Through the magic of Googlebooks and archive.org, it is possible to find bits and pieces about McGowan’s Pass and the Black Horse Tavern, though these often contradict each other.
Part of the 1789 Christopher Colles map, showing the "McGowen" house on the right and Legget's Tavern on the left.
In the excerpt below, the elderly Mr. S. Benson McGown (1797-1882?) tells us that the Legget’s tavern shown on Christopher Colles’s 1789 map (at right) is indeed the same house known as the Black Horse during the Revolution, and that it was somewhat south of his family’s house on the Kingsbridge Road.
Alas, McGown is fuzzy on the location: he seems to agree with the querent that the tavern was located near the line of 97th Street. Â Colles’s map clearly puts it on the line of 101st or 102nd–just across the road from the McGown house, or almost. Of course McGown was a very small boy when he last saw the tavern, and the Manhattan street-grid was well in the future. Likewise, his testimony about Legget’s circa 1805 doesn’t prove anything about the Black Horse Tavern in 1776.
But on this crucial point he is nevertheless very clear: the Black Horse Tavern was not in the McGown House, it was a little distance down the road.
From The Magazine of American history with notes and queries, Volume 8 (1882)
Letter from Mr. McGown, dated Feb 7, 1881, in reply to the query: “If the tavern eight blocks south of McGown’s house on the Kingsbridge road, north side of the present 97th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and marked on the road map of Colles in 1789 as Legget’s Tavern, was the Black Horse of the Revolution.”
Dear Sir
The Tavern referred to in the road map of 1789 is the Black Horse Tavern of Revolutionary fame. I have been in the house in my boyhood, and if you desire I can at any time give you a full description of the house and surroundings. The house was set on fire and burned down about the year 1809, perhaps 1808. You may accept the latter date, 1808. Will be happy to give you any information that I can in reference to the old Black Horse if you have no idea of it.
Yours,
S. Benson McGown.