New York Offbeat Walks, page 12
Almost opposite, at No. 69, is where the fabled Beat writer William Burroughs (1914-1997) lived from 1943, a decade before writing his best known works Junkie and Naked Lunch. During this period he was close to Lucien Carr and Dave Kammerer (the latter lived at 48 Morton Street nearby), and they often visited Chumley’s together (seen shortly). Carr is less well-known today, but he is most notable for having introduced Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg, the three key figures at the heart of the Beat movement.
It was during this period in the 1940s that the core of the Beat Generation formed, with Burroughs exploring the city’s underbelly with new friends such as Carr, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. However, tragedy struck in 1944 when Carr, fighting off a sexual assault from Kammerer, stabbed Kammerer to death in Riverside Park. Carr went to Burroughs and Kerouac for help, and their involvement dragged them into what became a sensational murder case that led to Carr being convicted of second-degree manslaughter.
Walk back up Bedford Street looking out for Nos. 75 ½ and 77 on the left. The first is the narrowest house in the city–just 9 ½ feet wide. Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived here in the early 1920s. Next door at No. 77 is the Isaacs-Hendricks house, built in 1799 and the oldest building in Greenwich Village. It used to be a farmhouse owned by Harmon Hendricks. In 1989 it was purchased by Jacqueline Thion de la Chaume, wife of actor Yul Brynner.
When researching this book, I had a conversation with two elderly gentlemen outside here. They were despairing of the rising real estate prices and how speculators were “flipping” houses on the street to make a buck. Then one told me he had lived in the area for several decades and owned a 16-bedroom house (he had combined three apartments together) and the other gentleman walked back to his six-bedroom house around the corner. It struck me as a very “Village” conversation.
Turn left onto Commerce Street, heading down to The Cherry Lane Theater at No. 38. This was founded in 1923 and is the oldest continuously running off-Broadway theater. The building dates from 1817, originally a farm silo, and another reminder that the Village was actually once a real rural village. The theater has always had a reputation for the avant-garde. One notable event took place on March 2, 1952 and was called An Evening of Bohemian Theatre. Performances included Pablo Picasso’s play Desire Caught by the Tail, and plays by T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. The theater was also the location for the premiere of plays by figures such as Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard.
Retrace your steps to Bedford Street and turn left. It is most likely named after Bedford Street in London, itself named after the Duke of Bedford. Bedford is a town about 50 miles north of London and Andrew Russell (b. 1962), the 15th and current Duke of Bedford, studied at Harvard.
Shorty on the right at No. 86 is the site of Chumley’s. This was originally a blacksmiths, then in the 1920s Leland Stanford Chumley opened a bar and restaurant that was completely anonymous from the outside (the entrance was through a courtyard on Barrow Street). It became a legendary haunt during Prohibition, and frequented by countless Village types including John Steinbeck, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, Norman Mailer, all the Beats and William Faulkner. With all this socializing, it is hard to imagine when all the plays, poems and books were actually written. The term “86 it”—or make a swift exit—is said to have come from patrons rushing out to avoid the raids by Prohibition officers.
A little farther up on the left at No. 95 look for the sign for “J.Gobel & Co.—Est. 1865.” This was used as a horse stable by the firm.
Continue on to reach Grove Street. At the intersection, look up to your right to see the much-photographed No. 90 Bedford Street. Why? This was used for the exterior shot of the apartments where Monica, Rachel, Joey and Chandler lived in the hit-series Friends.
Cross over, passing No. 17 Grove Street , to see an unusual and rare clapboard-style house on the corner. It was built for a window-sash maker named William Hyde and dates from 1822. It was valued at $100 in the 1820s and listed for sale for $12 million in 2019. The third story was added in 1870. There is, it is rumored, a secret tunnel underground that connects this property with Chumley’s.
Turn left onto Grove Street, where after the third house on the left you see the discreet gate leading to Grove Court. If I were forced to live in the Village, this would be one of my top picks. If you peek through here you can see houses dating from the early 1850s and Grove Court was first laid out in 1848. In the early 1900s, Grove Court was dominated by Irish working-class families and known as Pig’s Alley. There was even a local gang called the Pig’s Alley Gorillas. This was the setting for “The Last Leaf” (1907)—a short story by O. Henry about a young female artist dying of pneumonia and watching the leaves on a nearby ivy creeper (don’t worry, she survives).
Retrace your steps and continue along Bedford Street to the Twin Peaks building on the right at No. 102. This was originally a row house of 1830 that was radically redesigned in 1925. Its highly unusual Swiss Chalet style appearance seems to embody the quirky, Bohemian reputation the Village had at the time. Silent film star Mabel Normand (1893-1930), who starred alongside Charlie Chaplin and “Fatty” Arbuckle in many films, smashed a bottle of champagne against a gable in the opening ceremony. Some have suggested Walt Disney lived here but there is no evidence to support this.
Continue up to reach Christopher Street, named for Charles Christopher Amos who owned the land around here (hence Charles Street nearby). To your right at No. 121 is The Lucille Lortel Theatre, an off-Broadway Playhouse that has been running since 1955. It was known as the Theatre De Lys until 1981.
In the early 1960s, Bob Dylan came here to see Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, working on the production. The production had a big impact on Dylan, particularly the song “Pirate Jenny,” which Dylan would credit with inspiring his own songwriting. He would later recall in his memoir, Chronicles Volume 1, “I’d think about this later in my dumpy apartment. I hadn’t done anything yet, wasn’t any kind of songwriter but I’d become rightly impressed by the physical and ideological possibilities within the confines of the lyric and melody.”
The building began as a cinema in 1926 and was later bought by a wealthy financier for his wife, Lucille Lortel (1900-1999). The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Lortel became a stage actress and appeared in some early silent films. She later became a theatrical producer and director and owned this theater.
Now turn left onto Christopher Street, then right up Hudson Street. On the left at Nos. 509-511 Hudson Street is a fine building from around 1820 when the Village was being transformed from a rural hamlet into a new fashionable suburb. As a rule of thumb, if you see a brick building that is two or two-and-half stories high, it is old—often from the first half of the 19th century. New York’s buildings got steadily taller as the need for space became greater, and construction techniques and materials improved.
Continue up Hudson Street, passing No. 521. In the mid-1940s, this was the childhood home of Robert De Niro. He moved here with his artist mother Virginia Admiral after she separated from his father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr. The future actor grew up in an artistic, bohemian environment, his parents mixing with figures such as Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and Tennessee Williams.
Continue up Hudson Street. This stretch was home to many other notable people over the years. You pass Charles Street where photographer Diane Arbus lived for nine years at No. 131, then Perry Street where anti-corruption cop Frank Serpico lived at No. 116.
You pass on the left No. 555 Hudson, home to Jane Jacobs (1916-2006). She lived here from 1947-1968, and during this time wrote her best known work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). She is credited with helping change how many people saw their urban environment and led the fight against developers and officials such as Robert Moses who wanted to tear down great swaths of the city in the name of “improvement.” She chose a nice place to live—a rowhouse dating from 1842.
Continue on to reach the fabled White Horse Tavern. If you are interested in the Village’s literary and musical connections, you simply must pay homage with a drink here. You will be following in the sometimes unsteady footsteps of Jane Jacobs, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson.
The tavern opened in 1880, and was a speakeasy during Prohibition and a haunt for sailors and longshoremen working on nearby docks and piers along the Hudson River. But it was the people who came here in the 1950s to 1960s that made it known throughout the world. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas started coming here in 1952. On November 4, 1953, he claimed to have drunk 18 straight whiskeys, before returning to the Chelsea Hotel and then back to the White Horse where, shortly after and desperately ill, he was injected with morphine by a quack doctor before going into a coma. He died on November 9. He was 39.
On the same side as the Tavern, turn left onto West 11th Street, then right up Greenwich Street. When you reach Bank Street turn left a short way to where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived in a modest apartment at No. 105 between 1971-73. The couple rented the apartment from Joe Butler, a member of The Lovin’ Spoonful, and Lennon released his album Some Time in New York City (1972) while living here. It was after a robbery here that the couple, fearful of their safety, moved to The Dakota. The sad irony is that The Dakota is where Lennon would be murdered as he walked out of the building one day in 1980.
The couple, under surveillance from the FBI, regularly went next door to No. 107 to use the phone at avant-garde composer John Cage’s house. Lennon once said, “I should have been born in New York, I should have been born in the Village, that’s where I belong.” While living here, Lennon had visitors such as activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. As word spread that he lived here, fans began to turn up. One was Jesus. When Lennon asked his assistant to clarify, he was told it was “Jesus from Toronto,” to which the former Beatle replied “We don’t know that one.”
Turn left onto Bank Street, named in the early 1800s for the Bank of New York and another bank that moved here to avoid quarantine rules being imposed in lower Manhattan because of yellow fever. On the left at is HB Studio, a respected acting school founded in 1945 by Austrian Herbert Berghof, who came to the city in 1939 to escape Nazi oppression. Alumni include Al Pacino, Sarah Jessica Parker, Christopher Reeve, Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen, Whoopi Goldberg, Sigourney Weaver and Robert De Niro.
Continue along Bank Street to reach the intersection of Washington Street. On the northwest corner is the Westbeth Artists Housing complex. This incredible site, originally comprised of 13 buildings, was constructed for Western Electric in 1868, and was later taken over by Bell Laboratories in the late 1890s. Demonstrations were held here of the first talking film, the binary computer, TV broadcasts and the condenser microphone. Today it is hard to imagine the hyper-gentrified Village being the site of the biggest industrial research complex in the country, but for many years that was the case. Scientists at Bell Labs were also involved in secret research for the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bombs.
Bell stayed here until 1966. The empty buildings were then turned into live-work spaces for hundreds of artists and opened in 1970. It later incorporated performance and rehearsal spaces, and became home to a number of cultural organizations. The photographer Bob Gruen was a Westbeth resident and good friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In June 1975 Lennon came looking for Gruen’s studio at Westbeth and got lost inside the complex. He was approached by numerous artists living there looking for Lennon’s input and when he eventually found Gruen’s apartment he remarked, “Man, you’ve got some weird neighbors.” Gruen took some of the most iconic shots of Lennon, including the one in which he wears a t-shirt that says “New York City,” taken on the terrace of Lennon’s East 52nd Street apartment.
Notable residents include Diane Arbus (she committed suicide at Westbeth in 1971), actor Vin Diesel, artist Robert De Niro Sr., and jazz musician Gil Evans. If you look up to the second floor you can see part of the old High Line elevated railway, a larger section of which is now a major city attraction.
Now return back the way you came along Bank Street, crossing over Greenwich Street, to reach Hudson Street again. Bear left, with the Bleecker Playground on your right, then bear right to Bleecker Street. There is a striking Art Deco building overlooking the playground.
This is Abingdon Court (the address is 75 Bank Street). In the early 1940s, the teenage Betty Bacall (1924-2014) moved here with her mother Natalie. In 1941 she attended a nearby acting school and dated classmate Kirk Douglas. In 1942 Betty was crowned “Miss Greenwich Village,” and chosen to participate in the “Miss America” beauty contest. Her career moved very quickly—by 1944, at age 19, she was starring with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. Now called Lauren Bacall, she would marry Bogart, and star in other classics such as The Big Sleep, Key Largo and How to Marry a Millionaire. She also had a relationship with Frank Sinatra.
Proceed eastward along Bank Street. On the left at No. 63 is , where English Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose on February 2, 1979. He was on bail after being charged with the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen at the Chelsea Hotel on October 2, 1978. The former Sex Pistol was 21 when he died, Spungen just 20.
Bank Street
Other notable people who have lived on Bank Street include rock star Mark Knopfler, Jon Dos Passos (best known for The 42nd Parallel), Ezra Pound, Patricia Highsmith, politician Bella Abzug, and John Cheever. Recently houses on Bank Street have been valued in excess of $20 million. If you want to know more, check out Growing Up Bank Street: A Greenwich Village Memoir, by Bank Street resident Donna Florio. Just a few hundred yards from here on West 12th Street is a townhouse reported to have been purchased in 2015 by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for over $22 million.
Now turn right onto Waverly Place. Full of lovely homes, this used to be the very-cool sounding Art Place, but in 1833 it was named after Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott’s once hugely popular series of historical novels (actually spelled Waverley and first published in 1814). Regarded as the first historical novels, Waverley achieved a success similar to the Harry Potter books of today. About a dozen towns in places from Ohio, Florida and Alabama are also named after the work. No one is sure why Americans dropped the “e” in Waverley, but it is certain that the hero of Scott’s first novel was Edward Waverley, an Englishman. This is ironic given the authorities of New York did their best to change the names of pre-Revolutionary era streets with an English connection.
Waverly Place is so cool that the character Don Draper from the series Mad Men has an apartment here. He lived at 104 Waverly Place (as seen on a check in one episode). It is also where young wizards lived in the hit sitcom Wizards of Waverly Place (2007-2012) that starred Selena Gomez.
On the right (after crossing West 11th Street) you pass St. John’s in the Village Episcopal Church, and the 99-seater off-Broadway Rattlestick Theater at 224 Waverly Place.
At the bottom you reach Perry Street, named for Oliver Perry (1785-1819), a naval commander. It is not visited on this walk, but Sex and the City fans might want to visit Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment (the exteriors of No. 64 then No. 66 Perry Street were used in the show, but the interior was filmed on a set in Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens). Other residents of Perry Street have included Norman Mailer and Henry Miller.
At the corner of Waverly Place and Perry Street is what must be the city’s thinnest building, and just beside it at 178 Seventh Avenue is the Village Vanguard, a jazz venue that opened in 1935. All the great jazz artists have played here, as well as Woody Allen, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Barbra Streisand. Many live albums have been recorded here, including Live at the Village Vanguard by the John Coltrane Quartet in 1961.
Now continue down Seventh Avenue South and turn right on Charles Street. Walk along to No. 53, the home of the Congregation Darech Amuno (also known as The Greenwich Village Synagogue). The congregation was founded in 1838 and was located in various places before converting the brownstone here into a place of worship. Services began here in 1917. After World War II the congregation was joined by survivors of the Holocaust, including Nathan Steiman who was one of 1,200 Jews saved by Nazi Party member Oskar Schindler (immortalized in Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark (1982) and Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993). For many years, the Andy Statman Trio and guests have played Klezmer and Bluegrass music here each Thursday.
Folk legend Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) lived at No. 74 on Charles Street in the early 1940s. In 1954 he wrote a song called “Old Man Trump.” It was not recorded by Guthrie and includes the lines:
“I suppose Old Man Trump knows Just how much Racial Hate He stirred up.”
Old Man Trump was Fred Trump (1905-1999), father of President Donald Trump. Real estate man Trump Sr. was accused of discriminating against non-white tenants in his rental buildings, and Guthrie lived in a Trump apartment complex in 1950.
Now retrace your steps and turn right down West 4th Street. At No. 228 on the right, stop to admire the extravagant decorative art on the façade of this building that dates from around 1899. Look for the spread-eagles and bearded faces. This tenement was built to attract working-class residents in the Village.
Continue on to Christopher Street where you turn left onto Stonewall Place. Walk a little farther along until you shortly see on the left at No. 53 the Stonewall Inn. Today, this is the most famous gay bar in the world, all because of what happened here between June 28 to July 3, 1969, when the gay community fought back against police oppression. A police raid triggered the Stonewall riots, and the anniversary of the event would lead to the first gay pride marches in US cities in 1970.
