When Lager Reigned

What with its bone-boiling facilities, tanneries, towering manure heaps, and roaming packs of aggressive hogs, 19th-century Manhattan was an affront to the nose and eyeballs. Luckily one didn’t need to go far to dull the senses, as there seemed to be a bar crammed into every square inch of the city.

The utter dominance of booze slingers is on display in this 1883 map sketched by one Robert Graham and featured in the archives of the New York Public Library. A 32-block section of what’s now the Lower East Side was reportedly packed with 242 "lager-beer saloons" (marked with circles) and 61 “liquor saloons” (rectangles), enough to fatally poison a 300-pound souse doing a bar crawl in about two blocks.