The Golden Swan Garden

Hell Hole by John Sloan with Eugene O’Neill in the upper right corner.

That unassuming triangle of greenery at the corner of West 4th and Sixth Avenue doesn’t look like much. But the patch of ground once held a place nicknamed “The Hell Hole” — just one of the many aliases given to The Golden Swan Café, a haven for the early 20th-century Village literary set and the downright sketchy alike. The bar, with its large swan hanging above the door, occupied this corner from the late 19th century until the late 1920s, known for cheap drinks and raucous debates about writing, art, and politics.

Among the famous and infamous who drifted in and staggered out was playwright Eugene O’Neill. Drawn to rougher edges, he considered the Golden Swan prime real estate. According to members of the Provincetown Players, if he wasn’t working at the Playhouse on MacDougal Street, he could be found inebriated at the Golden Swan, reciting long poems to gangsters and turning a quick break into an all-night bender.

In a letter to his wife in 1919, O’Neill wrote:

“Last night I made a voyage to the Hell Hole to see how it had survived the dry spell [Prohibition]. There was no whiskey in the house … and it had to be stolen by some of the gang out of a storehouse, and sold to Tom Wallace. All hands were drinking sherry and I joined this comparatively harmless and cheap debauch right willingly.”

O’Neill loved the cafe and its bartender, Thomas Wallace, so much he immortalized them as Harry Hope and his saloon in The Iceman Cometh, which premiered on Broadway in 1946 and was later revived nearby at The Circle in the Square in 1956.

John Sloan worked across the street and captured the bar in the etching above, placing O’Neill in the upper right corner. Another unlikely regular was Dorothy Day, who had moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village to immerse herself in the scene. She would later help found The Catholic Worker after converting to Catholicism and leaving the debauched Village literary life behind.

By 1928 the cafe was gone, torn down during construction of the Sixth Avenue subway. For decades the space sat as a playground, then became a recycling center in the 1980s. In 2000 it reopened as The Golden Swan Garden.

Location: The Corner of West 4th Street and Sixth Avenue