EBTL.050817

Futures of Nostalgia, and

Other Thoughts on Places for Drinking

On another afternoon that summer in Paris, I found myself seeking sanctuary in Harry’s New York Bar, just off the Avenue de l’Opéra. Famously the place of origin of the French 75 and the Bloody Mary, perhaps more famously patronized by Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, et cetera. Reputedly the oldest cocktail bar in Paris, which confers a somewhat dubious honour given the nigh impossibility of finding a decent cocktail in the city,1 in spite of the wealth of native vermouths and aperitifs (Byrrh, Bonal, Picon, Salers Gentiane, Dolin, and so on). Harry’s is a beautiful bar, not quite like the gleaming French brasseries, but with a time-worn elegance that is restrained foremost by its need to remain legibly, unfussily “American.”2 As the story goes, what became Harry’s New York Bar was literally a bar in New York City, chopped up, shipped overseas, and reconstructed in Paris in the early twentieth century to remedy what was even then perceived as a dearth of good places to have a bunch of boozes artfully splashed together into a single cup. It is clear that great pains were taken to produce the impression that not much has changed in the decor, comportment, menu, or philosophy. What was most impressive, however, was how quiet it was inside: a calm, cool quiet that went deeper than the lack of music, as if someone had cut a chunk out of the sticky, suffocating heat of the afternoon and slotted the building in its place. It was immeasurably restoring.

Harry’s brings to mind another bar of historic note, an older bar in a younger city: McSorley’s Old Ale House. In 1940 Joseph Mitchell wrote “The Old House at Home,” a profile for the New Yorker of the bar, which is located just off Third Avenue and East Seventh Street in Manhattan, where the Bowery ended back when that really meant something. Mitchell’s claim that McSorley’s was the oldest saloon in the city (established in 1854) has been disputed, but it was even then, before the U.S. had entered WWII, already considered an anachronism, a dusty cave rich with Old New York history. Arriving there myself seventy-two years later (the bar now almost twice as old as it was when Mitchell wrote of it), I am inclined to think it rich with the dust of Old New York as well. The place is awesomely filthy. The floor is covered in sawdust, there’s a pot-bellied wood stove in one corner that provides heat in the winter, several of the tables are just old cable spools, and everything above eye level is black with the kind of grimy dust that you can tell feels tacky to the touch just by looking at it, that once disturbed threatens to make you over in its own smudged image. They serve only beer, “light” or “dark,” in small mugs, and always two at a time for some reason, two for five dollars. The bartender has a tired-dad look about him and walks with a heavy limp, spending what time he can with his feet up on the bar. He tells me he’s been tending bar there for forty-five years, in addition to the two he spent drinking at McSorley’s before that. It is strange sitting in a place that embodies so much of what the nouveau rustic of contemporary design emulates, a place that is down to its timbers just waiting to be “reclaimed” and put to aesthetic work in some Prohibition-style “speakeasy” a block down the street (McSorley’s somehow weathered the Volstead Act without closing or becoming a speakeasy).

It would be too easy and too trite to cast McSorley’s as merely a fading artifact of a more authentic past, although it is that. For it is an artifact in a dual sense that draws on both the archaeological and scientific meanings of the word. It is both a living relic of a bygone era and a living example of the drinking-hole-as-nostalgic-topos. Clearly, conscious decisions have been made to retain and amplify the shabby, old-fashioned charm of the place (short of hiring Ed Lauter to be the barman). The satisfaction to be derived from its authenticity is thus very much the product of a certain kind of nostalgia work. But, for all that artifactuality (I hesitate to say artificiality), these charms are no less real. When I first read “The Old House at Home,” my desire to see McSorley’s was tempered by the expectation that it would by now be thoroughly and obnoxiously commodified as a tourist experience, gleaming like a TGI Fridays in the night, selling history like hotcakes.3 So I was pleasantly surprised to find a place so seemingly genuinely at ease with its dumpiness. Admittedly, I strolled in on a frigid Sunday night in February, but I like to think that the cheap beer, dinge, and liverwurst and onion sandwiches maintain a certain amount of this atmosphere at most hours (perhaps excepting the weekend, when I am given to understand it is wall-to-wall with tourists).

It has been claimed that George Gershwin composed An American in Paris in the piano bar downstairs at Harry’s, and whether true or not, it is a fitting story. Not only because Harry’s is quite literally, down to its struts and panelling, an American bar in Paris, but because Gershwin devised An American in Paris to chart a sort of impressionistic journey of an American expat dazzled by the sights and sounds of the city, momentary lapsing into a sort of nostalgic melancholy signified by a blues passage: “Our American friend, perhaps after strolling into a café and having a few drinks, has suddenly succumbed to a spasm of homesickness,” read Gerswhin’s notes.4 I cannot speculate as to the feel of Harry’s in the twenties, but it is in a sense originally nostalgic, a place constructed from the pieces of another place, at least spatially distant if not so removed in time, to be a haven and haunt (at least partly) for American tourists and expats. It is perhaps now doubly nostalgic, or characterized by a sort of second-order nostalgia, and Harry’s wears it passably well, although with a little less easy confidence than McSorley’s. McSorley’s is still sprayed wall-to-wall (and floor-to-ceiling) with material Americana, but it comes across as patina rather than pastiche. Harry’s New York Bar seems intentionally and very artificially frozen in time, trapped somewhere between dignity and Disneyland, whereas McSorley’s feels more like it’s suspended between the 1860s and an insurance fire.

All said, however, if both trade heavily in nostalgia, they do so earnestly and harmlessly—they have the pedigree of physically existing spaces that have been there, each for over a century, and so the slide from preservation into artifice is understandable, perhaps inevitable. They lie on the other end of the spectrum, perhaps on a different spectrum entirely, from something like, say, Bier Markt, the Ontario chain (a property of the same corporation that owns Swiss Chalet, New York Fries, and, most tellingly, East Side Mario’s) that seems to be motivated by an attempt to combine a vague European beer-garden aesthetic with that of a Hooters. Bier Markt opened an outpost a few years ago in Montreal, and to their credit, they do have a lot of beer, much of which is international and in short supply in Quebec. I do not know if the Montreal iteration is on-message for the brand (I suspect yes), but the space is cavernous, two-tiered, and conspicuously gaudy, slick with the rapidly congealing afterbirth of a newly installed chain restaurant attempting to conjure the mythic grace of the— or perhaps any—“Old Country.” Its brass and pounded tin cry out for the patina that they shall never be allowed to accrete, and so it is destined to reside in perpetuity (or until it folds in three years) as a European beer hall chez Disney, its looming Manneken Pis (the famous naked urinating toddler fountain sculpture of Belgium) mutely proclaiming its aridity by dint of the absence of anything to piss or anywhere in which to piss, save onto the arriving clientele or anyone else who happens to turn around and find themselves faced by the yawning urethras of any of the eight-foot fake stone babies that populate the building.

It is, I suppose, beyond nostalgia. Beyond history perhaps. Where we perceive a chain of events, the fibreglass Manneken Pis sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The child would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has so buffered his naked behind that he can no longer turn. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call Bier Markt.