Greenwich Village Art Guide
Greenwich Village is where American bohemia was invented — and repeatedly reinvented. The neighborhood below 14th Street has been drawing painters, poets, playwrights, and professional troublemakers since the early 20th century, and the layers pile up on every block. From Eugene O’Neill getting drunk with gangsters to Jackson Pollock getting banned from his favorite bar, the Village’s creative legacy is inseparable from its vices, its cheap rents, and its stubborn refusal to be respectable.
1. Washington Square Park
5th Avenue and Waverly Place at West 4th and MacDougal Streets
Start here because everything starts here. The iconic marble arch — commissioned from Stanford White in 1892 and modeled after the Arc de Triomphe — sits above ground that holds the remains of over 20,000 people buried when the park was a cemetery from the 1700s until 1825. Workers found coffins and a gravestone during the arch’s construction. The park has always been a democratic commons at the center of Village life: NYU has surrounded it for decades, but the chess players, street musicians, and the occasional protest have never entirely yielded the turf. The park has been a rallying point for virtually every bohemian moment the Village ever produced — folk singers in the early 1960s, antiwar demonstrations, and a general staging ground for anyone with something to say.
2. Cedar Tavern
24 University Place
If one place defines the Village’s midcentury art mythology, it’s the Cedar. In its prime location on University Place in the 1950s, the bar was the unofficial headquarters of the Abstract Expressionists — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline all drank here with the intensity they brought to their canvases. The draw was partly practical: it was the closest bar to Robert Motherwell’s Greenwich Village apartment where he held his influential weekly salons. University Place was also genuinely seedy back then, which kept out the tourists and kept prices low. The creative-and-volatile mix produced legendary nights and legendary ejections — Pollock was banned for kicking in the bathroom door; Kerouac for urinating in a sink. Beat writers mixed with the Ab Ex painters, and the bar became a crossroads for New York’s most consequential artistic generation. The building sold in 1963, the Cedar relocated, and without its context it never recaptured the moment. The original scene is gone but the address is worth knowing.
3. Jackson Pollock’s Studio Apartment
46 Carmine Street, top floor
Pollock lived in this top-floor walk-up — what landlords generously called a “penthouse” — above Carmine Street, a short stumble from the Cedar Tavern. The roughly 800-square-foot apartment had four skylights that flooded it with the painter’s light he needed. The building itself has deeper history: it was once owned by Aaron Burr, who bought it after fleeing to Europe following his arrest (and eventual acquittal) for treason after the Hamilton duel. The layering of infamy feels appropriate for a building most associated with art history’s most celebrated drunk.
4. The Golden Swan Garden
Corner of West 4th Street and Sixth Avenue
The small triangle of green at West 4th and Sixth Avenue is easy to walk past without a second thought. Don’t. From the late 19th century until the late 1920s, this was the site of the Golden Swan Café — nicknamed “the Hell Hole” by its regulars — a dive known for cheap drinks, raucous arguments about literature and politics, and a clientele that ranged from literary to criminal. Eugene O’Neill, drawn to the rougher edges of Village life, was a fixture here when he wasn’t working at the Provincetown Players’ playhouse on MacDougal Street. He was so attached to the bar and its bartender Thomas Wallace that he immortalized them as Harry Hope and his saloon in The Iceman Cometh. John Sloan, who worked across the street, captured the place in an etching that includes O’Neill in the corner. Dorothy Day also spent nights here before her conversion to Catholicism redirected her energies. The café disappeared with the construction of the Sixth Avenue subway in 1928; the site became a park in 2000.
5. Minetta Tavern
113 MacDougal Street
Minetta Tavern opened in 1937 (it had been operating under different names since Prohibition, when it was called the Black Rabbit) and quickly attracted the struggling writers and artists who colonized the Village between the documented cultural booms of the 1920s and the 1950s. E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway were among its early customers. Franz Kline — before Abstract Expressionism made him famous — drew caricatures of regulars here for money, and many of those drawings still hang on the walls. The bar’s most intriguing regular, though, was Joe Gould: a homeless Harvard graduate and self-styled bohemian who claimed to be writing a nine-million-word “Oral History of Our Time” composed of overheard conversations. He was such a colorful presence that the owners paid him in spaghetti to sit by the window as a living exhibit of Village bohemia for tourists. When journalist Joseph Mitchell profiled him in the New Yorker in 1942, Gould became briefly famous. Mitchell’s 1964 follow-up revealed that the Oral History had never existed. What did exist were mundane diaries — notes on meals eaten and money bummed — that Gould gave to abstract painter Harold Anton for safekeeping. They now live at the Fales Library at NYU.
6. The San Remo Café
93 MacDougal Street (corner of Bleecker and MacDougal)
The “Remo,” as it was known, was one leg of the trifecta of hip Village bars in the 1950s — alongside the Kettle of Fish and Minetta Tavern — and it catered to the postwar generation of writers and artists who were done with the radicalism of their predecessors and interested in something more disaffected and dangerous. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, and Gore Vidal were regulars. Ginsberg met Dylan Thomas here. Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre held court here when the company was based at the nearby Cherry Lane Theatre. The bar was immortalized in John Clellon Holmes’s Go and Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, where it appears as “the Black Mask” — its crowd described as “hip without being slick, intelligent without being corny.” By the early 1960s, the Remo had evolved into primarily a gay bar and became one of Andy Warhol’s hunting grounds for early Factory characters. A plaque from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation now marks the spot.
7. Caffe Reggio
119 MacDougal Street
Opened in 1927 by barber Dominick Parisi, who wanted to offer his waiting customers free coffee, Caffe Reggio claims to have introduced cappuccino to New York City — and while that’s an aggressive claim, the place feels old enough to get away with it. The walls are hung with over 80 original artworks including a large painting by a student of Caravaggio, restored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s. A de Medici family bench from the 1400s is pressed into service as café seating. The original 1900 espresso machine — gold-leafed, adorned with angels and horses, reportedly purchased for $1,000 at a World’s Fair — still glimmers from its corner though it hasn’t been used since the early 1990s. Kerouac and his circle drank here when they weren’t drinking elsewhere. Kennedy gave a speech out front. The Godfather Part II was filmed inside. It’s the kind of place where the history accretes naturally, because the place is just old enough and unusual enough to attract it.
8. Kettle of Fish
114 MacDougal Street (original location)
The original Kettle of Fish on MacDougal was where the Beat writers and the Warhol crowd overlapped, which produced exactly the kind of volatile social chemistry you’d expect. Edie Sedgwick met Bob Dylan here during the period she was detaching from Warhol — she also met Bobby Neuwirth here, who cast her opposite Dylan and Salvador Dali in his film A Light Look. Kerouac got beaten up outside (he had a habit of this). The bar moved twice and now occupies a spot on Christopher Square next to the Stonewall Inn, where it was faithfully recreated for the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. The current incarnation is a good dive bar; the original location, now a different café, is just a ghost.
9. Circle in the Square Theatre
5 Sheridan Square
Jose Quintero and Theodore Mann opened Circle in the Square in 1951, staging some of the first important productions of The Iceman Cometh and Our Town. But by the mid-1950s it was also hosting the kind of poetry-and-jazz evenings that defined Beat culture before anyone had stamped a name on it. Jack Kerouac and Philip Lamantia performed there accompanied by David Amram — who quickly became embedded in the Beat circle — in a two-week engagement that mixed literature with improvised music. Between sets the crowd moved next door to Louis’ Tavern for cheap food and cheap drinks, which meant most of them never made it back for the second set. Amram would continue alone, improvising poetry and lyrics on French horn while the lighting man experimented with early psychedelic effects. The theatre eventually relocated to 50th Street, where it still operates.
10. Eighth Street Bookshop
32 West 8th Street
It’s hard to look at a stretch of chain coffee shops and discount sneaker stores and imagine it as a literary nerve center, but West 8th Street was exactly that in the 1950s and 60s. Brothers Eli and Ted Wilentz opened the Eighth Street Bookshop at 32 West 8th in 1947 and ran it as a genuine community resource — letting broke writers use the store as a mail drop, hiring them as clerks when they needed income. The regulars were formidable: Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings were all browsers. In 1964, at a party on the second floor, Ginsberg met Bob Dylan. A fire nearly destroyed the shop in 1976; New York’s literary establishment rallied to reopen it, but it finally closed in 1979. Stumptown Coffee operates in the space now.
11. Patchin Place
10th Street between Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue
Patchin Place is a small, gated alley of three-story rowhouses tucked between 10th and Greenwich Avenue, lined with trees and still lit by one original gas lamp (minus the gas). It dates to the 1840s and by the early 20th century had become what writers actually need but rarely find: a quiet address inside bohemia. John Reed and Louise Bryant lived here in the 1910s while Reed was finishing Ten Days That Shook the World. E.E. Cummings moved to 4 Patchin Place in 1923, describing it as having “safety and peace and the truth of dreaming and the bliss of work.” The modernist writer Djuna Barnes lived at number 5 from 1940 until her death in 1982, increasingly reclusive in her final decades. Cummings, who outlived her by decades, would periodically shout from his window: “Are you still alive, Djuna?” Today the alley is largely occupied by psychotherapists.
12. 75 1/2 Bedford Street
75 1/2 Bedford Street
The narrowest house in New York City — nine and a half feet wide — was home to Edna St. Vincent Millay in the 1920s, which seems fitting for a poet whose entire persona was built around doing more than the available space should permit. Millay moved to the Village after graduating from Vassar in 1917, worked briefly with the Provincetown Players, published feminist and sexually frank poetry that scandalized respectable readers, and turned down proposals from men including literary critic Edmund Wilson. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and lived at this address with her husband Eugen Jan Boissevain. A few doors down at 86 Bedford was Chumley’s speakeasy, an important gathering place for the same Village literary crowd. Millay left for upstate New York in 1925.
13. Twin Peaks House
102 Bedford Street
The strangest building in a neighborhood of architectural oddities, Twin Peaks looks like a Swiss chalet that wandered into Manhattan and decided to stay. The original structure dates to 1830; it was renovated in 1925 by Clifford Reed Dailey, who borrowed money from financier Otto Kahn and set out to create “an island growing in a desert of mediocrity” — a ten-unit, two-towered artists’ haven. Silent film star Mable Normand christened the finished building with champagne. Among those who called it home: Douglas Fairbanks, Walt Disney, Cary Grant, and Miles Davis. The apartments are tiny — around 20 by 18 feet — and still have the feel of the starving-artist studio ideal Dailey was after, whether the current residents want that or not.
14. Salmagundi Club
47 Fifth Avenue
The oldest surviving artist club in America, founded in 1871 as the New York Sketch Class and renamed for Washington Irving’s papers, the Salmagundi Club moved to its current landmarked Fifth Avenue brownstone in 1917. The building was originally constructed in 1852 for the president of Pennsylvania Coal — the palettes of past members, donated over 140 years, now decorate the interior rooms. With three galleries, a library, a bar, vintage pool tables, and a preserved period parlor, it still operates as it always has: a gathering place for artists who value conversation and accumulated history over what’s fashionable this season. Over 1,500 works from the club’s operational history are displayed throughout.
15. Christopher Park and the Stonewall Inn
53 Christopher Street
The Village’s radical political history and its artistic history converge at Christopher Park, where George Segal’s white cast-plaster Gay Liberation Monument — commissioned in 1979, installed in 1992 — faces the Stonewall Inn across the street. The Stonewall riots of 1969 were the flashpoint for the modern gay rights movement, and the Village was the logical setting: the neighborhood had been a haven for queer New Yorkers since at least the 1950s. Segal’s four figures — two men in quiet conversation, two women seated together — are deliberately understated. Arts patron Peter Putnam, who commissioned the work, required only that it be “loving and caring.” Next door to the park, still operating as a dive bar, is the current incarnation of Kettle of Fish.
The Village has been declared dead or finished roughly every decade since the 1960s — too expensive, too cleaned-up, too much a museum of its own past. But the history here is genuinely thick enough that even its ghost version has more to offer than most neighborhoods at full vitality. Walk slowly.