You Should've Been There

Farewell to Peter Walsh, co-owner of Coogan's among many other things.

Rob Mooney, me, and Peter Walsh

I like a drink now and then. But I have too much regard for alcohol to want to spoil the pleasure by drinking too much in front of other people. Or maybe I just made the face-first acquaintance of too many sidewalks when I was young and decided that if I was going to disgrace myself publicly I might as well get paid for it. In any event, I don’t go to bars that much. But the one place in New York where I made an exception was a pub in Washington Heights called Coogan’s, co-owned by a splendid gentleman named Peter Walsh who died on Good Friday.

If you never went to Coogan’s, well, you should’ve been there. And if you never knew Peter, boy, did you miss out. He was one of the great motormouth raconteurs of the city, and that’s saying a lot. He talked so fast and said so many funny, wise things that even the many professional writers he knew had trouble scribbling them down. I can’t quite do justice to his riffs about drunken firefighters and Mormon bartenders. But here he is, in his own words, on a somewhat more serious subject:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1afK7bGnRh4-Jq5faSPApmdS-3hAD7vgf/view?usp=sharing

Peter saw a lot of life from behind that counter, because he helped put a lot of that life into Coogan’s, which was a big mighty barn of a place on Broadway and 169^th Street. On any given night, you could see nurses from Columbia-Presbyterian just across the street, city council members, Dominican drug dealers, wholesome families celebrating tenth birthdays or fiftieth wedding anniversaries, hard-bitten homicide detectives, famous actors, and generally deranged people who could easily fit into any of those categories. You can get some sense of the atmosphere from Jon Michaud’s very fond book Last Call at Coogan’s and the documentary Coogan’s Way.

The food was simple but good. The drinks were reasonably priced. The conversation was killer and the people-watching was epic. Long marriages began over beers there, while other fell between stools. And I saw a few things that I still can’t really talk about, even though one of my detective friends assures me that the statute of limitations has passed.

Of course, Peter, and his co-owners Dave Hunt and Tess O’Connor McDade, glued it all together. And Peter was a character I would never try to make up for a novel. A poet, a playwright, a Vietnam veteran who knew his Joyce and could sing the bejesus out of “House of the Rising Sun.” He had a wife and children, supported the city’s running community and was deft at defusing fights. But at the age of 68, he famously duked it out on the sidewalk in front of Coogan’s with an overly aggressive panhandler, who came away impressed with Peter’s classic Marquis of Queensbury boxing stance.

He told great stories. Some were true. And the ones that were declared fiction he described with such brio that you couldn’t be sure. He had an idea for a Blue Bloods episode about a body hidden in the wall of a bar basement that he told so insistently that some of us were afraid to go down there.

But what impressed me most about Peter were his talents as a publican presiding over a public house. Places like Elaine’s and Studio 54 might loom larger in the legend, but Coogan’s was always more of the people and for the people. It was a sports bar if that’s what you wanted it to be, a family restaurant if the kids were around, and a community center where deals got made and beefs got settled.

We live in a time when we are increasingly trapped in front of screens and self-segregated into our own cohorts. But a lot of people – especially younger people – yearn to break out of those post-pandemic silos and have more authentic experiences. Every recent medical study says alcohol is no good for you, but isolation is not so hot either. Until the pandemic and financial pressures forced its closure in 2020, Coogan’s had a treatment for that condition. And that was largely a reflection of Peter’s character.

I’m told that when Peter learned his final call was coming, he said, “My life has been an adventure. This is just the next part.”

When my time comes, I’ll have whatever he’s having.