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by six he is in such a good humor that he stands near the door and shakes hands with incoming customers just as if he were the proprietor. Some strangers think he is the proprietor and speak to him as Mr McSorley. Kelly says that he had a long succession of odd jobs before he wound up in McSorley’s. ‘And when I say odd,’ he says, ‘I mean odd.’ Once, for a brief period, he took a job as night clerk and night watchman in a large funeral parlor in Brooklyn, quitting because a corpse spoke to him. ‘I sat up front in the office all night,’ he says, ‘and I used to keep a pocket-sized bottle of gin in my coat hanging up in the locker in the back room, and I would go back there every little while and take a sip – not a real swallow, just a sip, just enough to keep me going through the night – and to get back there I had to pass through the parlor, the room where the coffins and the corpses were kept, and on this particular night I had to go past an open coffin that had a corpse in it, a man all laid out and fixed up and ready for the funeral in the morning, and I must’ve already gone past him a half a dozen times, passing and repassing, and this time, as I was going past him, he spoke to me, and quite distinctly too. “Take off your hat,” he said, “and put out that cigar and pour out that gin and turn off that damn radio.”’
    To a devoted McSorley customer, most other New York City saloons are tense and disquieting. It is possible to relax in McSorley’s. For one thing, it is dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place. Also, the barely audible heartbeatlike ticking of the old clocks is soothing. Also, there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue intern once remarked that for some mental states the smell in McSorley’s would be a lot more beneficial than psychoanalysis or sedative pills or prayer.
    At midday McSorley’s is crowded. The afternoon is quiet. At six it fills up with men who work in the neighborhood. Most nights there are a few curiosity-seekers in the place. If they behave themselves and don’t ask too many questions, they are tolerated. The majority of them have learned about the saloon through John Sloan’s paintings. Between 1912 and 1930, Sloan did five paintings, filled with detail, of the saloon – ‘McSorley’s Bar,’ which shows Bill presiding majestically over the tap and which hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts; ‘McSorley’s Back Room,’ a painting of an old workingman sitting at the window at dusk with his hands in his lap, his pewter mug on the table; ‘McSorley’s at Home,’ which shows a group of argumentative old-timers around the stove; ‘McSorley’s Cats,’ in which Bill is preparing to feed his drove of cats; and ‘McSorley’s, Saturday Night,’ which was painted during prohibition and shows Bill passing out mugs to a crowd of rollicking customers. Every time one of these appears in an exhibition or in a newspaper or magazine, there is a rush of strangers to the saloon. ‘McSorley’s Bar’ was reproduced in Thomas Craven’s ‘A Treasury of Art Masterpieces,’ which came out in 1939, and it caused hundreds to go and look the place over. There is no doubt that McSorley’s has been painted more often than any other saloon in the country. Louis Bouché did a painting, ‘McSorley’s,’ which is owned by the University of Nebraska. A painting, ‘Morning in McSorley’s Bar,’ by a ship’s purser named Ben Rosen won first prize in an exhibition of art by merchant seamen in February, 1943. Reginald Marsh has done several sketches of it. In 1939 there was a retrospective exhibition of Sloan’s work in Wanamaker’s art department, and a number of McSorley patrons attended it in a body. One asked a clerk for the price of ‘McSorley’s Cats.’ ‘Three thousand dollars,’ he was told.