(passed along to me by Barbara Leigh.  Robin Room)


>Letter from the editor BY RICHARD F. SNOW
>American Heritage, November 1999
>
>
>Bar Keeping
>
>COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, walking down Third Avenue, I committed an
>honest-to-God Elmer Fudd double-take: Tuesday¹s was gone! Or, more
>accurately, transformed into Sal Anthony¹s Scheffel Hall Movement Salon,
>offering gyrotonics, ancestor channeling, and other New Age piffle. All that
>was left of what it had replaced was a mural up near the ceiling where,
>varnished by decades of cigar smoke, monks still lifted steins in a dim
>yellow carouse. 
>The movement salon took its name from the building, Scheffel Hall, a
>gathering place built for what would today be called ³the German-American
>community² at a time when New York was nearly as much a German town as an
>Irish one. The legend scheffel hall is still clearly visible on the
>building¹s busy facade (cheffel, actually, the S having been claimed by
>obliterating time), but it¹s the name right next to it‹and equally easy to
>make out‹that mattered more to me: allaire¹s. It had been a saloon, always.
>Opened during the second year of the Civil War, Allaire¹s provided O. Henry
>with the setting for his story ³The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss,²
>and over the decades its walls acquired a wonderful accretion of lithographs
>of prizefighters and women in tights and, later, photos of drivers in the
>coffin-snouted racing cars of the 1910s. By mid-century the bar had become
>Joe King¹s Rathskeller, a famous hangout for college kids‹and a particularly
>appealing one to me, who, in the late 1960s, could go there and see a
>picture of some long-dead welterweight and later talk to a dour washroom
>attendant who remembered watching him fight out at Coney.
>I was growing up or getting a job or married when a restaurant chain took
>over Joe King¹s; the next time I went there, it was Tuesday¹s. I¹d gone back
>in the service of this magazine. Like most journals, we seek ways to draw
>advertisers¹ attention to our virtues. In our case this presents a unique
>challenge: how to suggest to people who tend to be young and not
>automatically drawn to the study of history that our franchise is a vital
>and engaging one. Twelve years ago we lit on the idea of taking a group of
>potential clients on a tour of classic saloons, of which our neighborhood
>has an impressive supply.
>I discovered what Joe King¹s had become while scouting out the route of that
>inaugural tour. The old bar¹s new management clearly didn¹t care much about
>its heritage, but the pugilists and heroic-thighed women were still on the
>walls, and Tuesday¹s became part of our itinerary. So did the nearby Pete¹s
>Tavern (another O. Henry haunt); the scrupulously preserved Old Town (before
>the opening sequence of the Letterman show made it famous); Chumley¹s (a
>true speakeasy, and just as hard to find as it was when Helen Worden
>reported in her 1932 guidebook The Real New York that ³the quickest way to
>reach 86 Bedford Street is in a local taxi. Even Mr. Chumley can¹t find his
>own gate when he ventures away from it²); the White Horse Tavern (where
>Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, an oddly morbid and arty association
>for this workaday spot where draymen on their way to the Washington Market
>could sink a couple of schooners); and, of course, McSorley¹s Old Ale House,
>perhaps the most evocative of all bars, its fixtures furred with immemorial
>dust, its frame-to-frame prints and posters including one calling for the
>arrest of Lincoln¹s assassin before anyone was sure who he was.
>On the appointed evening, we took our group on what we had christened the
>American Heritage Pub Crawl, going from bar to busy bar while I brayed out
>fragments of information and misinformation above the din. We¹ve done it
>every spring ever since, each time with a larger string of guests in tow.
>And if the dozen years older I¹ve become sometimes make the marathon feel a
>bit more wearing than it did in the roaring eighties, they¹ve also brought
>me an increasing appreciation of the places we stop at.
>Last May, while our publisher, Ed Hughes, and I welcomed guests to a dining
>room we¹d reserved at Pete¹s (we¹ve found it¹s not a bad idea to feed the
>people embarked on this particular odyssey), it struck me that a few blocks
>to the north, Grand Central Terminal had just emerged shining and altogether
>magnificent from its justly heralded restoration‹but that the most modest of
>the places we were visiting in Grand Central¹s figurative shadow represented
>an even more miraculous survival.
>Besieged by time, by changing custom, by federal law (all of them were
>illegal between 1919 and 1933), they had hung on simply by giving weary
>people something of value cheap: respite for working folk whose lives would
>have been unimaginably severe to most of us. Today they offer the same sort
>of comfort‹and with it an intimate, vital connection to the vanished
>generations whose elbows helped rub smooth the mahogany under yours.
>New York has no monopoly on these establishments: Chicagoans can have wurst
>and lager at the Berghoff; San Franciscans have kept alive the House of
>Shields; Bostonians Lock-Ober¹s. There¹s likely one soldiering along not far
>from where you live. Give it a try. It may not be the frigate Constitution,
>but it¹s a historic shrine nonetheless. If it goes the way of Tuesday¹s,
>you¹ve lost something, and so have all the rest of us.
>