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Ale to the chief: McSorley’s turns 150

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

De la Haba’s paintings are works using charcoal and pastels on paper and they show scenes from McSorley’s throughout its long history on East 7th Street, and the event last Thursday was introduced by raconteurs Frank and Malachy McCourt, in their inimitable style. Professor Terence Moran of NYU also hosted the event.
Though muted and somber in tones, de la Haba’s sketches captured the warmth of McSorley’s, its instantaneous welcome to the regular and the stranger. Anyone familiar with the bar will see in the sketches many of the features and artifacts — the unkind might call it junk — that still remain on the walls and hanging from the ceiling to this day.
One sketch, “Contained Thoughts,” shows a drinker alone in a crowd, at the bar yet transported into his own world by thoughts of who knows what, but with one foot firmly planted on the brass rail. The charcoal and pastel tones also capture what was surely a feature of McSorley’s until about a year ago — the smokiness of the New York dive bar.
Another of de la Haba’s sketches is entitled “Tom’s Fan,” and shows a man enjoying the cooling breeze of the great fan that hangs from the ceiling to this day.
The event was held at Ireland House because to have gone to McSorley’s would have meant interfering with the drinking of the regulars, opined Malachy McCourt, who also paid tribute to the bar’s enduring authenticity, not least “its original cobwebs,” he said.
The bar’s current owner is an Irishman, Kilkenny’s Matthew (Matty) Maher, who bought the bar from the McSorley family in 1977. Maher has often said that McSorley’s has “a soul of its own.”
De la Haba’s art captures that soul: the sketches allude to McSorley’s timelessness and longevity: these are sketches of scenes that could have happened at almost any point in McSorley’s long life.
McSorley’s was established in 1854 just after the time of the Famine, which helped establish it as a vital part of the city’s Irish life, with immigrants arriving in the New World every day.
Then, the McCourts agreed, it remained steadfast as a meeting place through good and bad times ever since: the Civil war came, then the depression of the 1870s, and “it survived all of Queen Victoria,” said Malachy McCourt, who imagined that the British Queen’s famously disgruntled face was in part a response to the fact that as a woman, she was not allowed in McSorley’s — the bar restricted admission to men for the first 116 years of its life.
That notoriety ended on Aug. 10, 1970 when women were admitted for the first time: Frank McCourt recalled the bar’s “embracing urinals,” made of marble, which he said seemed to reach out and embrace the lonely drinker.
Urinals were no use to women when they arrived, added Malachy McCourt, hence McSorley’s installed “arsenals.”
With jokes like that, the well-wishers happily toasted McSorley’s 150th birthday.

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