Bars, Taverns, and Dives New Yorkers Love


Book Description

With charming original illustrations, this book celebrates fifty of the Big Apple’s storied taverns, legendary dives, and bars and the drink recipes that will inspire you to become a regular. For cocktail enthusiasts and those seeking the most real New York watering holes, this is a comprehensive guide to the city’s legendary bars, taverns, and dives across all five boroughs, featuring stories, insider tips, and delicious cocktail recipes. From McSorley’s in the East Village and the West Village’s Ear Inn, to Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, and Fort Defiance in Red Hook, Brooklyn, this book spans New York’s five boroughs, each entry combining an intoxicating mix of history, local color, and city lore. It includes tips like the best times of day to visit, or whether to choose bar or table, along with signature cocktail recipes, and witty sidebars on topics such as day drinking versus night drinking. Painting an intimate picture of each featured place accompanied by charming illustrations, this book stands out from typical New York City guidebooks on the market and will interest New York City tourists and natives alike, as well as cocktail enthusiasts and general bons vivants.




Storied Bars of New York: Where Literary Luminaries Go to Drink


Book Description

Explore the fabled past and vibrant present of New York’s literary bar scene Want to know what it’s like to pull up a stool with the likes of Hemingway, Updike, or Capote? Curious how Jay McInerney takes his martini, or where to find Colson Whitehead’s favorite neighborhood bar? For well-read drinkers and boozy bookworms everywhere comes Storied Bars of New York, a photographic and historical celebration of the best literary pubs, cocktail bars, and taverns of New York City. Every chapter profiles an influential bar and comes complete with photographs, a laundry list of the writerly clientele, a recipe for the establishment’s signature cocktail (as well as which authors were likely to order it), and a snapshot of its place in New York culture at the time of its eminence, as demonstrated by quotes from authors and excerpts from magazine reviews. In a city where there is almost too much to explore, this guide will make finding your favorite erudite-cool drinking spot that much easier.




Bucket List Bars


Book Description

Find your way to the most historic saloons, pubs, and dives of America. These are the watering holes that shaped our nation and created our country. Find the favorite spots of our Founding Fathers, the places where the most well-known celebrities could relax, and the joints that most wouldn’t walk into without a bodyguard. For each bar, you will get a complete history taken directly from the owners and bartenders. You’ll find out what to expect when you go today. You’ll get advice on what drinks and food to order. And we’ll even share insider’s tips so you won’t stand out like a tourist. You’ll also get instant access to brief online documentaries made for each bar so you’ll know before going exactly what to expect, what to order, and who to talk to. Bucket List Bars is the definitive guide to the historic saloons, pubs, and dives of America. Also Included: • QR Code-Linked Documentary Video of Each Bar—A First of its Kind for Guidebooks • QR Code-Linked Videos of Their Signature Drinks So You Know What to Order • Nearby Distractions in the Area To Make Each Visit Complete • Other Notable Bars Nearby To Visit If You Have the Time Featuring: Austin Boston Area Chicago Denver El Paso area Las Vegas Los Angeles New York City Philadelphia San Antonio San Francisco Tucson Area -- This book provides travel-guide like information to business travelers, history buffs and drinking culture enthusiasts. My partner and I have spent the last year traveling the country filming, photographic and documenting almost 50 historic bars from New York to Los Angeles, from 1673 to 1968. We've not only written about these, but also created brief documentaries of each that showcases them in their historic context, provides an assessment of food, drink, decor, etc, and interviews the bartenders and owners. Each chapter will include QR codes linking the reader to these videos that they can watch on their mobile device for free. This will be the first book in a multi-book series based on the same theme.




Drinking with Men


Book Description

NPR “Best Books of 2013” BookPage Best Books of 2013 Library Journal Best Books of 2013: Memoir Flavorwire 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2013 A vivid, funny, and poignant memoir that celebrates the distinct lure of the camaraderie and community one finds drinking in bars. Rosie Schaap has always loved bars: the wood and brass and jukeboxes, the knowing bartenders, and especially the sometimes surprising but always comforting company of regulars. Starting with her misspent youth in the bar car of a regional railroad, where at fifteen she told commuters’ fortunes in exchange for beer, and continuing today as she slings cocktails at a neighborhood joint in Brooklyn, Schaap has learned her way around both sides of a bar and come to realize how powerful the fellowship among regular patrons can be. In Drinking with Men, Schaap shares her unending quest for the perfect local haunt, which takes her from a dive outside Los Angeles to a Dublin pub full of poets, and from small-town New England taverns to a character-filled bar in Manhattan’s TriBeCa. Drinking alongside artists and expats, ironworkers and soccer fanatics, she finds these places offer a safe haven, a respite, and a place to feel most like herself. In rich, colorful prose, Schaap brings to life these seedy, warm, and wonderful rooms. Drinking with Men is a love letter to the bars, pubs, and taverns that have been Schaap’s refuge, and a celebration of the uniquely civilizing source of community that is bar culture at its best.




Chicago's Best Dive Bars


Book Description

From the world's largest urinal to the worst drunken story ever told, from the reformed ex-con Big Ol' Pimp to the sink pissing Pudge, Chicago's Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Windy City brings you the sights, sounds and smells of over ninety of the city's deliciously divey spots. This essential nightlife guide provides the lowdown on where to find the cheapest drinks, the scariest crowds, the coolest jukeboxes and everything else that makes a dive bar dive. So, if you are sick of the tourist traps and hipster havens listed in those "other" guide books and want to discover "real" drinking Chicago in all its grungy glory, Chicago's Best Dive Bars brings you the whole story, straight, no chaser. Book jacket.




McSorley's Wonderful Saloon


Book Description

New Yorker essayist Mitchell likes to start with an unimportant hero, but collects all the facts, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of a community. The subject of one portrait "is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself." Mitchell doesn't present him as anything more than a barroom scrounger; but in telling his story, he also gives a picture of New York sporting life. "King of the Gypsies" sets out to describe the spokesman of 38 gypsy families, but it soon becomes a Gibbon's decline and fall of the American gypsies; and it ends with an apocalyptic vision that is not only comic but also more imaginative than recent novels. Reading some of his portraits a second time, you catch an emotion beneath them that resembles Dickens'.--From Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic.




America Walks into a Bar


Book Description

When George Washington bade farewell to his officers, he did so in New York's Fraunces Tavern. When Andrew Jackson planned his defense of New Orleans against the British in 1815, he met Jean Lafitte in a grog shop. And when John Wilkes Booth plotted with his accomplices to carry out an assassination, they gathered in Surratt Tavern. In America Walks into a Bar, Christine Sismondo recounts the rich and fascinating history of an institution often reviled, yet always central to American life. She traces the tavern from England to New England, showing how even the Puritans valued "a good Beere." With fast-paced narration and lively characters, she carries the story through the twentieth century and beyond, from repeated struggles over licensing and Sunday liquor sales, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the temperance movement, from attempts to ban "treating" to Prohibition and repeal. As the cockpit of organized crime, politics, and everyday social life, the bar has remained vital--and controversial--down to the present. In 2006, when the Hurricane Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act was passed, a rider excluded bars from applying for aid or tax breaks on the grounds that they contributed nothing to the community. Sismondo proves otherwise: the bar has contributed everything to the American story. Now in paperback, Sismondo's heady cocktail of agile prose and telling anecdotes offers a resounding toast to taprooms, taverns, saloons, speakeasies, and the local hangout where everybody knows your name.




Eat the City


Book Description

Traces the experiences of New Yorkers who grow and produce food in bustling city environments, placing today's urban food production in a context of hundreds of years of history to explain the changing abilities of cities to feed people. 30,000 first printing.




Albion's Seed


Book Description

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.




Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World


Book Description

One of The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 “An engrossing read…a historically and psychologically rich account of the young Picasso and his coteries in Barcelona and Paris” (The Washington Post) and how he achieved his breakthrough and revolutionized modern art through his masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1900, eighteen-year-old Pablo Picasso journeyed from Barcelona to Paris, the glittering capital of the art world. For the next several years he endured poverty and neglect before emerging as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Here he met his first true love and enjoyed his first taste of fame. Decades later Picasso would look back on these years as the happiest of his long life. Recognition came first from the avant-garde, then from daring collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1907, Picasso began the vast, disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Inspired by the painting of Paul Cézanne and the inventions of African and tribal sculpture, Picasso created a work that captured the disorienting experience of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he’d gone mad, but over the months and years it exerted an ever greater fascination on the most advanced painters and sculptors, ultimately laying the foundation for the most innovative century in the history of art. In Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World, Miles J. Unger “combines the personal story of Picasso’s early years in Paris—his friendships, his romances, his great ambition, his fears—with the larger story of modernism and the avant-garde” (The Christian Science Monitor). This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is “riveting…This engrossing book chronicles with precision and enthusiasm a painting with lasting impact in today’s art world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), all of it played out against the backdrop of the world’s most captivating city.