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The American Tavern

America’s most impressive historic survivors just may be our taverns—because they’ve had to do it all on their own, by offering you exactly the same kind of comfort they did your great-grandfather. For many—perhap’s most—Americans, their first visit to a tavern is a rite of passage, a bridge between youthful days of sneaking illicit booze in a friend’s basement and the grownup pleasures of a social drink in good company. Others, however, find their tentative steps into the world of the American public house to be an encounter with history, a chance to commune with ghosts: the traditions, legends, and, in some cases, the very locales that have played a vital role in the development of this nation. For them the appreciation of a good tavern encompasses much more than the drinks and the food it offers, and the quest for the next great place gets under the skin.

Our nation was born in taverns. In colonial America they were places where people would go not only to eat and drink and pass the time but to argue the issues of the day—more and more vehemently as the gulf with Great Britain widened. Although food was served, these inns were not really restaurants. True dining establishments did not come to America until Delmonico’s opened its doors in Lower Manhattan in 1827, and the first tavern was likely established in the New World not long after the first house was built. And while many had rooms to let, they were certainly not hotels. The American tavern was primarily a place where people sought companionship, cemented friendships, made business contacts, and found respite from a harsh environment.

The Norwich Inn, just off the Appalachian Trail, was born in the 1700s in the same way as most taverns, as a resting point for journeymen, emigrants, and nomads after a long day on the road. Even though legislators of Puritan times had decidedly mixed feelings about alcohol, they sanctioned taverns in order to provide wayfarers with shelter and sustenance, and they meted out licenses to place inns a day’s horseback journey apart. This was partly a matter of protecting the citizens from constant annoyance; when there was no tavern, wayfarers were compelled to request food, lodging, and succor for themselves and their horses from the nearest house.

As soon as Col. Jasper Murdock, a self-made trader who had come to the Vermont wilderness with his parents in a dugout canoe, put up one of the first dwellings on the coaching road north of Boston, in 1797, he found himself obliged to take in travelers. After a time he made a business of it. Over the last two centuries his hostelry evolved with the world around it, catering to a changing clientele of Federal-era merchants, tourists headed for the White Mountains, and reveling Dartmouth students. It has expanded and contracted with the state of the local economy and the mettle of its owners, and, like every other tavern, it had to edge its way gingerly through Prohibition.

As Colonel Murdock might have done two centuries earlier, and as was common practice among tavern keepers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Wilson brews his own ale for sale and consumption at the inn, although as a concession to contemporary times he also bottles it for take-away. He brews only a handful of styles, none of them anything like our modern lagers, and he’s a one-man band, devising his own recipes, brewing alone, even growing hops on the premises.

Indeed, the beer itself connects the Norwich Inn to both the earliest days of New England and our modern marketplace. Americans have long been avid consumers of beer, but in the country’s early days, there were no big breweries to supply us with long necks and king cans of lager, so innkeepers were obliged to brew their own ales. In fact, it was the demand for beer from taverns that led to commercial brewing in America, which began when the Massachusetts Bay Colony licensed Capt. Robert Sedgwick as a “common brewer” in 1635.

Notions of propriety are often relative and geographically determined. In early twentieth-century Alaska, it is unlikely that many of those who had charted this unforgiving terrain would have been much cowed by old social niceties. Legend has it that at the champagne-drenched 1913 opening of a bare boards alehouse and “unofficial brothel” in Juneau known as the Alaskan Hotel & Bar, the front door key was attached to a balloon and floated out of sight, a signal that the establishment intended never to close.

America's Drunkest Presidents These 8 brau hounds fell off the sobriety tree and hit the executive branch on the way down. Martin Van Buren (1837–1841) "Party Hardy Marty" grew up with the language of the Dutch, but the eighth president would have been just as at home with a 40 of Olde English. Party fouls? Historical records of the man with a lampshade on his head are nonexistent, but doctors confirmed that the Democratic-Republican developed gout on account of his liquid diet of bourbon with a side of bourbon. Booze of choice: His cohorts nicknamed him Blue Whiskey Van. Take a guess. Franklin Pierce (1853–1857) Congressmen considered him a pushover. His son was decapitated in a train accident. He supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, precipitating the Civil War. Indeed, the depressive Franklin Pierce had plenty of reasons to drink his ass off—not to mention he looked like George McFly. Party fouls? Pierce was charged for running over a woman in his carriage in D.C. Booze of choice: Pierce wasn't picky. After leaving office, the 14th prez said, "There's nothing left but to get drunk." James Buchanan (1857–1861) Another geezer diagnosed with the gout. This booze-infused politico was known to down multiple bottles of rye and brandy in a single sitting. Party fouls? One night the dandy was allegedly poisoned with arsenic by warmongering Southerners. But for all we know, Mr. President drank himself into date-rape blackness. Booze of choice: On Sundays, Buchanan would make a trip to the local distillery to pick up a case of Old J.B. whiskey. Chester A. Arthur (1881–1885) "The Gentleman Boss" brought the Manhattan party scene to a bunch of otherwise farm boy wonks on Capitol Hill. Party fouls? He didn't move into The White House until months after inauguration because he wanted to redecorate the sonovabitch into something that looked less like a workplace. While living in hotels and boozing it up, Arthur auctioned off a shitload of The House's furniture, later discovered to be priceless antiques. (D'oh!) Booze of choice: The mutton-chopped playboy always had his pad stocked with wine and brandy for early happy hour Grover Cleveland (1885–1889; 1893–1897) The 260-pound beer-bellied New Yorker was diagnosed with oral cancer, requiring he fill a hole in the roof of his mouth with a rubber plug. It also prevented any suds from leaking out of his cakehole. Party fouls? Cleveland, while still governor of the Empire State, was driving in a stupor, when his carriage lost control and his law partner was thrown from it and killed. (Double d'oh!) Booze of choice? No doubt the brew. During his 1870 campaign for district attorney in Erie County, New York, he and his opponent agreed to drink only four mugs of beer a day. By the end of the week, the backsliders were both dragging tankards of barley pop to the saloon. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933–1945) FDR boozed so hard, surely that wheelchair of his wasn't just for the polio. Party fouls? Booze enthusiast that the Prohibition repealist was, Roosevelt was infamous for his dog shit bartending skills. His grandson on FDR's cocktails: "Many people—and this is record—say, 'The president made the worst martinis I've ever tasted.'" Booze of choice? His Haitian libation consisted of dark rum, brown sugar, orange juice, and an egg white shaken in a frosted tumbler. "For women companions," according to his son, "when he wanted them to feel frivolous." Richard Nixon (1969–1974) For a California native he wasn't too popular with the hippie kids, but c'mon: The man has a drink named after him. He couldn't have been all bad. Party fouls? In the fall of 1973, just as the Arab-Israeli War kicked off, the British prime minister tried to ring Nixon about the bloodshed. But, according to Henry Kissinger, Tricky Dick was too wasted to pick up the phone. Booze of choice? Nixon was all about the In-and-Out Martini, a downright silly concoction that required an ice glass be chilled with vermouth, then emptied before being filled with gin. A supreme waste—and an arguably bigger party foul than ignoring state calls. George W. Bush (2001–2009) The frat boy at heart swears that the hooch hasn't touched his born-again lips since he entered office. But the way the country's been run lately, Dubya must be three sheets on a daily basis. Party fouls? In the 1970s, curious George was arrested on a now-infamous DUI charge. Another time out behind the wheel, the motorist-in-chief crashed over his neighbor's garbage cans. Booze of choice? In previous interviews, Bush has alluded to drinking the nonalcoholic O'Doul's. Pfft—guess we'll have to wait for history to prove otherwise.

That Wild West spirit dominated the Alaskan as late as the 1970s. Known as Ace’s Place under its then-landlord Ace Burny, this was a raffish operation that closed for just three hours a day (between 5:00 and 8:00 A.M.) and often entertained locals with impromptu strip shows starring their friends and neighbors. The Alaskan still proudly boasts the trappings of a traditional brothel-tavern, from oil paintings of nudes on the walls to an ornate winding staircase that one imagines could lead to all sorts of temptations. As for the strip shows, well, locals vouchsafe that the Alaskan is still the kind of bar where anything can happen.

Built as a mortuary in 1890, the Rose has had a complicated past. Its premises have served as, among other things, a hotel, a nickelodeon, an antiques store, and a Chinese laundry. Today, some 80 years after ticket holders lined up to see vaudeville troupes like the Duffy Players and the Baker Players, patrons gather to talk politics, catch up on local news, monitor the comings and goings of the staff—many of whom have become fast friends—and exchange the occasional homebrew recipe.

While the direct link between the prosperity of the nation’s brewing industry and its taverns seems obvious today, that relationship has historically been the source of one of America’s most enduring double standards. On the one hand, our traditional Puritan ethic requires us to eschew wasting time in barrooms; on the other, tavern-going is in our genes, and a large part of tavern culture was handed down from our God-fearing but beer-loving forebears, both the English, who brought their pub traditions to the new land, and the Dutch, with their custom of using drinking parlors as semipublic living rooms, an appealing convention known as uit en thuis (“out and at home”). In eighteenth-century America, a time when large families living in small spaces made home life cramped, taverns served as communal living rooms. Records show that in 1755, of the seven or eight houses in the town of Salisbury, North Carolina, four were taverns or inns. One Rowan County clergyman summed up the situation succinctly when he lamented that the tavern seemed to be faring far better than the church in the competition for men’s souls.

In sentimental memory, these colonial gathering spots should have been exemplars of America’s democratic ideal, offering creature comforts and companionship to all who passed through their doors. In practice, of course, they reflected the social and political order of their time, especially where class and separation of the races were concerned. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Massachusetts law prohibited servants, slaves, and apprentices from even entering taverns unless given permission by their masters.

Inequality persisted in taverns even into the second half of the twentieth century. The famous McSorley’s, was off-limits to women. It’s no surprise that few American taverns have lasted as long as McSorley’s. The owners of every surviving hundred-year-old bar once needed the business acumen of a Rockefeller and the daring of a Leonardo to stay in business. During Prohibition they transformed their establishments into everything from grocery stores to bordellos.

At Chicago’s Southport Lanes, bowling alleys—and possibly a brothel—were installed to make up for lost alcohol sales. The lanes remain today, along with the classic Midwestern terra cotta Schlitz ball on the side of the building—a reminder of the pre-eminence the brand enjoyed in the mid-twentieth century, even though craftbrewed beer now dominates the bar top. These days, although Southport has become a gathering spot for a youthful crowd that likely promises little in the way of long-term loyalty, it remains an authentic American gem, plastered with relics of an age that hawked the virtues of Camels—“What a cigarette—20 for 10 cents!”—and celebrated the sleek lines of a 1960 Olds that could be owned by any hardworking mom and pop for $777. And while the Depression-era frieze of nymphets dancing above the bar suggests the days the tavern may also have served as a brothel, it’s in the lively backroom that we find a scene closest to the 1930s. There the bar’s billiard tables look as though they haven’t been idle in decades, and in an age of electronic scoring and smooth mechanical pin-setters, groups of young people still crowd the last four hand-set bowling lanes in Chicago, filling the wait between balls with conversation and observing the establishment’s most crucial dictum: “If you see feet—don’t bowl.”

The story of Baumgartner’s Cheese Shop, in Monroe, Wisconsin, where bikers share space with elderly ladies and gents in the lively backroom bar, is also intriguing. Its legacy sprawls across a wall-sized mural, Battle of the Spirits, an early-twentieth-century cross between Hieronymus Bosch and The Night Watch, in which beer steins and wineglasses wearing the faces of local denizens engage in pitched battle. During Prohibition, the Joseph Huber Brewery, which owned Baumgartner’s, adopted the prosaic moniker Blumer Products, Inc., and its employees climbed the town’s courthouse tower to watch for incoming hooch trucks. A menu staple is the Limburger sandwich, served with or without onion and mustard, though always with a mint.

Such eccentricities—sandwiches accompanied by mints, hand-set bowling alleys—can be maintained only by people with passion, and fortunately passion is what taverns arouse in many of their owners. Puempel’s was a railroad workers’ boardinghouse, where a bed and meals went for 60 cents a day. In 1913 an itinerant artist by the name of Albert Struebin stayed for six months to paint the walls with heartfelt scenes of the old country, such as Appenzeller Musik, depicting Puempel’s mother’s hometown, and Andreas Hofer, homage to an Austrian patriot, who is immortalized resisting arrest by Napoleon’s troops. The history of the tavern is the history of America.”

But beyond century-old bar tops and age-darkened murals, it is the embrace of community that marks the traditional American tavern, making it a place where people feel free both to revel in good times and to close ranks in bad. On September 12, 2001, the air in Lower Manhattan was acrid with smoke and dust, and the city’s comforting cacophony was distorted by sirens and the bellow of police bullhorns, d.b.a. was a magnet for people eager to crowd around the bar for human contact, even though all eyes were on the TV and no one exchanged a word. 24 hours earlier people covered head to toe in white dust, looking like so many walking statues, had streamed in asking for water, a young man in a designer sweater and a goatee moved off to take a call on his cell phone. When he returned, he took a sip of Grey Goose and started to weep. Neither we nor our temporary family assembled at the bar found this display of emotion at all out of place.

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