I Spent My Saturday Learning Literary History in Greenwich Village Pubs

An Afternoon with NYC's Lit Pub Crawl

This weekend, my friend and I spent three hours drinking our way through Greenwich Village and learning about the literary titans who once frequented the same bars.

Which, without any context, might seem extremely niche, but knowing us, it was exactly the sort of thing we would choose to do for fun.

Specifically, I’m talking about the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl hosted by Lit Pub Crawl. Despite having lived in New York City for nearly two years, I learned more about the neighborhood in three hours than I had in all that time.

The weather was absurdly perfect (and if you live in NYC, you know how desperately we needed a perfect Saturday after this bitter excuse of springtime). We spent the afternoon bar hopping between The Four-Faced Liar, Kettle of Fish, and Marie’s Crisis while hearing stories about the authors, screenwriters, and occasional singer who once defined the neighborhood (and arguably still do).

The list of names felt endless. Jack Kerouac. James Baldwin. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Allen Ginsberg. Edgar Allen Poe. Dorothy Parker. Dylan Thomas. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ernest Hemingway. E.E. Cummings. Edith Wharton.

Every few blocks, another literary giant apparently got into a bar fight, shared a soon-to-be canon poem at an open mic, started a literal revolution (no, seriously, did you know Washington Square Park tried to secede from the union twice?), or got dramatically drunk.

The crawl was a surprisingly effective test of my own literary knowledge. There’s nothing more humbling than realizing you recognize an author’s name but cannot remember a single thing they actually wrote. Or, worse, not knowing who they were at all.

Needless to say, my TBR grew significantly by the end of the afternoon.

The guides, Kurt and Maks, were excellent. Not just knowledgeable, but genuinely theatrical. They somehow managed to recite poetry and prose entirely from memory in the back of crowded bars full of twenty-somethings throwing darts and throwing back beers.

The tour also doubled as an excuse to try a few bars I probably never would have wandered into otherwise. That might have been one of my favorite parts. New York has so many places that carry decades of history inside them, and it’s easy to walk past all of it if nobody points it out to you.

Publishing can sometimes feel very future-focused. Everyone is worried about trends and algorithms and what readers want next and whether attention spans still exist. But afternoons like this remind me why literary culture persists in the first place, and that no matter how solitary the writing process might feel, we are intrinsically connected to the writers who came before us.

If you’re a book person living in NYC or a tourist who likes history and a good excuse for a midday beer, I can’t recommend it enough.

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