Thursday's Place: The White Horse Tavern

There are places, some merely of the imagination, that have taken hold in history and fiction as they represent an era, a time, or a shared cultural experience that has since faded, but is certainly mourned. These places are pockets of nostalgia for what once was or could have been. Most of those to be featured, if they existed at all, are no longer with us, replaced by parking lots, or “big box” stores, or ugly houses. However, if you’re with the right people, or in the right place, to evoke them is to evoke an era that may be long gone, but permitted some creativity and joy.

The White Horse Tavern
New York City

This week's "place" is seminal in the promotion of poetry, both the kind found in high school textbooks and the kind found in court dockets, and of the folk music craze of the 1960's that produced much of the influential music of that generation and beyond.  Bonus: It's still open for business.

From something published earlier in The Coracle:

In the late 1950's, Richard Farina, a Cuban-Irish college drop-out born in Brooklyn in 1937, showed up in Greenwich Village with a dulcimer and a slight repertoire of folk songs such as people had never heard before. Turns out he was also adept at writing, having had short stories and poems published while still a student at Cornell. Being of an attractive and rakish nature, he hung out at many of the favored bars of the creative class, particularly the White Horse Tavern [where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death; Norman Mailer drank and punched people; Jim Morrison of The Doors drank too much, Jack Kerouac drank such a prodigious amount that he was banned from the property; and Delmore Schwartz, come to think of it, drank himself to death, too].

While I would encourage the reader to follow the link to the story of Richard Farina, as he is an interesting and virtually unknown personality in the development of 1960's counter-culture, I couldn't help but notice the importance of The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village in trans-generational, self-destructive, British and American literature.  It is here that the more lubricious writers and artists have gone to appreciate their mortality, either in 1 and 1/2 ounce increments or in quantities more vast and eternal.

Like many of the places of which we will speak on Thursdays, the White Horse started as a neighborhood bar, in this case for the longshoremen working the docks in Chelsea.  Its venerable history, stretching back to 1880, has witnessed and/or participated in all of the societal and economic changes that have visited that portion of New York City.  As the neighborhood became less working and more middle-class, and distinctly more "artistic", by the 1950's the Horse [that's what the locals called it] had become a place to hear folk music, Irish folk music, poetry based on folk music, and folk musicians.  Oh, and the Welsh inebriate who hung out there all of the time because it reminded him of a pub back home.

[Really?  I've been to Wales and never saw any place that even resembled the Horse.  I think the Welshman preferred it because they let him run a prodigious tab.]

I lived nine blocks north of the place when I first moved to New York.  I never went there, as the Eagle Tavern on 14th had better Irish music, and The White Horse Tavern had become touristy enough that it was selling, God help us, t-shirts behind the bar.  In a city not lacking in places for dark slouching, or bars where poets and writers regularly got or get drunk, I really wasn't interested, until I was told they served a really good cheeseburger.  It was good, and if I could afforded them on a regular basis, I would have gone the way of Dylan Thomas, except with beef fat instead of whiskey.

So storied is The Horse in literature that it has its own page on the website of the Academy of American Poets:

The White Horse Tavern, built in 1880, has been a stomping ground for New York’s literary community since the 1950s when the bar’s most famous patron, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, was introduced to this longshoreman’s haunt. The White Horse holds the dubious distinction of being the place where Thomas drank his last whiskey. In November of 1953, Thomas beat his own personal record by downing eighteen shots of whiskey. Soon after the last drink he stumbled outside and collapsed on the sidewalk. He was taken to the Chelsea Hotel and there fell into a coma; the next morning he was transferred to St. Vincent’s Hospital where he died. In addition to the many portraits of Dylan Thomas that adorn the walls, a plaque commemorating Thomas’s last visit to the White Horse Tavern hangs above the bar. The bar soon drew more literary figures as patrons, including James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Anais Nin, and James Laughlin, the founder of the publishing house New Directions. In addition, the bar was a gathering place for both the Beat writers, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as well as the New York School poets, such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.

Anyway, any place that has such a hold on literary imagination should be visited at least once, even if it isn't the most convivial in the city.

Although, there is a tradition that is maintained that I've always appreciated.  Jack Kerouac would get so drunk at The Horse that someone once wrote "Jack, Go Home!" on the men's room wall.  While there have been some well-done renovations and restorations to the bar performed in the last sixty years, and the wall painted many times, some individual or series of individuals always ensures that, somewhere on that wall, that command to Kerouac still appears.

That kind of wit needs to be admired, don't you think?