I received this book in the mail last week from Turner Publishing and I think it makes a good addition to the beer library. In a nutshell, it is a coffee table book with black and white photos of thirty great bars in the Big Apple. Some are historic places like McSorley's Old Ale House, with those famous dusty chicken wishbones over the bar left by those regulars who joined up but couldn't return from WWI to claim them, to the Bridge Cafe which has pretty much been selling beer since 1794. Other places are famous speakeasies of the prohibition like Chumley's or former dives that are now filled with celebrities hunting for and hunted as shabby chic like the Parkside Lounge. For each place, you get a few serious black and white photos and a couple of pages of back story and anecdotes. Not a huge about of text but that's is not the point.
You can check out some of these places on the Old Bars pages of the ever excellent Forgotten New York...including an excellent shot of those dusty wishbones at McSorley's. It is difficult sometimes, especially in light of websites like Forgotten New York to consider the place of the coffee table book - that big hardcover that sort of lays around there for you when you are also sort of laying around. But you really can't slob out on a sofa with the laptop like you can with book like this and that is what a book like this is for. So who do you buy it for? Some relative you have to visit from time to time to park over there so you have something to flip through. You, if you have a cottage, or the person whose cottage you hit a couple of times a summer so you flip through it there. Maybe for your sofa. Wrap it up nice.
Comments
Richard McDermott - January 4, 2009 6:07 PM
The main value of this book is the photography and the locations of the bars. However, there is a good deal of misinformation and a failure to do serious research. The author cites an ignorant hanger-on in McSorley's as her source for its history. She would have done better to have read the New York Times November 19, 1995; September 29, 1996; The AIA Guide to New York City 2004; The Blue Guide to New York; and An Architectural Guide To The Metropolis, McGraw Hill 2003. McSorley's opened in 1862 not 1854.
She fails to acknowledge that her information about The Bridge Cafe And Fanelli's Cafe came from the research that I did for the owners. Even so, she manages to insert some misinformation.There is no information whatever that Fanelli's ever harbored a brothel.
She could have asked the owner of The White Horse for a copy of the research a NYU graduate student did which is quite different from her account. He gave it to me.
She has the Ear Inn and The Old Town quite wrong.
A black man named James Brown never owned the Ear Inn as she claims.No one knows when it was built. There is no record. The Old Town was not started by Harry Viemeister. He did not arrive here until 1913. It was started in 1892 by Jacob Burckel whose name is on the 1896 license behind the bar. The owner could have told her all this.
Everything about the former patrons of the Paris Cafe is myth. The author does not have an ounce of evidence to support her tall stories.
Pete's Tavern dates from 1851 not 1829. It was never called the Portman Hotel (consult the City Register's office 66 John Street). O.Henry did not write The Gift of the Magi in the tavern. We have the word of his editor at The New York World, W.W, Williams, about this matter.
Based upon these cases I have little confidence in her accuracy about the other bars.
There is little or no serious research in this book. In many cases she apparently repeated whatever the guy behind the bar told her. No person with a serious interet in these bars should buy this book.