A couple of months ago, walking down Third Avenue, I committed an honest-to-God Elmer Fudd double-take: Tuesday’s was gone! Or, more accurately, transformed into Sal Anthony’s Scheffel Hall Movement Salon, offering gyro-tonics, ancestor- channeling, and other New Age piffle. All that was left of what it had replaced was a mural up near the ceiling where, varnished by decades of cigar smoke, monks still lifted steins in a dim yellow carouse.

The movement salon took its name from the building, Scheffel Hall, a gathering place built for what would today be called “the German-American community” at a time when New York was nearly as much a German town as an Irish one. The legend SCHEFFEL HALL is still clearly visible on the building’s busy facade (CHEFFEL, actually, the S having been claimed by obliterating time), but it’s the name right next to it—and equally easy to make out—that mattered more to me: ALLAIRE’S . It had been a saloon, always. Opened during the second year of the Civil War, Allaire’s provided O. Henry with the setting for his story “The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss,” and over the decades its walls acquired a wonderful accretion of lithographs of prizefighters and women in tights and, later, photos of drivers in the coffin-snouted racing cars of the 1910s. By midcentury the bar had become Joe King’s Rathskeller, a famous hangout for college kids—and a particularly appealing one to me, who, in the late 1960s, could go there and see a picture of some long-dead welterweight and later talk to a dour washroom attendant who remembered watching him fight out at Coney.

I was growing up or getting a job or married when a restaurant chain took over Joe King’s; the next time I went there, it was Tuesday’s. I’d gone back in the service of this magazine. Like most journals, we seek ways to draw advertisers’ attention to our virtues. In our case, this presents a unique challenge: how to suggest to people who tend to be young and not automatically drawn to the study of history that our franchise is a vital and engaging one. Twelve years ago we lit on the idea of taking a group of potential clients on a tour of classic saloons, of which our neighborhood has an impressive supply.

I discovered what Joe King’s had become while scouting out the route of that inaugural tour. The old bar’s new management clearly didn’t care much about its heritage, but the pugilists and heroic-thighed women were still on the walls, and Tuesday’s became part of our itinerary. So did the nearby Pete’s Tavern (another O. Henry haunt); the scrupulously preserved Old Town (before the opening sequence of the Letterman show made it famous); Chumley’s (a true speakeasy, and just as hard to find as it was when Helen Worden reported in her 1932 guidebook The Real New York that “the quickest way to reach 86 Bedford Street is in a local taxi. Even Mr.