White Horse Tavern, New York CityWhite Horse Tavern
- Best time
- A weekday afternoon, in the front room
- Getting there
- At Hudson and West 11th Street in the West Village
Why it’s in the log
The White Horse opened in 1880 and spent its first seventy years as a longshoremen's bar. Then, in the early 1950s, Dylan Thomas and other writers started drinking here, and it became one of the great Greenwich Village literary bars — one of the few from that era still open. Its regulars over the following years included James Baldwin, Jane Jacobs, Norman Mailer and, later, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison.
It is best known as the bar where Dylan Thomas drank in 1953, in the days before he died in New York. The famous story that he downed eighteen straight whiskies here is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere, so treat it as legend.
The bar changed hands in 2019 and was closed for repairs before reopening under its new owner, who kept the original front room. Sit in that one.
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