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Raging With Dead Poets in the West Village, NYC
On a weekday afternoon, you can almost imagine the White Horse Tavern as it was during the fifties and sixties, a creaky corner hangout harboring Hudson River longshoremen and boozing poets. The longevity of this 19th-century tavern is likely the by-product of a tragic occurrence: Dylan Thomas, perhaps hopped up on doctor-administered morphine and suffering from bronchitis, hit the bottle here in a big way, consuming a debilitating (though disputed) number of whiskey shots over the course of one night. He later retired to the Chelsea Hotel, fell into a coma, and expired a few days later at St. Vincent's hospital. While the hospital is gone, the bar rages on, resisting sanitization--as evidenced by the beer patina on the long mahogany bar, grungy hardwood floors, and tin ceiling--though it does suffer from a severe case of urban-bar split-personality syndrome. Here, you can expect to be treated like family, with all the unpredictability and dysfunction that might imply. By day things are friendly and uncrowded and you could hang here for hours over a blank page peering out at the West Village corner. When the boozy after-work and weekend hordes descend, out comes a bouncer and enforcer of arbitrary house rules channeling an abusive big brother. It's not inconceivable that you might get thrown out on your ear for a minor infraction. It happened to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It could happen to you.
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