re: Pictures from days gone by....

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McSorley’s Bar (1912)
John Sloan



McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a red brick tenement at 15 [East] Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. … 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. There is no cash register. 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 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.
—Joseph Mitchell in The New Yorker, Aug. 14, 1940



McSorley's, oldest Irish pub in NYC, is forced to admit women customers (after 116 years of being male only) due to a lawsuit by the National Organization for Women. NOW's Lucy Komisar grimly steps up to the bar. (1970)

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Woody Guthrie with patrons at McSorley's, 1943

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Between 1912 and 1930, Sloan created five paintings of McSorley’s Old Ale House. In this version, he depicted a few of his friends enjoying the bar known for its “good ale, raw onions, and no ladies.” Seated at the table in the lower left corner are Sloan himself (with pipe and glasses), the cartoonist Art Young, and George O. Hamlin (with pipe). Artist and critic Alexander Kruse leans on the bar, holding a cane. The proprietor of the tavern, Bill McSorley, opens the icebox to feed his cats ground bull’s liver.

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My parents had that LP

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