Continuing our new monthly feature on this country's finest places to drink to ruin, this time we're featuring Manhattan's White Horse Tavern, home base for many of America's finest gritty male writers, including animated medicine cabinet Hunter S. Thompson and infamous female terrorizer Norman Mailer.
These and other intellectual graffiti grace the hallowed stalls of the White Horse (there's also, if you can find it, a note directed toward the late Jack Kerouac, who drank off and on again till his death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1969, saying kindly, "JACK GO HOME!"
The greatest White Horse Tavern story is actually about Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and some believe Robert Zimmerman in disguise, who finished the last day of his life at this very bar.
On 5 November, at the White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, when he started to feel ill. He decided go back to his room at the Hotel Chelsea, where he later collapsed and slipped into a coma. An ambulance was called, which took him to St Vincent's Hospital. Thomas died four days later on 9 November 1953 at around 1pm.
The most popular myth is that Thomas' last words were, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that is a record." [Wikipedia]
While the West Village has become too classy for anything resembling a dive bar to survive, The White Horse nonetheless qualifies for its sheer old age and the presence of regular barflies. So, have one on all the great writers at West 11th and Hudson-- and remember... if you're having a ball when it comes to last call, do not go gentle into that goodnight.
Previously: The Greatest Dive Bars: The Saturn Bar