I lived for a few years mere blocks from the legendary McSorley's Ale House, in Manhattan's Lower East Side. I remember the cheese sandwiches with sliced raw onions and the pair of light or dark ales you got with each order; no single drinks and, until the 1970s, no women. From Joseph Mitchell's McSorley's Wonderful Saloon:

"At midday McSorley’s is crowded. The afternoon is quiet. At six it fills up with men who work in the neighborhood. Most nights there are a few curiosity-seekers in the place. If they behave themselves and don’t ask too many questions, they are tolerated. The majority of them have learned about the saloon through John Sloan’s paintings. Between 1912 and 1930, Sloan did five paintings, filled with detail, of the saloon—'McSorley’s Bar' [shown above], which shows Bill [McSorley] presiding majestically over the tap and which hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts; 'McSorley’s Back Room,' a painting of an old workingman sitting at the window at dusk with his hands in his lap, his pewter mug on the table; 'McSorley’s at Home,' which shows a group of argumentative old-timers around the stove; 'McSorley’s Cats,' in which Bill is preparing to feed his drove of cats; and 'McSorley’s, Saturday Night,' which was painted during prohibition and shows Bill passing out mugs to a crowd of rollicking customers. Every time one of these appears in an exhibition or in a newspaper or magazine, there is a rush of strangers to the saloon."

I came to prefer the Grassroots Tavern on St. Mark's Place, mostly because of the barmaid who worked there during my Lower East Side/ East Village years, but McSorley's was a wonderful saloon indeed, a piece of Old New York perfectly preserved. Here's Robert Day's fine memoir of it in The American Scholar.