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THE cops never found the booze during Prohibition, and it belongs to the 21 Club. Famous for its sumptuously New Yorky dishes (such as filet mignon with cumquat vinaigrette), 21 is a real boys' den.
Dark and plush, the subterranean rooms are festooned with intriguing junk: footballs, helmets, a model torpedo boat given by JFK, and a smashed racket from John McEnroe. There are even 25 paintings by Frederic Remington, left by debtors during the Depression. But oddly it isn't a club at all. Anyone can go there, provided they've got a fat wallet and hollow legs. "How did you hide the booze?" I ask. "I'll show you," says the wine steward, and leads us off downstairs, even deeper underground. There, he produces a meat skewer, and slides it into the brickwork. With a distant clunk, 2 1/2 tonnes of wall swing aside, revealing a cavern big enough for 2000 cases. It's still a private stash (for movie stars and presidents).
In the kitchen opposite, even the cooks look slightly guilty and spring to attention as we pass through. It was here in 1931 that a gangster's moll famously had it off with a talented young writer. He, of course, was the irrepressible Ernest Hemingway.
And it's these writers that intrigue me. What is it about New York that's made it such a literary hothouse? Everyone seems to have been this way, boozing and scrawling: Stein, Steinbeck, Thurber, Miller, Mailer. Often the books have had nothing to do with the city: Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in the Bowery (while emphatically off the wagon) and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood emerged from a pretty little brownstone. Often, too, New York has spawned books about distant, unimaginable worlds, such as James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, written in the East Village, or Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in the Hotel Chelsea.
Writers have always liked the hotels. The Chelsea also hosted Mark Twain and Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams enjoyed the Elysee so much that he stayed for 15 years, only checking out in his coffin.
I am curious as to what has become of these old haunts, so I set off on a literary ghost tour. I don't expect to find much. After all, Eugene O'Neill's birthplace on Times Square is now a Starbucks.
I begin (where 17 million Americans began) at the old immigration station on Ellis Island. It's a weird mix of palace and prison. Between 1892 and 1917, it was a portal of hope, beckoning in the outside world. Strangely, there are few literary ghosts on the manifests, although I did spot Joseph Conrad (just visiting).
I have more luck over a $25 sandwich at the Algonquin, on West 44th. In its hallowed Edwardian lobby, it is easy to imagine the city's earliest celebrity writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and her vicious circle. They've even left a few artefacts in glass cabinets. But, for me, one man's majestic is another man's funereal. I doubt all that dark varnish and polished brass has sparked much creativity in recent years. We need a literary hot spot.
Surprisingly, one of the hottest spots is across the East River. I love Brooklyn Heights, with its maple-shaded streets and huge, chocolatey mansions. It has about it something of the stage set. Perhaps it's the dearth of cars or the sprawling Manhattan backdrop. Behind the lace, it's heaving with ghosts.
Between Ramsden and Orange streets is a tiny enclave that produced Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead.
It's here we find WH Auden's gloomy apartment. Back in 1939, it was so cold that the loo froze and he had to use one at the nearby liquor store.
I ask an old university friend, Joseph O'Neill, if Brooklyn is still a literary hot spot. Joe has been living in New York for 15 years and has seen his fortunes soar with his novel Netherland. Yes, he tells me, these days they all live in Fort Greene. In one street there are four Pulitzer prize-winners. And what's the secret of its success? "It's cheap."
I met Joe for lunch at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. The food's a bit iffy, he's warned, but the atmosphere's fine. By fine, he means pine floors, blokes in camouflage, and ketchup on the tables. Once, writers had loved this, and they were all here: Mailer, Kerouac, James Baldwin and Hunter S. Thompson. But its most lucrative customer was Dylan Thomas, whose portrait hangs in the snug. It was here, in 1953, that he drank his last five whiskies, although, contrary to myth, it wasn't those that killed him. It was the two beers the following morning.
We doubt whether today's literati would like the food at the Horse. I have a bottle of Bass, a chilli dog (don't ask), and a pint of instant coffee. Perhaps these days writers don't feel the need to huddle together for warmth and work. Nowadays, the Horse sees few writers. "Sadly, the scene's moved on," says Joe.
All around us, in the Village, are the reminders of a gloriously literary drunken age. Even the pubs here sound like novels (the Slaughtered Lamb, Four-Faced Liar and Frank McCourt's old local, The Kettle of Fish). Best preserved, all marble and panelling, is the Minetta Tavern at 113 MacDougal Street. Amid the crush, I half expect to spot Ezra Pound, an old regular, or perhaps Hemingway tossing back a martini.
To navigate Greenwich's maze of pretty Georgian streets, I hire a guide, Paul of the Finest Walking Tours. Being ex-NYPD, Paul has a nose for junkies, and we are soon among the old dives of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. We also find Twain's favoured pharmacist, and the infirmary where, in 1836, Edgar Allan Poe sought treatment for a cold.
I am pleased to be staying right at the heart of this literary labyrinth. Like many authors, the Washington Square Hotel has often found its fortunes lurching from glory to disgrace. By 1952, it was so desperate it even tolerated Thomas, and in a Joan Baez song it's memorialised as "crummy".
It eventually became a sort of flop-house for creatives, hosting one binge after another, from the Ramones to the B-52s. Now, the glory has been restored. Although the corridors are as higgledy-piggledy as ever, my room is huge, the bar magnificent and the breakfast (smoked salmon and capers) a triumph. I imagine things were like this when PG Wodehouse called by, in 1904, staying for a month. It was the beginning of a long affair.
As he later wrote of New York, "being there was like being in heaven, without going to all the expense and bother of dying". Well, yes, that's one way of putting it.
The Spectator
John Gimlette is the author of Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge.