Two of the old bars have been completely demolished, one at the corner of N.Moore and W.Broadway which served mostly firemen and cops. The other, sometimes known as Charlie’s, at the corner of Greenwich and Murray which was briefly owned by some of the original Saturday Night Live guys. And then there was Barnibus Rex, the raunchy, libidinous Barnibus Rex on Duane Street which died sometime in the seventies and left only a few places to the the local night owl. There was the newly opened Odeon where you could go if you were feeling elegant and spiffy, and happy to be seen on the town. There was Puffy’s with a great juke box and dancing where you could go if you’d had a hard day, and then there was McGovern’s where you went if you were having a hard life.

McGovern’s Bar was on Reade street just off Bogardus Triangle. At lunch time it catered to the heartiest appetites from the local businesses. The city agencies, the phone company. Charlie McGovern, the owner who had the drooping face of a bloodhound, never really got beyond the idea that his customers worked at hard, physically demanding jobs and needed an overflowing plate of corn beef and cabbage, or pot-roast or pork chops and mashed potatoes to set them up for the afternoon’s labor. The smell of the cooking lingered long after lunch and into the night and would probably blend seamlessly into the following day’s fare if it were not for the overlaying smell of stale beer and cigarettes. It was an odor that wouldn’t quit, it clung to the dark wood and the chipped formica and seemed soaked into the very bricks and mortar. The next day you could smell it in your hair and on your clothes and the only time they tried painting the place it even overwhelmed the smell of the paint.

Evenings in McGovern’s were different. Unlike the lunch hour crowds who had to wait on line for a table the bar, after happy hour, was rarely crowded. To the first time visitor it had a edgy, unwholesome quality of a derelicts saloon. There was sawdust on the floor, a ball-game on the television, a few customers reading the Daily News at the bar, a lone woman dancing by herself in front of the jukebox. As the evening wore on odd groups would come and go, line men from the phone company, late working Wall Street types, guys from the Korean Market, local artists and contractors, revelers, celebrants, substance abusers of all stripes. The endearing thing about McGovern’s was its nonjudgmental welcome. There was a common understanding and acceptance of human  frailty, even cheerfull encouragement, like a therapeutic session, for the denizens who were willing to let it all hang out.

There were the regulars like the gaunt South African racist and Holocaust denier in skin tight black jeans and bother boots who hunched over his newspaper like a poisonous spider. He appeared dangerous until you realized his debilitating heroin addiction had ultimately turned him into a parody of skinhead hatred. There as the lapsed preacher, isn’t there always, whose substance abuse had convinced him that his balance problems were due to having one leg shorter than the other. There was a young army sargent, clean cut and excessively polite, drinking coca-cola and  completely gay and completely tortured. Then the red-head, one time painter, who lived atop a four-storied flight of stairs, and who had learned from bitter experience to keep a crash helmut at the foot of the stairs ready for his nightly wasted ascent. And George Reuben. Who was George, where had he come from? Everyone assumed he was an old boxer, he had the flattened nose and solid, compact body of a pugilist. He seemed permanently punch drunk for it was impossible to understand a thing he said through his toothless garbled diction. He rarely drank, he just stood in the middle of the saloon, all three buttons of his aged sports jacket straining, and stared as if trying to fit together some pieces of the puzzle, some shards of memory that had pierced his mind. Then he would shuffled about the bar picking up glasses and offering a paragraph of incompressible  gobbledegook.  One bartender swore he quit the day he realized he actually understood what George was saying. And of course there were the gargoyles. Elbow to elbow hanging off the bar the usual bar room lawyers yelling at the television or the jukebox or anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact, telling the world how much better off it would have been, if it had only listen to them.

Friday night was crazy night when paychecks were blown and revelers who had been tossed out of the more conservative bars moved on to McGovern’s to kick off any remaining inhibitions. The conversation grew too loud, the laughter too raucous, and the faces too flushed, all fueled by Charley’s  over generous  drink policy – every third drink a buy-back. Dancing broke out, arguments too, and it was not always easy to tell the difference. Slumming uptown folk went looking for the bathrooms and found more than they bargained for, and returned with looks of horror imprinted on their faces. Special attractions would arrive from time to time on Friday nights like the Hoboken Eel. The Hoboken Eel was a pimp and always entered with three or four women.  He was an ugly, pear shaped, man the bulk of whose weight seemed to sag below his belt and sink into misshapen shoes the like of the barges on the nearby Hudson river. His women, like Falstaff’s Misstress Quickly or Doll Tearsheet were overripe and bruised fruit who counted on the alcoholic content of their customers to make them seem attractive. Maybe that’s what the slumming tourists had found in the bathroom.

Late, late, when even the revelers had exhausted themselves, sitting glossy-eyed around the bar or fallen asleep across the beer slicked tables, the Toy Man would appear. Small and cheerful, a round barrel of a man he would arrive wearing some ridiculous headgear – A Goofy or Mickey Mouse hat or propellar beanie –  and clutching a sack of toys and a small beagle at the end of a long leash. Out of his bag came hopping spiders, windup frogs, remote control race cars. It was a Feliniesque magical moment where a roomful of besotted grownups would sit in slightly dazed transports of delight as children’s fantasies would hop and skip on the sawdust floor.