Ear Inn

The Ear Inn is the bar that outran its own name — the Federal townhouse built around 1770 for James Brown, the African-American veteran of Washington's army who may be the figure in the Leutze painting of the Delaware crossing, where the Hudson lapped at the door when it opened. A bar has poured on the ground floor continuously since 1817 — homebrew and corn whiskey to the sailors when the river was five feet away, a speakeasy through Prohibition, 'The Green Door' to the seamen who knew it from every port.

The name is the landmark commission's accident — when Rip Hayman and Martin Sheridan bought it in 1977, repainting the neon BAR sign meant a landmarks review, so they covered the rounded parts of the B and called it the Ear Inn. The sign they avoided changing became the name; the building stayed as untouched as the sign did.

The ghost is a regular — Mickey the Sailor, the legend the bar keeps, reportedly still at the bar he knew when the river was at the door. The file keeps the layers intact: the upstairs that was a boarding house, a smuggler's den, a brothel, a doctor's office; the downstairs that never stopped pouring; and the jazz on Sundays that shakes the 18th-century bottles in the apartment overhead — the bar New York built itself around and never closed.

The Ear Inn is the archive's continuous file — the 1770 townhouse where a bar has poured since 1817, renamed by covering part of its own neon sign, haunted by Mickey the Sailor and the sailors who knew it as the Green Door.