ABSTRACT
McSorley’s saloon happens to be situated in New York City, on Seventh Street, near Third Avenue, within a stone’s throw of the historic Cooper Union, but it might have been, as far as its spirit is concerned, placed almost anywhere in this great country of ours. A one-hundred-years-old safe, an ancient slanting ice-chest, old solid chairs and tables, a sedulous care manifested to keep the place as it always was, help to establish an atmosphere of tradition and permanence. Entering the saloon one seems to leave present day New York and to find oneself in a quieter and more aesthetic place. “Drunks” have never been welcome in McSorley’s saloon. McSorley’s saloon thinking workingman takes more things into account than he does in a brutal, hasty and violent saloon of the more frequent type. The heavy, solid chairs, the rich, dark colors, the trailing mementos of the past give pause to the headlong spirits, tending to take away what is unbalanced.
