Old John laid out on opening night in 1854 is still there.
When other women came in, Old John would hurry forward, make a bow, and say, “Madam, I’m sorry, but we don’t serve ladies.” This technique is still used. On warm days, Old John would sell her an ale, and her esteem for him was such that she embroidered him a little American flag and gave it to him one Fourth of July he had it framed and placed it on the wall above his brassbound ale pump, and it is still there. No Back Room in Here for Ladies.” In McSorley’s entire history, in fact, the only woman customer ever willingly admitted was an addled old peddler called Mother Fresh-Roasted, who claimed her husband died from the bite of a lizard in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and who went from saloon to saloon on the lower East Side for a couple of generations hawking peanuts, which she carried in her apron. Old John believed it impossible for men to drink with tranquillity in the presence of women there is a fine back room in the saloon, but for many years a sign was nailed on the street door, saying, “Notice. That is still the official name customers never have called it anything but McSorley’s. He patterned his saloon after a public house he had known in Ireland and originally called it the Old House at Home around 1908 the signboard blew down, and when he ordered a new one he changed the name to McSorley’s Old Ale House. Many photographs of him are in existence, and it is obvious that he had a lot of unassumed dignity. He went bald in early manhood and began wearing scraggly, patriarchal sideburns before he was forty. He was normally affable but was subject to spells of unaccountable surliness during which he would refuse to answer when spoken to. They refer to him as Old John, and they like to sit in rickety armchairs around the big belly stove which heats the place, gnaw on the stems of their pipes, and talk about him.
Some of these veterans clearly remember John McSorley, the founder, who died in 1910 at the age of eighty-seven.
The backbone of the clientele, however, is a rapidly thinning group of crusty old men, predominantly Irish, who have been drinking there since they were youths and now have a proprietary feeling toward the place. It includes mechanics from the many garages in the neighborhood, salesmen from the restaurant-supply houses on Cooper Square, truck-drivers from Wanamakers’s, internes from Bellevue, students from Cooper Union, clerks from the row of secondhand bookshops north of Astor Place, and men with tiny pensions who live in hotels on the Bowery but are above drinking in the bars on that street. It is a drowsy place the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years. Coins are dropped in soup bowls-one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves-and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox. It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. In eighty-six 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. It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in the city. McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a red brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends.
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