Hotel Builders in New York Might Have Just Uncovered the Colonial-Era Bull’s Head Tavern

On the Bowery, in New York City, there’s a small construction site near a Chinese restaurant. The place is slated to become a hotel, but when the builders were working on it, they uncovered some weird beams. Turns out, this might be the famed Bull’s Head Tavern, a place visited by George Washington, and written about by Washington Irving. James Barron at the New York Times writes that Adam Woodward, a photographer and preservationists, got a look inside the site the other day and realized what they had found:

“At one point there was a distinct change in the building material, from cinder block to a brick-and-stone foundation wall,” he said. “I followed that wall and found myself at the front of the building, under the sidewalk at the Bowery, and looked up and saw what looked to me like 18th-century hand-hewn and hand-planed joists and beams with extremely wide floorboards right above them.”

He said, “I was thinking, I am standing in the cellar of the Bull’s Head.”...