McSorley's Wonderful Saloon

I read the first three articles:
- The Old House at Home
- Mazie
- Hit on the Head with a Cow

My takeaway is that McSorley's, which is the focus of the first article seems like an interesting place to visit the next time I'm in New York. A quick search on YouTube suggests that the place still exists and open for business.

The writing itself is characteristics of a New Yorker article. It reads tightly, about the people of New York from the time it was written. Ordinary people, local weirdos. Barkeepers, their customs, movie theater workers, homeless folks. No one a biographer would devote years of their lives for.

But I don't deeply care about them, I don't live in New York and surely they're all dead now. The world in the 1930s is very different with the present day, nearly a century later. (The structure of the world could feel the same, but the trappings today are entirely modern.) So I wonder, why am I reading this book? (Also, as the foreword noted, some people who knew the people profiled here thought that these were inaccurate characterization of these individuals, and they were entitled to their opinions.)

Anyway this made me think about Humans of New York (on Instagram? Facebook?) and how HoNY feels very much like a direct kin of this book.