It opened in the early 20th century as Union Cigars in a triangular space between Seventh Avenue South and Christopher Street—the major crossroads of Greenwich Village.
As of last year, Village Cigars shut its doors due to a rent dispute, as Curbed reported in February 2024.
It’s not just any downtown shop that’s turned out the lights and closed up. Village Cigars is something of a symbol of Greenwich Village, and seeing it darkened and empty is a reminder that no space no matter how iconic is safe from disappearing forever.
While we wait to see if a reopening is in the future, take a look at this image of the storefront from 1940. It’s a very different Village, with men in the 1940s uniform of long coats, hats, and newspapers tucked under their arms.
But the subway-flanked storefront is instantly recognizable. Zoom in close to the front entrance, and you can even see the triangle-shaped mosaic embedded in the sidewalk that marks what was once the smallest plot of private land in New York City (Village Cigars bought it in the 1930s).
The Greek Revival row houses built on Washington Square North between 1829 and 1833, with their graceful stoops and elegant ionic columns, offered everything a wealthy New York family could want.
What would that be? Think spacious living quarters, backyard gardens, proximity to the theater, church, and fine shops, and assurance by the builders, who leased the land from Sailors’ Snug Harbor, that no factories would encroach on this residential enclave.
Elite residents also craved some distance from the filth overtaking lower city. And across the street was a lovely new park—the former potter’s field turned military parade ground, Washington Square. Access to the park was definitely a plus.
But for any New Yorker to live comfortably in the antebellum city, they needed a place to keep their horses and carriage, and possibly living space for the servants who tended to them.
So began the early years of Washington Mews, perhaps Greenwich Village’s most famous and photographed historic private lane.
Shortly after the row houses fronting Washington Square were completed, planning began for this back alley—an unusual concession in a city that was intentionally mapped out without alleys, as real estate was too precious to waste on horses and garbage.
Cutting a slender path between Washington Square North and Eighth Street, the Mews followed what had been a Lenape trail connecting the Hudson and East Rivers, according to James and Michelle Nevius’ Inside the Apple.
Once the Belgian block paving was in place, a row of two-story carriage houses were built—but only on the north side of the Mews (third photo). That kept the sound and stench of horses from intruding on the “deep rear gardens and extensions” of the Washington Square North houses, according to the Greenwich Village Historic District report.
Who were the well-heeled residents who parked their equipages here? Bankers and merchants, according to Village Preservation. The Row, as Washington Square North became known, enjoyed decades of status as one of the most desirable places to live.
But change was coming. In the 1850s, six new stables were built on the south side, freeing up space on the north side for the carriage owners living on Eighth Street, per the Greenwich Village Historic District report. No longer was it the exclusive lane of residents of The Row.
In 1881, city officials mandated that gates be built at the entrances of the Mews, clarifying its status as a private lane, wrote Christopher Gray in a 1988 New York Times Streetscapes column. (Fourth photo shows a gate on the University Place side.)
By now, artists were arriving; “the house and stable at 3 Washington Square North was demolished for a studio building in 1884,” stated Gray. Coinciding with the coming of the artists was the end of the horse and carriage era.
In 1916, Sailors’ Snug Harbor, which still owned the land, announced that “the little stables of the mews, whose usefulness has long since passed away,” will be converted into artists’ live-work studios, per Gray. ( Fifth image: 1917, looking toward University Place)
Artists like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Edward Hopper, and Paul Manship did occupy the stables-turned-studios. More dwellings were constructed on the south side, and a renovation did away with many of the original brick facades in favor of stucco and the occasional ornamental tile.
Washington Mews’ next chapter began in 1949, when New York University purchased the alley—or the lease from Sailors Snug Harbor, as some sources state. Since then, school administrators have gradually transformed the cottages into faculty housing and facilities space.
Even though it’s a private street, the gates tend to be open during the day, so tourists and curious New Yorkers can wander through and imagine living inside this “charming little village,” as the Greenwich Village Historical District report describes it, isolated from city traffic.
If you stand still and concentrate, you might even sense the ghosts of the original horses clip-clopping on those Belgian blocks.
The chalet-style elevated train station is long gone; the Ninth Avenue El, which ran along Greenwich Avenue, was demolished in 1940. (Though Berenice Abbott keeps it alive just as the painting does in this 1936 photo.)
The cigar shop in the little Federal-style house on the left has also bit the dust. The land is part of the churchyard of St. Luke’s, and the sidewalk is occupied by a row of Citibikes.
But otherwise, so much of Beulah R. Bettersworth’s 1934 depiction of Christopher Street looking down toward Greenwich Avenue is strangely unchanged more than 90 years later.
The three-story yellow building on the northwest corner of Greenwich is still there and still yellow. The two red-brick taller buildings to the north exist as well. The curvy awning at the entrance to the Hudson Tubes—aka, the PATH train—remains in place.
Beyond Greenwich Street, the Gothic steeples of St. Veronica’s enchant and delight. Far in the background, a sliver of the Hudson River lets us know we’re at the small-scaleend of this historic street in Greenwich Village.
I tried to capture the same view today, but my camera work is no match for Bettersworth’s eye. This was her neighborhood—she lived in an Art Deco high-rise on the corner of Bleecker Street—and she depicts her neighborhood with tenderness.
I’m not the only one so taken with this streetscape. “A wintry corner of Greenwich Village lives in this painting as Beulah Bettersworth knew it when she and her husband inhabited 95 Christopher Street, a block away,” explains the Smithsonian, which has the painting in its collection. (Before that, FDR had it hanging in the White House.)
“Closely observed details draw the viewer into the painting to join Bettersworth’s neighbors hurrying through the slushy snow, catching a whiff of tobacco from the cigar store in the foreground. Snow melts from the roof of St. Veronica’s Catholic Church, whose towers are visible behind the Ninth Avenue ‘L’ station. The elevated train station had been an elegant adaptation of a Swiss chalet when it was built in 1867, but by Bettersworth’s time it was an aging relic soon to be torn down.”
More about Christopher Street is known than about Bettersworth. Born in St. Louis, she studied at the Art Students League and became a WPA painter during the Depression. She exhibited portraits and still lifes; she painted a mural for a Mississippi post office that by today’s sensibilities has been considered controversial.
She died in Tucson in 1968, and I like to think she’d be quite charmed to know that the contours of this part of Christopher Street are almost frozen in time.
The first signs of it emerged in the 1830s cityscape: brown porous sandstone began appearing around entrances and as window lintels on New York’s stylish Federal-style brick houses.
By the 1860s, brownstone-clad row houses were everywhere, going up across Manhattan and then Brooklyn (above, a brownstone row in Bedford-Stuyvesant) as fast as the Gilded Age’s upper classes could buy them.
Some rose four stories with grand proportions, including a tall stoop and elaborately carved doorway, such as the brownstone below, built in 1853 at 47 Fifth Avenue and long occupied by the Salmagundi Club. Others stopped at three floors and cut a more slender, less ornate appearance.
But what was it about this iconic house type that made it a symbol of New York City elegance and charm—and is still sought after today?
Before getting into the backstory of the brownstone, it might be helpful to define what one is. New Yorkers often consider any attached row of houses to be brownstones whether the facade is brick, marble, or limestone.
But a brownstone is a specific type of row house constructed between the 1830s and the 1890s cloaked in brown sandstone.
“Originally referred to as ‘brownstone fronts’ in the nineteenth century, the brick buildings acquired their name from the four-to-six-inch-thick stone veneer that covered the front side,” wrote Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn.
This stone, much of it mined from a quarry in Portland, Connecticut, was actually pink when it was cut and shipped to stone yards along the East and Hudson Rivers.
But once placed on the exterior of a brick house and then exposed to the elements, it turned brown, stated Osman. That brown could be a reddish rust, or dark mud, or a brown that made the house appear “chocolate-colored,” as Edith Wharton, who was born in a brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street, disparaged it.
As Wharton’s comment reveals, brownstones have always had their detractors. In an 1840s dispatch, Edgar Allan Poe contemplated the destruction of Manhattan by predicting that “in some 30 years every noble cliff will be a pier, and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous of brownstone, or brown-stonn, as the Gothamites have it.”
Still, when the stone first appeared as trim on new row houses in today’s downtown neighborhoods—like on the entrance and base of the Isaac Hopper House, above, built in the Greek Revival style at 1838 at 110 Second Avenue—it made a fashionable impression.
It’s unclear where the first true brownstone residences were built. But a 1926 New York Times article that prematurely eulogized brownstones gave the honor to a group of row houses on an unnamed block in Chelsea constructed in the late 1830s.
Soon, brownstone fever hit Gotham. With the city’s population booming in the 1840s and 1850s, brownstone rows made their debuts in other upper middle class neighborhoods, such as Greenwich Village, Madison Square, and Murray Hill.
The elegant look of brownstone was part of the attraction. “Brownstones were an architectural trompe l’oeil designed to give a faux sense of historic glamour,” wrote Osman. “In an era when stone was seen as more monumental than brick or wood, builders used sandstone as a cheap substitute for marble.”
“The facing was carefully designed to give the illusion that the entire building was constructed of stone,” continued Osman. “Builders cut large slabs of stone to minimize any visible seams, giving the townhouse a solid brown and austere look.”
Builders found that brownstone had a practical appeal as well. The industrial revolution made it possible to quarry lots of it and mass produce design motifs that made each uniform row of new brownstones look slightly different than other rows in development.
Brownstones also reflected “the mid-19th-century popularity of Romantic Classicism, which glorified picturesque nature,” states an article on Brownstoner. “Brownstone echoed the dark browns, grays, and greens of the romanticized landscape.”
As the 19th century went on, different design styles supplanted the Greek Revival look of pre-Civil War brownstones. In the 1860s, Italianate architecture flourished, which brought more ornamentation and curvy lines (exemplified in the above West Village brownstone), according to Stefanie Waldek in Architectural Digest.
Queen Anne and Renaissance Revival brownstones began to appear in the 1880s and 1890s. These fanciful, quirky homes often incorporated other types of building material as well as brownstone, like limestone and granite, per Architectural Digest.
Parts of New York City that were not developed until the late 19th century, like today’s Upper West Side (below photo) and Harlem, tend to feature brownstones that reflect these later design styles.
All this brownstone love suddenly came to a halt as the 20th century began.
Brownstones were now derided as gloomy, their interiors hopelessly dark and outdated. The typical brownstone layout had a formal parlor in the front and a more relaxed parlor in the back, then a kitchen and dining room on the lower garden level and bedrooms on the upper floors.
The stone itself wasn’t always in great shape after decades of rain and snow, especially on the many smaller, more narrow brownstones rushed into development by 19th century speculators eager to sell to middle class families (like these below, in Bedford-Stuyvesant).
The New York brownstone, once so prized, was now regarded as a relic. Rows were bulldozed to make way for lighter-colored limestone or marble Beaux-Arts townhouses. In the 1920s, others were razed in favor of handsome luxury apartment buildings. (Below, a row condemned to make way for Tudor City in the 1920s)
Those that didn’t meet the bulldozer were carved up into small apartments, their tall stoops removed and replaced by a street-level front door. Those that escaped demolition often stood alone, random remnants of the era of silk hats and showy equipages. Few mourned their passing.
“The age of the brownstone front draws to a close,” proclaimed the 1926 New York Times article. “In almost every cross street of central Manhattan, from river to river, the dignity of brownstone gives way to shining new structures that rise higher. A hundred families come to live where but two or three have dwelt as the panorama of New York moves on.”
The Times’ obituary for brownstones turned out to be wrong, of course. By the 1960s, a new generation of urban dwellers were eager to take advantage of the space and historical cred of these dwellings.
Trailblazers restored them to single-family use. Historic Districts came into existence, protecting brownstones within their borders from destruction. Wide swaths of Manhattan and Brooklyn owe their revitalization—or gentrification, depending on your point of view—to their newfound popularity.
The brownstone era wasn’t over; it simply entered a new phase of its love story with New Yorkers. Even the Times, in its 1926 eulogy, was wistful about the passing of a house type that was, and once again is, an emblem of the city. (Below, a lovely row in Yorkville)
“The brownstone front was peculiarly and essentially the citadel of the home, the stronghold of an old-fashioned era before New York became such a vast hive,” the Times concluded. “In no other city did the brownstone front achieve greatness. It was respectable, prosperous, frock-coated New York at the best.”
Maybe it’s a holiday evening, or perhaps the bright corner street lamp makes late-day shopping easier for these mostly faceless residents of Greenwich Village.
Whatever the reason, there’s a line outside this corner meat market, with customers eyeing the goods while others gather outside a dry goods shop, its entrance also illuminated in the night.
“Bleecker Street, Saturday Night” is a 1918 painting by John Sloan. Born in Pennsylvania, Sloan by this time was a Village denizen who famously depicted the ordinary street life of his new neighborhood—from the flower vendors on Sixth Avenue to the rush of the elevated train and crowds of commuters scurrying under the track.
There’s a lot going on in this highly detailed image. Sloan introduces us to a cross-section of people, from young children to older adults, all going about their lives amid the Belgian block pavement and wood and brick buildings of a corner I wish I could identify. The rooftops get higher from right to left, shifting the perspective. The open basement doors add more drama.
“When Sloan painted this scene, the city was undergoing rapid change. Residents navigated the streets and shops late into the evening hours thanks to the recent introduction of electric lighting. New construction projects led to buildings, such as the white one pictured here, getting partially or fully demolished. The painting represents both what once was and the inevitable change that comes with industrial development.”
Nestled within the lovely brownstone blocks of Greenwich Village, one house in particular stands out to me: 152 West 11th Street, toward the end of that triangular block west of Sixth Avenue where Seventh and Greenwich Avenues meet.
In the shadow of what used to be St. Vincent’s Hospital (RIP), this Flemish-bond beauty features all the charm of an early 19th century grand row house. Yet its smaller scale gives it a homey feel: two stories plus a half-floor attic, an English basement, a short stoop, and a pretty iron fence in front.
What really sets Number 152 apart from its neighbors is the copper and glass awning over the entrance. This delicate, ornamental headpiece is unlike anything I’ve seen on similar residential buildings.
It’s hard to walk by it and not wonder who put it there. It likely wasn’t the original builder of the house, who in 1836 also put up the three houses to the left—creating an identical row of Greek Revival homes for the new, well-heeled residents of rapidly developing Greenwich Village.
Over the years, changes came to the row. The three houses at 146, 148, and 150 gained an extra floor; Number 152 served as a boardinghouse before appearing to go back to a single-family residence occupied at different times by a merchant, a doctor, the well-known stage actress Bessie Cleveland, and a Suffrage supporter who held public meetings in the house.
Later photos from the mid-20th century, like the one above, show Number 152 with its unique awning, and this old-school piece of beauty has been in place ever since.
While it’s unclear which owner decided to add it to an already stunning row house, I’m going to guess it date back to the first years of the 20th century.
The ornamental copper pieces look like petals, and this motif inspired by the natural world makes me think it’s an example of the Art Nouveau style popular in the early 1900s.
Or perhaps the awning is supposed to look like a crown, with jewels of glass that sparkle in the sun like diamonds and meant to make the house feel regal—like you’re entering a miniature palace.
For almost 170 years, the sweet, three-story Greek Revival row house at 11 Bank Street, just off Greenwich Avenue, has had many occupants.
Built in 1845 when Greenwich Village was a choice neighborhood in the growing city, its first owner was French-born Louis Peugnet, a former member of Napoleon’s army at Waterloo. With his brothers, Peugnet came to Manhattan and established a military school down the block from his lovely new residence, states the Greenwich Village Historic District Report.
Peugnet died in 1860, and by the 1880s the home had become a boardinghouse, according to Donna Florio in her 2021 book, Growing up Bank Street: A Greenwich Village Memoir.
Forty years later in a Village favored by artists and writers, John Dos Passos had a room here; it’s where he wrote his 1926 novel, Manhattan Transfer.
But perhaps the most curious occupant of 11 Bank Street was the ghost of a Greenwich Village woman who died in 1939. The ghost’s presence was first noted by a scientist-artist couple that moved here during the 1950s and made it their home for decades.
The ghost story starts in 1956 after Harvey Slatin, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and his painter wife, Yeffe Kimball, bought 11 Bank Street. At the time, the house was a 19-room boardinghouse long run by a Mrs. Maccario, per a 1957 New York Times article.
Once the rooms were emptied of boarders, Slatin and Kimball set about restoring the house. That’s when they began hearing strange noises, usually during the day.
“In quiet hours while they were alone or with a few friends, they thought they heard a woman’s footfalls on the steep staircases, sometimes just crossing the upper floors,” wrote the Times. “Sometimes there was a light hammering.”
The couple would go upstairs to investigate, but there was never any explanation for the sounds. “They called, ‘who’s there?’ The walls gave back the call in echo fragments,” stated the Times.
One day, their carpenter made an eerie discovery. While hammering through a top-floor ceiling, an object fell out and hit the floor as plaster and lath dust showered the ground.
It was a metal can “about twice the height of a tin of ground coffee.” The can’s label read, “The last remains of Elizabeth Bullock, deceased. Cremated January 21, 1931.” The label also listed a Middle Village, Queens address for the crematorium.
Slatin called the crematorium and discovered that Bullock, 51 years old at the time of her death, was killed in a car accident blocks away on Hudson Street. Her home address was listed as 113 Perry Street, just beside Hudson Street. (Below, 11 Bank Street, undated)
To the couple’s knowledge, Bullock had never lived in the Bank Street house. So how did her remains end up in a can in the ceiling, and who put them there? Slatin and Kimball searched for relatives who might have answers, but they came up empty.
Resigned to keeping Bullock’s remains, they decided to display the can on top of the grand piano in their brick living room. “The Slatins cannot think of what else to do with it,” the Times reported, “and there’s a chance, they think, that someone, some day, may come for it.”
How Bullock’s remains found their way into the ceiling appears to still be a mystery. But this strange ghost story doesn’t end there. In 1980, Joyce Wadler, writing in the Washington Post, picked up the story—paying a visit to Slatin and his second wife, Anne, at 11 Bank Street. (Yeffe Kimball had died of cancer in 1978.)
Twenty-three years later, Bullock’s remains were still in the can on the piano. After the New York Times article ran in 1957, Slatin and Kimball brought in a ghost expert and medium, who channeled Bullock. In an Irish accent, Bullock said that her family disowned her when she married a protestant. Her soul was not at rest because she wanted a proper Christian burial.
But the Slatins still had Bullock’s remains, and the haunting continued. Anne Slatin described Bullock as a “benign ghost” whose perfume was often smelled at parties. The ghost also liked to open closet doors unexpectedly, at which Harvey Slatin would reply, “Oh Elizabeth, go fix yourself a drink,” according to Wadler’s article.
After the WaPo story ran, a Catholic priest in California contacted the Slatins and offered a Christian burial. The couple took up the offer. Elizabeth Bullock’s ashes were interred in a Catholic cemetery on the Pacific Coast 50 years after the Hudson Street car accident that claimed her life.
Does Elizabeth Bullock still haunt those upper floors of 11 Bank Street, even though her remains are out of the house and in a Catholic cemetery in California? Only the current residents could say.
Right now, though, the house seems unoccupied, and it’s up for sale. This 19th century stunner with a spooky Greenwich Village ghost tale in its backstory can be yours for $15 million.
Whenever I stroll through the West Village, I’m well aware that there are two versions of the neighborhood.
One is the Village of cobblestone streets, enchanting houses, and sidewalk cafes. The other is the secret Village behind brick walls, embowering trees, iron fences, and horsewalk doorways.
But sometimes you find a portal into this secret West Village. The one I came across is an arched side entrance at a sweet, three-story white stucco house at 93 Perry Street (below).
Under the arched entrance is a locked gate, which leads to a slender outside passageway that takes you to a small courtyard and a second house. This backhouse, as it’s called, feels right out of a fairy tale—with rounded windows, decorative ironwork on the fire escape, and rustic wood shutters.
Backhouses aren’t unusual in downtown neighborhoods; an estimated 75 of them still stand in Greenwich Village, according to a 2002 New York Times article. Some are visible through cracks between buildings, while others are true secrets hemmed in by buildings.
What makes this backhouse more unusual is the small, shady courtyard in front of it separating the two houses into what seems like distinct entities.
Trees and plants make the court feel more like a front yard; cracks in the stone and concrete on the ground carry an air of neglect. But the privacy it affords is a rarity in contemporary New York. What’s the story behind it?
Backhouses were typically built by the owner of the front-facing house to serve as a carriage house or a workspace. In a 19th century city with fewer housing regulations, they were also used as illegal rental units that could make extra cash for an unscrupulous owner willing to pack in boarders.
The backhouse at 93 Perry Street was built as a workspace for a carpenter who purchased this lot of land in 1811.
“Abraham A. Campbell, a local carpenter-builder, leased the lot for 21 years and built his shop on it in 1827, and his house the following year, making it his home and place of business until late in 1832 when he sold the lease ‘and the buildings thereon,'” states the 1969 Greenwich Village Historic District designation report.
Campbell bought the land under his two houses when the former country village of Greenwich was transitioning into New York City’s newest sought-after neighborhood, thanks to overcrowding and disease outbreaks in the lower city.
Selling his lease in 1832 must have netted Campbell a tidy profit, which he used to relocate to West 12th Street. The West Village continued to grow through the 1800s, and waves of new residents of 93 Perry Street reflected the more middle- and working-class population in later decades. (Above, in 1932)
As for the courtyard, like many of the alleys and lanes of the era that have been paved over and de-mapped, it may have once had a real name.
A wistful 1924 article in the New York Evening Post described the backhouse and delved into the mystery of what the writer called the “nameless” courtyard. This sketch (below) from the article captures the scene in time.
“The city ought to establish a lost-and-found department to help recapture odd little streets and courts and alleys that have wandered away like strayed waifs and lost themselves in the bewildering maze of New York byways,” read the article. “Take, for instance, one little alley just off Perry Street, past Bleecker. Everything about it is lost. Name, country, identification of any sort.”
“Some people have lived there for years, and are still at a loss for an address….Sometimes, to be sure, out of sheer necessity, the residents of Nameless alley supply the title ‘Perry Court.'”
“No one ventures a definite solution of the mystery,” the article concluded. “But there is singing from an open window where bright flowers edge the sill, and the least tinge of corned beef and cabbage is in the air. Everybody’s happy—and what’s in a name?”
One person who made note of this Evening Post writeup when it appeared was author H.P. Lovecraft. A resident of New York City in the 1920s, this horror and science fiction writer published a short story titled “He,” which involved a narrator taking a late-night, time-traveling sojourn through Greenwich Village.
“At the conclusion of ‘He,’ a passerby finds the narrator—bloodied and broken—lying at the entrance to a Perry Street courtyard,” wrote David J. Goodwin, author of the 2023 book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham.
In “He,” from 1925, the narrator calls it “a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section,” as well as “a little black court off Perry Street.”
It would be strange to call the courtyard “grotesque” today, as it and the backhouse have an old-school charm increasingly difficult to find in today’s tidy, hyper-expensive West Village.
These days, the backhouse appears to be a rental building with one- and two-bedroom units—a very different setup from Abraham Campbell’s workshop in the West Village of 200 years ago.
[Sixth image: NYPL, 1932; eighth image: New York Evening Post, August 1924]
It’s the kind of curious New York City relic you typically find by accident. In this case, the story starts with a visit to a parking lot at the northeast corner of Lafayette and Great Jones Streets, just behind East Fourth Street.
The parking lot occupies space in this historic area of Noho, where 19th- and early 20th–century stables, tenements, and manufacturing buildings intersect with an older generation of pre-Civil War row houses.
From the parking lot, the backs of some of these buildings fronting Lafayette and East Fourth Street can be seen; nothing looks out of the ordinary.
But then there’s a brick structure behind a row of buildings just inside East Fourth Street. It’s hemmed in from the streetscape and only viewable between the steel vehicle stackers where cars are parked.
The red-brick building has the peaked roof and general outline of a Federal-style building, which was a popular architectural style in early 19th century New York City.
On closer inspection, something even more remarkable appears on both sides of the building—enormous Gothic-style cathedral windows.
The windows are the giveaway that this lonely building was once a church, and the peaked roof was perhaps a vaulted ceiling that helped create a simple yet light-filled, inspiring space of religious devotion and celebration.
But what kind of church was it, and why was it left behind in anonymity? A little research reveals that what is left of this house of worship was once St. Bartholomew’s Protestant Episcopal Church, founded in 1835 (illustration above).
“In 1835-36, a church in neo-Classical style with a Gothic or Regency spire was erected at a cost of $33,000 on Lafayette Place at Great Jones Street,” states nycago.org, the website of the New York City chapter of the American Guild of Organists.
“It was a time of unprecedented prosperity, when the price of land and the cost of building was at the peak,” the site continues.
This prosperous time in New York City history resulted in the creation just a few years earlier of “Lafayette Place” as it was called—an elite enclave for posh city residents looking to move away from the crowded downtown neighborhoods of the city center.
St. Bartholomew’s, part of the Evangelical movement of the Episcopal church, was constructed in the heart of this high-end area. Worshippers likely included many wealthy merchants and prominent New Yorkers.
The prosperity, however, came to a halt in 1837, a year of financial panic and ruin.
“For the next fifty years, the church struggled with inadequate finances despite having a communicant list that was larger than any other New York Episcopal church, including some of the wealthiest and most aristocratic families,” states nycago.org.
Coinciding with the church’s financial struggle was the northward march of rich New Yorkers to newer, more stylish neighborhoods like Gramercy and Murray Hill. By the Gilded Age, St. Bartholomew’s was in an unfashionable, increasingly commercial area.
So the church congregation moved with them—to Madison Avenue and 44th Street (above, sixth image). The land for the church was purchased with help from William H. Vanderbilt, a parishioner, states nycago.org.
James Renwick, the architect behind Grace Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, designed the new granite church, which featured a bell tower and eventually a “triple portal” by Stanford White. It was completed in 1876.
Structural problems forced the church to move again, and in 1918, a third St. Bartholomew’s opened to parishioners, this one on Park Avenue between 50th and 51st Street (seventh image, above).
This third St. Bartholomew’s still stands today, a Byzantine Revival-style house of worship with a congregation dedicated to a strong social justice mission.
But what about the original St. Bartholomew’s from 1835? It seems to have become an afterthought. At some point, its spire disappeared. Construction in the early 20th century to create today’s Lafayette Street may have pushed the former church off its original corner.
It’s hard to tell, but the front of the church looks connected to a building facing East Fourth Street. Maybe the church is part of a loft or residence?
Or perhaps this church erected with power and purpose has been reduced to a mostly hidden remnant of the pre-Civil War city.
Artist John Sloan enjoyed depicting the outside world of the Greenwich Village neighborhoods where he made his home and studio—painting women on rooftops, a flower vendor selling his wares, and a cat streaking across pristine snow in his apartment backyard, among others.
In 1912 he lent his talents to an indoor scene. Sloan lived on Perry Street at the time, and he was a frequent visitor of Renganeschi’s, an Italian restaurant inside an 1830s brick dwelling at 139 West Tenth Street.
Unlike many of the other Italian restaurants opening in the Village at the time, Renganeschi’s was described as “classier” but still “modestly priced,” according to Gerald W. McFarland’s Inside Greenwich Village.
“Renganeschi’s Saturday Night” came out of these visits. On the surface, it gives us three stylish women at a prime table, having drinks and seemingly enjoying one another’s company.
It’s an unremarkable scene, right? Not in the early 1900s. In the painting, Sloan is signaling something about the three friends and the changing social rules for women of the era.
“By showing the women celebrating a night out on the town, the artist emphasized their newfound freedom to socialize in public spaces without the need for male escorts,” states the website for Art Institute Chicago, which has the painting in their collection.
“Although he indicated their working-class status through their ‘unladylike’ gestures—legs wrapped around their chairs and pinkies flared in the air—Sloan did not cast judgment on the women’s relaxed behavior. His informal style and loose brushwork enliven this scene of urban leisure with a sense of immediacy and action.”
Ephemeral New York 