Jack Kerouac’s favourite bar in New York City
Jack Kerouac shuffles through from the toilet to return to his lukewarm stout. It has now been sat there for so long that life forms have begun to inhabit the foam. It is clear to his fellow patrons that this toilet break involved vomit. Upon seeing this Greenwich Village apparition, a labourer at the bar turns to his drinking buddy and decrees, ‘D’you know that’s actually one of the pre-eminent authors of our time?’
This was such a common sight in the White Horse Tavern that ‘GO HOME JACK’ is scribbled onto the bathroom wall. The writer liked to juice life right down to the pith, and that extended to drinking lavishly. “Don’t drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life,” the famed drunkard once wrote. And there were few places he enjoyed life more than this quirky watering hole for bohemians.
The bar first opened way back in 1880. At that time, the region’s history had largely been tied to the prison that dominated the area. This was before the province had been incorporated into the urban sprawl of New York City, so it was a fairly isolated patch. But steadily, the city grew, and the penitentiary made way for a genuine ‘village’, a place that offered an escape from the hustle and bustle of the city. Although it has now been subsumed, in the mid-1800s, this led to folks seeking an alternative lifestyle flocking to the area. New York University made use of the space too.
Thus, it became a renowned bohemia, and these hip folks needed places to meet, so the White Horse Tavern popped up to serve them, and in due time, you had the likes of James Baldwin, Jane Jacobs, Bob Dylan, Anais Nin and Norman Mailer all refreshing themselves in the place that now calls itself the second oldest bar in New York City. In truth, it retains that feel. There is almost a British pub sentiment to the place, and that homely escape served to comfort the creative imagination of Kerouac and his beat peers.
Sadly, not all writers have faired as well as Kerouac in its hallowed walls. The On The Road writer might have gotten sloppy before an idea pinged into his head, and he rolled home to West 11th Street before forgetting it again in the morning, but he rarely pushed things far enough to be barred (or worse). As Michael Thomas Ford wrote: “The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He’s this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning.”
It was the Welsh pub feel that had drawn Dylan Thomas into the bar, and it was the same feel that had seen his corpse pulled out of it. However, its net influence on literature is a positive one despite this loss. You see, the otherworldly feel of the place, the essence of old America that it embodied, may well have even inspired Kerouac to lift himself up from his favourite stool and see what was out there in the world beyond, roaring his pen across the road to the old west where such taverns were surely plentiful?
While it remains there to this day, a continuously ran touchstone to the past, with smash burgers now on its menu, with Greenwich Village now a bohemia strictly for hip millionaires, the ideas it’s inspiring these days are likely to involve bonds and brokering rather than masterpieces. But that’s not for want of the odd tourist seeking a muse and trying their hand at securing divine drunken inspiration on Jack’s storied old stool.
