McSorley's Old Ale House.

The oldest continuously operated saloon in New York City.

McSorley's opened in 1854 and has not closed for any reason except the 1918 flu and a 2020 pandemic. John McSorley was an Irish immigrant who built the bar to serve the East Village's Irish working class. The Maher family inherited it in 1936 and the De La Cruz family bought it in 1977. The De La Cruz family runs it today. The bar's exact original layout, two rooms divided by a partition, has not changed in 171 years.

The room is small: thirty seats at two communal wooden tables, twelve stools at a 130-year-old bar. The walls are covered, ceiling to floor, with newspapers, photographs, framed letters, posters, and small artefacts donated by regulars across the bar's lifespan. Some of the artefacts are pinned with horseshoe nails dating to 1862. Houdini's handcuffs hang on a beam over the second room.

Why this matters. McSorley's is the oldest continuously operated drinking room in New York. Lincoln drank here. Roosevelt drank here. Woody Guthrie wrote songs at the front table. The walls are a 171-year archaeological record. The dust over the kitchen door has been there since the Civil War.

The two-beer order.

McSorley's serves two beers and only two beers: McSorley's Light and McSorley's Dark, both house ales brewed off-site to the bar's specification. You order in pairs. You always order in pairs. When you ask for "a beer" the bartender pours two small mugs, six ounces each, and slides them both to you. The price is six dollars for two beers. The math has worked the same since 1860.

The reason for the pair is partly tradition and partly economics: the small-mug pour means a faster turn at the bar and a slower drinking experience for the customer. You drink the first while the second is still cold. The pair is also the only way the bartenders can serve eighty drinks at peak hour without pulling individual taps for each customer.

Order a Light pair and a Dark pair if you want both. Most regulars order one of each. Most tourists order Light first. Most editors prefer Dark.

Two beers, cheese plate, and the dust.

• Two beers: six dollars. Light or Dark, your choice. Ordered in pairs. Drink the first while the second is cold.
• Cheese plate: seven dollars. Cheddar, sliced raw onion, saltines, Saltinas, mustard. The bar's only food beyond a few sandwiches.
• Liverwurst sandwich: nine dollars. The 1950s bar food still on the menu.
• The kitchen burger: twelve dollars. Added in 2002. Some of the regulars regard this as too modern.
• The thing nobody knows: the bar will pour you a single rye whisky at five dollars from a bottle behind the bar that has been there since the 1980s. Ask for "the rye." The bartender will look at you, then pour.

Tuesday at 4pm. The empty bar.

McSorley's opens at 11am every day and closes at 1am. The peak crowd is St Patrick's weekend (avoid), Saturday afternoon (busy), and Friday after work (loud). The honest hour is Tuesday at 4pm: the bar is half empty, sun comes through the front window, the regular at the second table is reading the New York Post, the bartender is wiping the bar with the cloth that has been used here for the last decade.

The Sunday afternoon hour, between 1pm and 3pm, is the second great time. The bar opens earlier on Sundays and the locals drink slowly with newspapers. If you are doing the East Village dive bar pilgrimage, McSorley's is the late-morning stop, not the late-night stop.

Avoid Saturday night. The line goes around the block by 9pm and the bar is at capacity within an hour of opening. The pours are still good but you will queue an hour.

What happened the day women got in.

McSorley's refused to serve women from 1854 until August 10th, 1970. On that day, after a three-year legal challenge by Faith Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow of the National Organization for Women, a New York court ordered the bar to admit women. The bar complied. The first women drank McSorley's Dark on the afternoon of August 10th, 1970, served by a bartender named Pete who later admitted to the New York Times that he was relieved.

The bar still keeps a small framed copy of the court ruling on the back wall. The framed letter is hung at eye height for the regulars to read while they wait at the bar. A photograph of Faith Seidenberg drinking a McSorley's Dark on the day in question hangs next to the ruling. The bar regards both as part of the room's history, neither celebrated nor obscured.

Twenty-five dollars per person, two pairs.

Plan for twenty to thirty dollars per person for a two-hour visit. Two pairs of beers at six dollars each, a shared cheese plate at seven, twenty percent tip. A pair of friends drinks for forty to fifty dollars total. A four-top sharing two cheese plates: eighty dollars.

The bar accepts cards. Tipping is twenty percent on the bill. The bartender pool includes the cooks downstairs. Cash is preferred for the rye order. Two dollars per pair on the bar is the local minimum.

The East Village survivors and the international history pilgrim.

McSorley's draws three populations. The first is a small group of long-tenure East Village residents, often in their sixties and seventies, who have drunk here since the 1970s. The second is a working-class New York contingent: police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, who use the bar for after-shift pairs. The third is the international history pilgrim, particularly Irish, German, and Japanese visitors who have read about McSorley's in their own languages.

You will find no finance crowd, no tech crowd, and very few NYU undergraduates. The bar's economic logic and the cheese plate keep it self-selecting. The price point also keeps the bar's social mix consistent: McSorley's is one of the only Manhattan bars where a sanitation worker and a Princeton professor drink in the same room without either feeling out of place.

How not to be the worst person at McSorley's.

• Do not order a single beer. The bar pours pairs. Asking for one will result in two arriving and you paying for two.
• Do not photograph the artefacts on the walls. The bar will allow one casual phone photo of the room. The wall artefacts are private.
• Do not touch the dust above the door. The 1917 Houdini horseshoe nails are nailed to a 1862 beam. The dust is structural.
• Do not request the Light when you mean Dark. The bar pours dark by default in winter, light by default in summer.
• Do not bring a stag party. The bar will not refuse service but the cheese plate will not save the night.
• Do not skip the cheese plate. The cheese, raw onion, and Saltines combination is the food. Order one for two people minimum.
• Do not, ever, ask "is this all?" when looking at the menu. Two beers and a cheese plate is the menu. That is the whole point.

Veselka, McSorley's, Mona's. The East Village trinity.

The classic East Village dive walk: pierogis at Veselka on Second Avenue at 6pm, the Ukrainian diner that has fed the East Village since 1954. Walk three blocks south to McSorley's at 7:30pm for two pairs and a cheese plate. End at Mona's on Avenue B at 10pm for the Tuesday Irish session if it is the right night, or just for a pint of Guinness if it is not.

For more bars in the area, see our New York city guide, the craft beer guide, and the East Village hidden gems list.

Yes. The single most important bar in American history.