This afternoon we have been thinking how pleasant it would be to sit
at one of those cool tables up at McSorley's and write our copy
there. We have always been greatly allured by Dick Steele's habit of
writing his Tatler at his favourite tavern. You remember his
announcement, dated April 12, 1709:
All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall
be under the article of White's Chocolate-house; poetry, under
that of Will's Coffee-house; learning, under the title of The
Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from Saint
James's Coffee-house; and what else I have to offer on any
other subject shall be dated from my own apartment.
Sir Dick--would one speak of him as the first colyumist?--continued
by making what is, we suppose, one of the earliest references in
literature to the newspaper man's "expense account." But the
expenses of the reporter two centuries ago seem rather modest.
Steele said:
I once more desire my reader to consider that as I cannot keep
an ingenious man to go daily to Will's under twopence each day,
merely for his charges; to White's under sixpence; nor to The
Grecian, without allowing him some plain Spanish, to be as able
as others at the learned table; and that a good observer cannot
speak with even Kidney[*] at Saint James's without clean linen:
I say, these considerations will, I hope, make all persons
willing to comply with my humble request of a penny-a-piece.
[* Evidently the bus boy.]
But what we started to say was that if, like Dick Steele, we were in
the habit of dating our stuff from various inns around the town, our
choice for a quiet place in which to compose items of "gallantry,
pleasure, and entertainment" would be McSorley's--"The Old House at
Home"--up on Seventh Street. We had feared that this famous old
cabin of cheer might have gone west in the recent evaporation; but
rambling round in the neighbourhood of the Cooper Union we saw its
familiar doorway with a shock of glad surprise. After all, there is
no reason why the old-established houses should not go on doing a
good business on a Volstead basis. It has never been so much a
question of what a man drinks as the atmosphere in which he drinks
it. Atrocious cleanliness and glitter and raw naked marble make the
soda fountains a disheartening place to the average male. He likes
a dark, low-ceilinged, and not too obtrusively sanitary place to
take his ease. At McSorley's is everything that the innocent
fugitive from the world requires. The great amiable cats that purr
in the back room. The old pictures and playbills on the walls. The
ancient clocks that hoarsely twang the hours. We cannot imagine a
happier place to sit down with a pad of paper and a well-sharpened
pencil than at that table in the corner by the window. Or the table
just under that really lovely little portrait of Robert Burns--would
there be any more propitious place in New York at which to fashion
verses? There would be no interruptions, such as make versifying
almost impossible in a newspaper office. The friendly bartenders in
their lilac-coloured shirts are wise and gracious men. They would
not break in upon one's broodings. Every now and then, while the hot
sun smote the awnings outside, there would be another china mug of
that one-half-of-1-per-cent. ale, which seems to us very good. We
repeat: we don't care so much what we drink as the surroundings
among which we drink it. We are not, if you will permit the phrase,
sot in our ways. We like the spirit of McSorley's, which is decent,
dignified, and refined. No club has an etiquette more properly
self-respecting.
One does not go to McSorley's without a glimpse at that curious old
red pile Bible House. It happened this way: Our friend Endymion was
back from his vacation and we were trying to celebrate it in modest
fashion. We were telling him all the things that had happened since
he went away--that Bob Holliday had had a fortieth birthday, and
Frank Shay had published his bibliography of Walt Whitman, and all
that sort of thing; and in our mutual excitement Endymion whisked
too swiftly round a corner and caught his jacket on a sharp
door-latch and tore it. Inquiring at Astor Place's biggest
department store as to where we could get it mended, they told us to
go to "Mr. Wright the weaver" on the sixth floor of Bible House, and
we did so. On our way back, avoiding the ancient wire rope elevator
(we know only one other lift so delightfully mid-Victorian, viz.,
one in Boston, that takes you upstairs to see Edwin Edgett, the
gentle-hearted literary editor of the Boston _Transcript_), we
walked down the stairs, peeping into doorways in great curiosity.
The whole building breathed a dusky and serene quaintness that
pricks the imagination. It is a bit like the shop in Edinburgh (on
the corner of the Leith Walk and Antigua Street, if we remember)
that R.L.S. described in "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured"--"it
was dark and smelt of Bibles." We looked in at the entrance to the
offices of the _Christian Herald_. The Bowling Green thought that
what he saw was two young ladies in close and animated converse; but
Endymion insisted that it was one young lady doing her hair in front
of a large mirror. "Quite a pretty little picture," said Endymion.
We argued about this as we went down the stairs. Finally we went
back to make sure. Endymion was right. Even in the darkness of Bible
House, we agreed, romance holds sway. And then we found a book shop
on the ground floor of Bible House. One of our discoveries there was
"Little Mr. Bouncer," by Cuthbert Bede--a companion volume to "Mr.
Verdant Green."
But Dick Steele's idea of writing his column from different taverns
round the city is rather gaining ground in our affections. There
would be no more exciting way of spending a fortnight or so than in
taking a walking tour through the forests of New York, camping
for the night wherever we happened to find ourself at dark,
Adam-and-Evesdropping as we went, and giving the nearest small boy
fifty cents to take our copy down to the managing editor. Some of
our enterprising clients, who are not habitual commuters and who
live in a state of single cussedness, might try it some time.
The only thing we missed at McSorley's, we might add, was the
old-time plate of onions. But then we were not there at lunch time,
and the pungent fruit may have been hidden away in the famous tall
ice box. Hutchins Hapgood once said, in an article about McSorley's
in _Harper's Weekly_: "The wives of the men who frequent McSorley's
always know where their husbands have been. There is no mistaking a
McSorley onion." He was right. The McSorley onion--"rose among
roots"--was _sui generis_. It had a reach and authenticity all its
own.
We have said a good deal, now and then, about some of the taverns
and chophouses we enjoy; but the one that tingles most strongly in
our bosom is one that doesn't exist. That is the chophouse that
might be put in the cellar of that glorious old round-towered
building at 59 Ann Street.
As you go along Ann Street, you will come, between numbers 57 and
61, to an old passage-way running down to a curious courtyard, which
is tenanted mostly by carpenters and iron-workers, and by a crowded
store which seems to be a second-hand ship-chandlery, for old
sea-boots, life preservers, fenders, ship's lanterns, and flags hang
on the wall over the high stairway. In the cellars are smithies
where you will see the bright glare of a forge and men with faces
gleaming in tawny light pulling shining irons out of the fire. The
whole place is too fascinating to be easily described. That
round-tower house is just our idea of the right place for a quiet
tavern or club, where one would go in at lunch time, walk over a
sawdusted floor to a table bleached by many litres of slopovers,
light a yard of clay, and call for a platter of beefsteak pie. The
downtown region is greatly in need of the kind of place we have in
mind, and if any one cares to start a chophouse in that heavenly
courtyard, the Three Hours for Lunch Club pledges itself to attend
regularly.
[Illustration]