This Place on Third Avenue

About This Place on Third Avenue

A collection of hilarious, poignant, and eternal stories by the acclaimed New Yorker writer captures the off-beat, quirky, and amusing characters that he encountered at Tim and Joe Costello’s Irish Saloon, from cab drivers, horseplayers, and glamour girls, to has-beens, never-weres, and dreamers.

From 1937 until his death in 1956, John McNulty walked many beats for The New Yorker, but his favorite–and the one he made famous–was Tim and Joe Costello’s a bustling Irish saloon at Third Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. The place is gone now, it was leveled and replaced by the lobby of a skyscraper in 1973, but it and its hard-drinking mid-century patrons live on in these funny, poignant, immortal sketches and stories.

McNulty’s people are drawn from life, and draw the breath of life. “What a marvelous writer McNulty was!” said Brendan Gill when they tore down Costello’s. “His stories will survive . . . and perhaps seem all the more remarkable to a later generation for the reason that both the time and the place they celebrated have disappeared without a trace–brick and stone as thoroughly ground to dust as man”.

There is a short shelf of American classics born in the talk of ordinary folk–Mark Twain’s sketches, Ring Lardner’s baseball yarns, Studs Terkel’s Chicago, and Joseph Mitchell’s reports from the waterfront. With This Place on Third Avenue, that shelf grows one book longer.