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Immortality on 44th St.

Cartoonists from a bygone era resurrect memories of an old watering hole

By Patrick Arden / Metro New York

NOV 20, 2005

MIDTOWN - Costello�s occupies a special place in the annals of New York watering holes. Opened as a speakeasy under the elevated tracks on Third Ave., the bar became celebrated as a writers� hangout -- only with more character. In a series of stories that ran in the New Yorker in the 1940s, John McNulty told of the horseplayers, cabbies and �sour beer artists� who frequented �this place on Third Avenue.�

�Costello�s had a great literary history,� said John Kates, a reporter for the New York Daily News, recalling the place in its final location on 44th Street. �There was a shillelagh that Ernest Hemingway was supposed to have broken over his head in a bet with John O�Hara.

�That bar culture is long gone in newspaper work,� Kates said. �It was profitable journalistically -- it created an energy, and the competition was intense. It was also very profitable for the bar, because newspapermen would come in on a Friday and cash their paychecks.�

Perhaps the most well-known Costello�s anecdote concerned James Thurber re-creating his cartoon �Battle of the Sexes� as a wall mural in order to pay off his bar tab.

A cartoon mural

In 1976, owner Tim Costello asked Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo to create a mural opposite Thurber�s.

�But I thought it was too presumptuous to go up against Thurber,� remembered Gallo. �I finally said, �I�ll get cartoonists to fill that wall, if you give us a party from noon to closing.� Forty guys showed up, some sober, and maybe in 20 minutes that wall was done.�

Contributors included Stan Lee (�Spider-Man�), Mort Walker (�Beetle Bailey�), Al Jaffee (Mad magazine), Dik Browne (�Hagar the Horrible�) and a who�s who from the world of newspaper comic strips.

�When Tim sold the place, he took his Thurber panels,� Gallo said. �Then we heard that this< lady was going to tear down the wall.�

Gallo approached Kates, who wrote an article. �We got calls from the Smithsonian,� Gallo said. �The lady pulled back and didn�t tear it down.�

Bid for immortality

That mural is still up at 225 E. 44th St., but the bar�s now called the Overlook. One of the owners, Jeff Pruzan, called on Gallo to paint the wall where the Thurber piece used to be.

�I said, it will have to be the same deal,� explained Gallo, 81, who oversaw the creation of a new mural by about two dozen cartoonists yesterday.

�Cartoonists are a band of brothers,� said Irwin Hasen, 87, the creator of Dondi. In the old mural, Hasen had painted his war orphan smiling, but the new drawing has Dondi peeing on a tree -- an irreverent reaction to his character getting killed off by the newspaper syndicate 20 years ago. �They owned it -- I didn�t. It�s harder today, though -- cartoonists have been taken over by animation, computer-induced creativity. In my time it was raw, a whole �nother ball game.�

At one point yesterday, Gallo made a speech.

�This is 30 years ago,� he said, pointing to the old mural. �And this is today. All you cartoonists are now immortal. Your work will live till somebody buys the place and has a notion to tear down this wall. I hope that never happens.�

[Originally ran with photo by Bill Lyons/Metro] Don Orehek, 77, re-creates a cartoon he published in Playboy magazine during the 1970s.

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