Last Call for Men Only

The dark little tavern ahead on your right has served exactly two drinks for most of its life, its own light ale and its own dark ale, nothing else, a policy it has barely bent since the eighteen hundreds. McSorley's has long advertised itself as opening its doors in eighteen fifty four, though historians who have combed through city records found the lot was still empty land as late as eighteen sixty one, and the man it is named for, John McSorley, does not show up in city directories until the year after that. Either way, by any measure, it is one of the oldest bars still pouring drinks in New York.

For most of its history, this was also a men only room. Its original motto, painted on the wall, read Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies, and the bar enforced that last part literally, turning women away at the door for generation after generation. That finally broke on an August afternoon in nineteen sixty nine, when two attorneys, Faith Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow, walked in and were refused service. They sued, and the case, Seidenberg versus McSorley's Old Ale House, argued that because the bar held a public liquor license, it could not legally discriminate by sex. They won. The ruling made the front page of the New York Times in June of nineteen seventy, and McSorley's was ordered to open its doors to women for the first time in its history.

The sign on the wall today reads Be Good or Be Gone, a rule that, after a century and more of turning away half the city, the bar itself was finally forced to follow.