At 15 East 7th Street in the East Village, McSorley’s Old Ale House has been serving two types of beer, one light and one dark, for most of the last 170 years. The bar is widely cited as New York City’s oldest continuously operating saloon. Its founder, John McSorley, was an Irish immigrant from County Tyrone who arrived in New York on January 23, 1851, aboard a ship called the Colonist, at the age of 18. He opened his ale house sometime in the 1850s, calling it The Old House at Home, a name that pointed to the role he intended the bar to play for the Irish community around him.

The exact founding date of McSorley’s has been debated. The bar has long claimed 1854, and John McSorley himself wrote in a document now held at the Museum of the City of New York that the establishment was founded that year. A New York Tribune article from 1895 referred to the bar as having “stood for 40 years,” which would also point to the mid-1850s. However, city records show that the building currently occupied by the bar was constructed no earlier than 1858, and McSorley’s name first appears in New York City directories in 1862. Historians have suggested there may have been an earlier, smaller structure on the site. Whatever the precise date, the bar has been operating in the same building on East 7th Street for well over 160 years.

The location mattered. When McSorley opened his saloon, East 7th Street was close to the Five Points neighborhood, the densely packed area in lower Manhattan where many of the Irish famine immigrants had settled. The area was poor and crowded, and the working men who lived there had few comfortable spaces to spend time outside their overcrowded tenement apartments. The pub served a social function that was familiar from Ireland, where the local public house was a place for men to gather, talk, find out about work, and maintain community ties after long days of physical labor.

McSorley kept his menu simple. The bar served only ale, and the food was basic, with cheese and crackers provided to patrons. His ale came from the Fidelio Brewery on First Avenue, which had been founded in 1852. The simplicity was deliberate. McSorley patterned his saloon on the public houses he had known in Ireland, where the emphasis was on the community gathered around the bar rather than on elaborate food or drink offerings.

Notable visitors came through over the years. Abraham Lincoln is said to have visited McSorley’s in 1860 after delivering his famous speech at Cooper Union, which was located just a few blocks away. The bar has a framed newspaper announcing Lincoln’s death on its walls, along with a wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth. Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt are also listed among historical visitors.

John McSorley died in 1910 on the second floor of the building, at the age of 83. His son Bill took over the bar and refused to remove any of the paintings, newspaper clippings, and artifacts that his father had collected and hung on the walls. Those items remain today, giving the bar the quality of a museum as much as a drinking establishment. On the old gas chandelier that hangs in the main room, visitors can see wishbones left by soldiers before they shipped out to fight in World War I.

For the first century of its operation, McSorley’s did not admit women. This was consistent with the social norms of the working-class Irish saloon culture the bar was modeled on, where the pub was understood as a male space. The restriction ended after a legal challenge. The National Organization for Women filed a lawsuit in 1969, and in 1970, McSorley’s was required to open its doors to women. The current owner, Teresa Maher de la Haba, inherited the bar from her father and is herself a woman.

McSorley’s survived Prohibition, which ran from 1920 to 1933, by serving what it called “near beer,” a product with very low or no alcohol content. The bar’s distinctive mugs, which are still used today, are a holdover from the Prohibition era. Woody Guthrie is said to have played guitar at a table near the front door. In 1940, the writer Joseph Mitchell visited the bar and wrote a profile of it called “The Old House at Home” for The New Yorker. His articles were collected and published in 1943 in a book called McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which brought the bar a new wave of attention.

The painter John French Sloan, who was part of the Ashcan School of American art, depicted McSorley’s in several works. His painting “McSorley’s Bar” from 1912 was shown at the famous Armory Show of 1913, one of the most important art exhibitions in American history.

Beyond McSorley’s, the Irish pub became a fixture of New York City life in general. In neighborhoods with large Irish populations across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, pubs served the function that McSorley had understood from the start: they were living rooms for people who did not have much room to live. They were places to find out about jobs, to meet people from the same county in Ireland, to mark occasions like funerals and christenings, and to maintain the social bonds of a community that was far from home.

That tradition has continued into the present. Irish bars remain part of the fabric of New York City’s neighborhoods, and McSorley’s, with its sawdust floors and unchanged walls, continues to draw both longtime regulars and visitors who want to sit in a room that has been part of the city’s Irish heritage since before the Civil War.