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Charlie's Place Before Washington Market became Tribeca, most of the old saloons in the neighborhood catered to men who moved barrels of feta cheese, crates of cabbages or baskets of fruit throughout the night. Shifts began around 10 or 11 at night, with the local bars serving lunch around 2 or 3 a.m. By 7 a.m. only the clean-up crew and a few stragglers were left. Most of those old bars faded away in the ’60s and ’70s with time and gentrification. Some were turned into restaurants and cafes so glamorous that the Market workers would have been astonished.
McGovern’s Bar, now the Reade Street Pub, was around the corner from where I lived on Greenwich Street, and through the ’70’s and ’80’s I would drop in there from time to time to catch its rough edge, no pretensions, quality that served as a dose of reality. During the day, it catered to the lunch crowd from the local industry—city agencies and the phone company. The owner, Charlie McGovern, 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 have blended 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.
Unlike the lunch-hour crowds who had to wait for a table, the bar, after happy hour, was rarely crowded. To the first time visitor it had the edgy, unwholesome look of a derelicts’ saloon. As the evening wore on, odd groups would come and go; line men from the phone company, late-working Wall Street types, local artists, revelers, celebrants, substance abusers of all stripes. The endearing thing about McGovern’s was that all were welcome. There was a common understanding and acceptance of human frailty, even cheerful encouragement 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, who wore skin-tight black jeans and bother boots and hunched over his newspaper like a spider. He appeared dangerous until you realized his debilitating heroin addiction had turned him into a parody of skinhead hatred. There was the lapsed preacher, 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 sergeant, clean cut and excessively polite, drinking Coke—completely gay and completely tortured. There was the red-headed, one-time painter, who lived atop a four-storied flight of stairs, and who had learned from bitter experience to keep a crash helmet at the foot of the stairs. And George Rubin. Who was George, and where had he come from? Everyone assumed he was an old boxer, with his flattened nose and solid, compact body of a pugilist. He seemed permanently punch drunk as his toothless, garbled diction made it impossible to understand a thing he said. And of course there were the gargoyles. Elbow to elbow, the bar room lawyers yelled 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 listened to them. Friday nights were crazy as paychecks were blown and revelers who had been tossed out of the more conservative bars moved on to McGovern’s. The conversation grew too loud, the laughter too raucous, and the faces too flushed; all fueled by Charlie’s generous drink policy—every third drink a buy-back. Dancing broke out, arguments too, and it was not always easy to tell the difference. Late, late, when even the revelers had exhausted themselves, sitting glossy-eyed around the bar or asleep on the beer-slicked tables, Forrest the Toy Man would sometimes appear. Small and cheerful, the round barrel of a man would arrive wearing some ridiculous headgear (a Goofy or Mickey Mouse hat or propeller 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 racecars. It was a magical moment when a roomful of besotted grownups would sit in slightly dazed delight as children’s fantasies would hop and skip on the sawdust floor.
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