On Sacred Space

And on the greatest bar in the world

A while ago a post circulated on Twitter that got people talking about “thin places,” by which it meant those places in the world where the boundary between our world and another seems especially thin—places where one feels that someone, if they knew the trick of it, could step across that boundary and be Elsewhere. A circle of mushrooms in the remotest part of the woods; an ancient redwood whose canopy blots out the sky; a frozen mountain lake so smooth that it throws back and redoubles the light of the moon like a perfect mirror: these are the kinds of places I mean, where nature is so thoroughly itself that it reaches over into something more, to touch a primordial history that springs from a time before humanity and that will endure long after us. One feels like an intruder in such places: they remind us that we are not masters of the world, that there are things older, stranger, and far more dangerous than homo sapiens, and that while we are in such places we had best mind our manners.

I like visiting thin places sometimes, but I don’t seek them out. My favorite places are in many ways the opposite: places dense with humanity, suffused with the accreted meaning of everyday use; places that are deeply embedded in communities and generative of them in turn. Far from rendering us intruders, these are “thick places” where a person can come to belong, perhaps for the first time in their lives. An old and distinguished school, the sort to which a teacher might devote forty or fifty years of service, carries this quality, but it’s felt in humbler places too. For me, that palpable humanity is most keenly felt in a small dive bar in the West Village of Manhattan.

Marie’s Crisis is not a nice bar. The fanciest beer on the menu is Stella Artois, but it’s so expensive ($9 a bottle outside happy hour) that you really ought to order something else. There’s no sales tax added to the drinks because there are no credit card readers and the staff don’t want to deal with coins. In the middle of the bar, near the eastern wall, is a piano that gets played for 8–10 hours a day and is for that reason perpetually broken or out of tune; I think the last time they replaced it the new one lasted almost 2 months before a key broke. It’s the kind of bar where you can order something fancier than a highball, but since there’s only room for a single bartender you probably shouldn’t after about 8 pm. If you want to hear anything other than Broadway show tunes from the piano, no you don’t.

The bar has a history, too. The building sits on the site where Thomas Paine lived at the end of his life; he wrote The American Crisis there as well, which gives the bar part of its name. The other part of the name comes from Marie DuMont, a woman who bought the place in 1929 and ran it as a bar and brothel called simply “Marie’s” until the second part of the name was added at some point. During the 30s or 40s the WPA put up a mural behind the back bar depicting the French and American revolutions. Like a lot of WPA projects, it hints at socialist propaganda in its details: one of the French partisans is holding a sickle straight up into the air, and above it you can read “LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ” in the center of the mural. Marie’s seems to have basically always been a primarily gay establishment, and nobody’s quite sure when the piano part started but it was definitely in full swing by the late 70s and hasn’t really changed at all since then: there are still only two light fixtures (the rest of the light is provided by Christmas lights strewn across the ceiling, probably in violation of several fire code provisions) and a couple of single-occupancy bathrooms in the basement.

All this has been a prelude to my contention that Marie’s Crisis is the greatest bar on the planet. It’s a piano bar, but the pianist is only paid to play, not to sing: it’s up to the patrons to provide that part of the entertainment. It’s a place where you go to do the kind of unapologetic, full-throated singing that happens on road trips with your best friends or reunions with your college choir. But the restriction of the music to a single genre—the Broadway show tune—also gives shape and depth to this spontaneity. There’s a common language shared among patrons who’ve never met one another: the songs say more than their lyrics. I once returned after a long absence, and a friend who had arrived about 15 minutes before me made sure that “Hello, Dolly!” was playing as I walked in. In a room full of theatre lovers, such grand gestures are not at all out of place.

And then there are moments, rare and usually late in the evening, when the (largely straight) 9–11:30 crowd has emptied out and only the (mostly gay) stalwarts remain. These times, when people are still drunk but nursing waters to sober up for the train ride home, when the full weight of an evening out descends, are natural times for reminiscence and memorial. In a gay bar, especially one with plenty of older patrons, this inevitably means thinking about AIDS. One night in 2010 when I was 22 years old, I was staying late at Marie’s. It was about 2:30 in the morning, and there were a dozen or so of us left at the bar, sipping light beer or water and making small talk between songs. I was the youngest person there by several decades, and then suddenly the pianist struck up something we all knew: “Seasons of Love,” from Rent. If you haven’t spent much time in gay spaces, or if you don’t know that show well, I suspect it’s difficult to appreciate the effect that the instantly-recognizable opening chords of that song has on a room full of gay men. Rent is about a group of young artists living through the AIDS crisis, defiantly continuing to live in the face of so much death. It hits very close to home for a lot of people, and that night I was in a room full of men who had seen people die of AIDS. There weren’t many visible tears, but you could feel in the air that this song was important in a way that the others hadn’t been. It was a way for someone like me, born too early to know what it was like, to become part of the work of remembering. It was the first time that I remember feeling like I was part of a community with a history larger than my own, a history made of people and therefore understandable in human terms.

This is the real difference between these thick and human places and the thin places of nature. Both are taut and thrumming with the music of history, music that you can hear echoing with every step you take in such a place. But the history of thin places is deep and alien, a history with no people in it, quantifiable only with numbers too big for our brains to properly reckon with. We can model such history but never really understand it. A thick and human place, however, is a place whose history is nothing but humanity. Its history means something because it is a history of meaning, of the ways a place has been important to people and made to mean something for them and for the community that surrounded them. In a thin place your words will be snatched away by history; in a thick place they are the very stuff of history. The things we whisper to our friends, the drink order we don’t even need to say anymore, the obscene lyrics that we substitute for the real ones because British megamusicals aren’t real theatre anyway—these are the things that make a bar like Marie’s real in a way that makes other parts of life seem washed out and faded. What we say and do in a place like that becomes part of it, part of the stories people will tell when they’re older and far away, about a night that they’ve never forgotten.