Burgher Guard

Burgher Guard Meeting Winter 2008

February 21, 2008

To the Members of the Burgher Guard of the Holland Society:

The Winter 2008 meeting of the Burgher Guard will have Holland Society President John VanDerbeek in attendance. It will be held at The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street and West 11th Wednesday night, March 12, 2008 at 6:00 o'clock , for the following purposes:

• Discuss descendants from the first Dutch colonists and how we are preparing for a 2009 historic commemoration of Henry Hudson's voyage of discovery
• Calendar of Branch Activities
• Publications of the Holland Society
• Membership
• To collect, preserve and present the history, traditions and genealogy of the Dutch Colonial Period in America
• Meet with John VanDerbeek and discuss ways in which we can assist in achieving his goals and expectations for the society during his Presidency

The evening is about friends, family and most importantly good times. The Burgher Guard does have a budget so the first $300 of cocktails and drinks are free of charge. No reservations are required but the more the better.

Respectfully yours,
Sean F. Palen, Burgher Guard Captain
Mobile # 201-213-1879

Built in 1880 at the corner of Hudson and 11th Streets on the western edge of Greenwich Village , the White Horse Tavern is one of the few wood-framed buildings remaining in the city. For decades, its proximity to the warehouses and docks of the Hudson made it a longshoreman's hangout with no literary ambiance whatsoever. The White Horse became famous in '50s literary circles when it began to attract visiting Englishmen reminded of pubs back home.

The Scottish poet Ruthven Todd introduced Dylan Thomas to the bar, and the great Welsh bard was soon quaffing oceans of ale in the Horse's back room. Thomas made the place his headquarters on his tumultuous stateside forays, and soon tourists were lining up eight deep at the bar to watch him carouse. Today a plaque on the wall commemorates the November night in 1953 when the poet, still only 39, downed one last shot, staggered outside and collapsed. After falling into a coma at the nearby Chelsea Hotel, he was whisked to St. Vincent's Hospital where he died.

Thomas' boozy soirees inevitably attracted other writers. Novelists Norman Mailer and James Baldwin drank at the White Horse. Vance Bourjaily (his The End of My Life was an influential novel of the period) organized a regular Sunday afternoon writer's klatch. Anais Nin was one of the few notorious women writers who hung out at the Horse. Seymour Krim, the now all-but-forgotten early Village Voice writer whose collected pieces, Views Of A Near-Sighted Cannoneer, helped spawn the "New Journalism" of the late '60s, hung out there. Village Voice staffers came over from their original offices on nearby Sheridan Square. Delmore's publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, kept an apartment for visiting writers nearby.

While Jack Kerouac was living in a dilapidated Westside townhouse with the model Joan Haverty, writing On The Road on a roll of teletype paper, he used to drink so heavily at the White Horse that he was 86'd a number of times. In his book Desolation Angels he describes discovering "Go Home Kerouac" scrawled on a bathroom wall. Like Delmore, Kerouac also put in time at the Marlton Hotel — where he wrote Tristessa, a bittersweet reminiscence of an affair he'd had with a Mexican junkie prostitute.

The White Horse action had a political dimension as well. In the '50s, Michael Harrington, a lanky guy with freckles and a broad grin who would go on to write The Other America (the book which inspired America's short-lived "War On Poverty"), and writer-organizer Dan Wakefield would hit the White Horse after Dorothy Day's militant pacifist lectures at the Catholic Worker's "Hospitality House." They'd knock back pints and join in songs of the Irish rebellions and the Spanish Civil War with the Clancy Brothers or Mary Travers, the leggy blonde who became one-third of the popular ‘60s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. As Wakefield would later recall of the joint in his memoir New York In The '50s, "you could always find a friend, join a conversation, relax and feel you were part of a community."

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