Landmark Tavern

When Patrick Henry Carley opened the Landmark Tavern in 1868, the Hudson River lapped a block away — there was no Twelfth Avenue, just the water and the dockworkers who drank at the mahogany bar carved from a single tree. The upstairs was the Carley family's home; the third floor became a speakeasy when Prohibition came. The neighborhood was Hell's Kitchen, and the bar outlasted the slaughterhouses, the glue factories, and the gangs.

In the 1980s it was a Westies bar — the Irish gang that ran the West Side drank under the tin ceilings. The ghosts that accumulated are the neighborhood's own: a Confederate veteran knifed in a brawl who staggered upstairs to die in a bathtub that's still on the second floor; an Irish immigrant girl who survived the famine voyage and died of cholera in a third-floor bed; and George Raft, the Hollywood tough guy who grew up in Hell's Kitchen and is said to still drink at the bar where he started.

The Landmark is one of the oldest continuously operating taverns in New York — restored in 2004 with the original bar, the tin ceiling, and the tile floor intact, still on the corner of Eleventh and Forty-Sixth, a block now from the aircraft carrier parked in the river it used to face.