White Horse Tavern

The White Horse Tavern, located in New York City's borough of Manhattan at Hudson Street and 11th Street, is known for its 1950s and 1960s Bohemian culture. It is one of the few major gathering-places for writers and artists from this period in Greenwich Village that remains open. "When not at his desk, Kerouac hung out with Allen Ginsberg at the 19th-century White Horse Tavern, made infamous as the site of Dylan Thomas’s fatal drinking binge in 1953. The pub has since become a West Village institution, popular now with locals, literary students and curious tourists alike."  Whether or not you have the Great American Novel in your head, you can still get blasted at this nostalgic high temple of the Alcoholic Artist. The scene today is characterized less by sailors, workers and bohemian writers (like Dylan Thomas, a regular back in the day, whose portrait hangs in the bar's middle room) than by a mix of locals, NYU students and tourists, but the surroundings haven't changed much. After a dozen whiskies or so (legend has it that Dylan's record was eighteen), you might even indulge the fantasy that you can afford to write poetry, live here in the West Village and still have money left over to drink. (Oh, by the way, those eighteen drams killed Thomas several days later.)