He married Teresa Mary Brady of County Meath, Ireland. His father was a farmer, his mother a cook.Īfter leaving school at 14, he worked for a farmer, drove a delivery truck for a local meat company and caught foxes, providing them to wealthy landowners for hunts. 8, 1939, in Kilkenny to Patrick and Ellen (Fogarty) Maher. Bloomberg in 2004 during a celebration of McSorley’s 150th anniversary.Credit…Kristen Artz/Office of the Mayor, via Associated Press Maher, center, had a word with the New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. He accepted the offer, set off for America and ultimately, in 1977, bought the bar and the building it occupies, at 15 East Seventh Street near Cooper Square, from the Kirwins’ son. Harry Kirwin promised Matty a job at McSorley’s if he ever moved to New York. Kirwin’s husband, Harry, was stranded with a flat tire when who should come along to offer help but 25-year-old Matty Maher. In 1964, while vacationing near Kilkenny, Ireland, Ms. In 1936, the McSorley family sold the bar to Daniel O’Connell, a patron and police officer, who left it to his daughter, Dorothy Kirwin. Maher commissioned a regular customer, Bill Wander, to turn the tables and prove the bar’s date of birth, which he did. When an amateur historian challenged McSorley’s reputation as New York’s oldest Irish pub, Mr. “He was a five-foot-eight spark plug,” the author and journalist Rafe Bartholomew wrote in a memoir, “Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me” (2017), “with the Irish gift of gab, a belly laugh that could fill the front room and an explosive temper when he needed it.” Maher was perfectly cast as the publican. Mitchell had distinguished McSorley’s as a “dark and gloomy,” unpretentious and “utterly democratic” place where malt and wet hops contributed to “a thick musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves.” The bar was immortalized early in the 20th century by the paintings of John Sloan of the Ashcan School (one, displayed at the 1913 Armory Show, was said to have been priced at $500 and failed to sell) and by Joseph Mitchell’s 1940 profile in The New Yorker titled “The Old House at Home,” the bar’s name when it was opened by John McSorley about 1854. Maher said, of encouraging customers to drink more. He graduated to manager as the beer hall, surrounded by neighborhood blight near the Bowery, tottered at the brink of bankruptcy survived the loss of a gender discrimination case in 1970 that forced McSorley’s to delete the last two words of its durable slogan vowing “Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies” and endured a Health Department ordinance that, while it banned smoking, had the unintended consequence, Mr. Maher, who could trace his career at McSorley’s to a bit of end-of-the-rainbow serendipity in Ireland, began by tending bar at the saloon in 1964 as an Irish immigrant. The cause was lung cancer, his daughter Teresa de la Haba said. Matty Maher, the patriarch of only the third family to steward the venerable dive bar McSorley’s Old Ale House since it opened in the East Village of Manhattan in the mid-19th century, died on Saturday in Queens. He eventually became its manager, and then proprietor.Credit…Ari Mintz/Newsday RM, via Getty Images Matty Maher and the establishment he joined in 1964 as a bartender. McSorley’s Old Ale House Matty Maher, an Institution at an Institution, McSorley’s, Dies at 80 As bartender, manager and owner, he helped the East Village saloon survive neighborhood blight and change its ways by admitting women and banning smoking.
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