McSorley's Old Ale House

**Texts:** "i was sitting in mcsorley's" by e.e. cummings and *McSorley's Wonderful Saloon* by Joseph Mitchell. > "snug and evil" Cummings turns McSorley's into a modernist sound-box of beer, smoke, motion, and compressed urban life. Mitchell later treats the saloon as one of old New York's stubborn survivals, a place where the city seems to preserve its sediments rather than clear them away. Its literary role is preservation through atmosphere. Writers choose McSorley's because the room appears already written: sawdust, age, memory, and ritual doing much of the descriptive work before a sentence is finished.

15 E 7th St, New York, NY 10003, USA