SECRETS OF THE CITY’S OLDEST BAR
Son pays tribute to McSorley’s — and his bartender dad who’s worked there since 1972
‘Saturday mornings were my twisted version of heaven,” Rafe Bartholomew recalls in his new memoir. “I was 5,6,7 years old, and every weekend I gott o spend a few hours hanging out with grown men . . . Working men, old men, homeless men, policemen and firemen. Men who cursed and spat and groaned, who broke each other’s chops and answered insults with a “Right here!” and a handful of crotch . . . I worshipped them all.”
Rafe, 35, grew up in a bar — and not just any old one. Since 1972, his father, Geoffrey “Bart” Bartholomew, has been a bartender at McSorley’s, considered by many to be the oldest continuously operating pub in New York City. Rafe’s “Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me” ( Little, Brown and Compmany, out Tuesday) is a tribute to both the place and his dad.
“When I was a kid, the bar was an almost magical place,” Rafe told The Post.
Bart got his job as a bartender at McSorley’s by serendipity, after renting an apartment upstairs from the saloon in 1970. The bar became his spiritual home and down stairs living room, and Bart worked his first shift when the owners needed a last-minute fill-in.
He learned McSorley’s history from Matthew Maher, a bartender who would eventual- ly buy the place, and from John Smith, the “barman emeritus” who’d worked there since the 1940s.
“The people working here today are still only a couple of degrees of separation between them and 100 years of history,” Rafe said.
John McSorley opened the bar — then known as The Old House at Home — in 1854 and was an avid collector of memorabilia, posting playbills and newspaper articles on the walls. He sold light and dark house ale only, a tradition that continues today. John didn’t allow women in his bar lest it lead to prostitution, Rafe writes. (Thefirst female customer hoisted a pint in 1970, after a federal court ruling and a city ordinance forbade such discrimination.)
John died in 1910, two years after changing the pub’s name to McSorley’s Old Time Ale House, and his son, Bill, took over. In 1936, Bill sold McSorley’s to Daniel O’Connell, a policeman who promised not to make any changes. And it’s been the way ever since: Most memorabilia remains, along with decades’ more, so the bar is like a museum of NYC history.
With Maher having bought McSorley’s in 1977, only three families have owned the bar in its 163- year history. Because John M cS or ley had the foresight to buy the whole building at 15 E. Seventh St. in the East Village, every time the bar changes hands, the building goes with it, meaning its rent hasn’t skyrocketed.
Bart left his apartment over the bar in 1979, after marrying his wife, Patricia. They moved to the West Village and had Rafe, their only child, in 1982. (Patricia passed away from cancer in 2006.) As a kid, Rafe used to spend Saturdays hanging out with Bart at McSorley’s. During the week, the boy would excited ly wake up every night at the sound of his father coming home. Bart would have chocolate milk and regale his son with stories about characters from his work.
There was the CIA man who believed a tracking device had been planted behind his ear. Richie Buggy, the waiter who used to work for the NYPD as a decoy, dressing as an old la- dyto entrap muggers. And Larry the bum, who would howl from the street until someone inside gave him a ham sandwich, gratis.
But Rafe’s favorite stories were those that involved vomit. His dad told him about the customers who arrived already drunk and took two steps inside the bar before spewing on the floor andthen ordering a drink. And then there was the time a chef drank herself into a stupor and threw up all over the bar cat, who had been innocently curled up in her lap.
“My dad’s storytelling was great. He had me in stitches every night,” said Rafe.
Ra fe himself tended bar at M cS or le y’ s on and off in his 20s. But inspired by his dad’s gift for storytelling, he decided to become a writer instead. He has worked at Harper’ s magazine and the now-defunct Web site Grantland, and now lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend.
With “Two and Two” — the title is a reference to Rafe’s favorite McSorley’s order, two light ales and two darkales — he follows in hallowed footsteps. The bar has been the subject of a poem by E.E. Cummings, and Joseph Mitchell’s 1940 New Yorker piece “The Old Houseat Home” helped turn the bar into an institution.
Mitchell continued to visit until his death in 1996. He would come in the afternoons, when the place was empty because, Rafe writes, “McSorley’s timeless nature allowed him to recapture a sense of the New York he loved.”