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.