In 1980, Jiri George Erml (1945–2008) emigrated from his native Czechoslovakia to the United States, where he settled in Brooklyn and worked as a freelance photographer. Erml was immediately enchanted by the bars of New York, and began to photograph them: Casablanca in Harlem (since closed), Chumley’s in Greenwich Village, Montero and John Hanley’s in Brooklyn, Woods Inn in Queens, George’s Rockaway Cove on Staten Island, the Golden Note Café in the Bronx and many others. This volume is a tribute to a little-documented aspect of New York life.
