White Horse Tavern

A longshoremen’s bar that became a favorite haunt of poets and writers in the 1950s

Local name: White Horse Tavern

Collection: Greenwich Village and the East Village · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The tavern at the corner of Hudson Street and West Eleventh Street · Ajay Suresh, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the White Horse Tavern. The house is much older than the bar. It is a wood-frame house, and its history can be traced back to 1817, when it belonged to a bookseller named Daniel Smith. The bar opened here in 1880. The Hudson River piers were close by, and the customers were longshoremen, mostly Irish immigrants. In the 1930s and 1940s, union organizers and communists met in the tavern. Then in the 1950s, writers and poets made it their own. James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Anaïs Nin all drank here, and later Bob Dylan. The most famous regular was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and his story is a sad one. Legend has it that in November 1953 Thomas downed eighteen whiskeys here and boasted that he had beaten his own record. Soon afterward he collapsed on the street, fell into a coma at the Chelsea Hotel, and died at St. Vincent’s Hospital. A plaque above the bar marks his last visit, and his portraits hang on the walls. Jane Jacobs, the writer who defended lively city streets, lived on this very block. In her famous book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” she wrote about this tavern too, and about how it brought the neighborhood to life. Inside, the tin ceilings, the big oak bar and the dark wood walls survive. They look almost the same as in photographs from the middle of the last century.

Visiting

567 Hudson Street, at the corner of West Eleventh Street. It runs as an ordinary bar with a kitchen; see the bar’s website for hours. Subway: the 1 train to Christopher Street–Sheridan Square, then about a ten-minute walk.