McSorley's Old Ale House has been pouring since the mid-1850s, making it the oldest Irish saloon in New York City. John McSorley, an immigrant whose family came from Ireland, first appeared in city directories in 1862, and the building itself dates to no earlier than 1858. The bar has operated under only a handful of owners since then. John passed daily management to his son William around 1890 and died in 1910 at the age of 87. William sold to Daniel O'Connell, a retired policeman and longtime regular, in 1936. Ownership eventually passed through O'Connell's daughter Dorothy, then briefly to her son Danny, before Matthew "Matty" Maher purchased the bar in 1977. Maher ran it until his death in January 2020, and his daughter Ann Pullman now keeps it in the family. Through every transition, two mottos have endured: "Be Good or Be Gone" and "We were here before you were born."

No piece of memorabilia has been removed from the walls since 1910, and the accumulation tells its own sprawling story. A pair of Harry Houdini's handcuffs hangs from the bar rail. Newspaper clippings yellow behind glass. The sawdust on the floor is not an affectation but a holdover from a time when every saloon had it. Among the bar's notable patrons were Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Boss Tweed -- a range that spans the moral spectrum of American public life. Cooper Union founder Peter Cooper held court in the back room so regularly that John McSorley ordered Cooper's favorite chair draped in black cloth every April 4 after Cooper died in 1883. That tradition persisted for decades. The Ashcan school painter John Sloan produced five paintings of the saloon between 1912 and 1930, and New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell made it the subject of his celebrated 1943 collection, McSorley's Wonderful Saloon.

For most of its existence, McSorley's operated under a third, less printable motto: "Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies." Women were barred from entry until 1970, when National Organization for Women attorneys Faith Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow filed a discrimination suit after being refused service in 1969. The case, Seidenberg v. McSorleys' Old Ale House, established that the bar's state liquor license constituted state action, requiring compliance with the Equal Protection Clause. The decision landed on the front page of The New York Times on June 26, 1970. The bar complied, though by all accounts it did so "kicking and screaming." Barbara Shaum became the first female patron that August. The raw onions, at least, survived the ruling -- they can still be ordered as part of McSorley's cheese platter.

McSorley's endured Prohibition by serving "near beer" with too little alcohol to be illegal. It survived health code violations that briefly shuttered it in November 2016, reopening the following week. It even maintained a mouser cat on the premises until a city law ended the practice in 2011. Through it all, the bar has served exactly two choices: light ale or dark ale. That radical simplicity is part of its staying power. In 2005, New York magazine named it one of the city's top five historic bars, and it has appeared in television shows from Saturday Night Live to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Jackie Gleason reportedly wrote "where are all the dames" in the bar's logbook. John Lennon drank here. Woody Guthrie drank here. Hunter S. Thompson drank here. The bar's guest list reads like an anthology of American restlessness, and the ale keeps flowing regardless of who walks through the door.