50 Fun Facts About Greenwich Village

The building at 75½ Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, built in 1873, is famous as New York's what?

Narrowest house is the title it usually gets: the front is just 9 feet 6 inches across. Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and anthropologist Margaret Mead both lived inside.

Which NBC sitcom, on air from 1994 to 2004, is set in Greenwich Village but was filmed in California?

Friends puts Monica's apartment and the Central Perk coffee house in the Village, yet the series was shot on Warner Bros. soundstages in Burbank.

Which Marvel hero lives in the Sanctum Sanctorum, a mansion at 177A Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village?

Doctor Strange moved in after his training as a sorcerer, sharing the townhouse with his assistant Wong and a library of magical books.

At Greenwich Village's Gaslight Cafe, what did audiences do instead of clapping, to spare the neighbors upstairs?

Snapped their fingers, the story goes, because applause carried up the air shafts to the apartments above and brought the police. The basement club opened in 1958 as a haunt of poets.

What is the Hess triangle, a small mosaic set into a Greenwich Village sidewalk on Seventh Avenue South?

A plot of private land of about 500 square inches, it was left over when the city seized a landlord's building. His heirs refused to donate the scrap and laid the defiant mosaic in 1922.

Which holiday does Greenwich Village mark with a nighttime parade of giant puppets, begun in the 1970s?

Halloween night brings out a parade that mask maker Ralph Lee began as a walk for local children. It grew into the world's largest of its kind, with tens of thousands in costume.

In which 2004 superhero film is the hero fired from his delivery job at Joe's Pizza in Greenwich Village?

Spider-Man 2 shows Peter Parker losing the job because fighting crime keeps making his deliveries late. The real Joe's has sold slices in the neighborhood since 1975.

Which singer walks down Jones Street in Greenwich Village with Suze Rotolo on the cover of a 1963 album?

Bob Dylan and Rotolo, his girlfriend, lived close by when the picture was taken for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the record that opens with Blowin' in the Wind.

Which Greenwich Village bar, raided by police in June 1969, became the birthplace of the gay rights movement?

Stonewall Inn patrons fought back that night, and the uprising is remembered by Pride marches every June. The bar occupies buildings put up in the 1840s as stables.

Caffe Reggio, open on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village since 1927, says it introduced which drink to America?

Cappuccino was brought over by founder Domenico Parisi, whose original 1902 espresso machine still stands against the back wall of the coffeehouse.

Which Manhattan thoroughfare starts at the Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village and runs north past Central Park?

Fifth Avenue ends at the arch, which replaced a plaster and wood version put up nearby in 1889 for the centennial of George Washington's inauguration.

Which school, founded by Albert Gallatin, has kept its main campus around Washington Square Park since the 1830s?

New York University began near City Hall in 1832 and moved up to the Village a year later. Its founder had been Treasury secretary under Jefferson and Madison.

Which actress played Alex Russo, a teenage wizard living in Greenwich Village, on the Disney Channel?

Selena Gomez led Wizards of Waverly Place from 2007 to 2012. The title borrows a real street, which carries on from the north edge of Washington Square Park on both sides.

Which New York mayor, born in Greenwich Village in 1882, later gave his name to an airport in Queens?

Fiorello La Guardia was the son of an Italian father from Foggia and a mother from Trieste. He ran the city from 1934 to 1946.

The Village Vanguard, opened by Max Gordon in the 1930s, is New York's oldest operating club for which kind of music?

Jazz took over in 1957. Before that, the Seventh Avenue South club was known for poetry readings and folk singers.

From 1797 until the 1820s, the land that is now Washington Square Park served New York City as what?

A potter's field, or burial ground for the poor, filled the site, and thousands of bodies still lie beneath it. Workers digging the arch's foundations turned up a gravestone dated 1803.

Greenwich Village stretches from Houston in the south to which crosstown thoroughfare on its northern edge?

14th Street is the boundary. Below it, the Village's streets mostly carry names instead of numbers, a holdover from its days as a separate hamlet.

Greenwich Street once ran along the shore of which waterway, now the western boundary of Greenwich Village?

Hudson River water once reached Greenwich Street, so the blocks to the west of it stand on landfill added later.

In which Alfred Hitchcock thriller does James Stewart, stuck in a cast, spy on his Greenwich Village neighbors?

Rear Window never went near New York: the whole courtyard was an enormous indoor set on Stage 18 at Paramount, the largest of its kind the studio had built.

Which US president made a small Greenwich Village park America's first national monument to LGBTQ rights?

Barack Obama signed the designation in June 2016, protecting Christopher Park and the surrounding streets where the 1969 uprising took place.

Which guitarist had Electric Lady Studios built in Greenwich Village but recorded there for only ten weeks?

Jimi Hendrix bought a defunct nightclub where he used to jam and turned it into the studio. He died less than a month after its opening party in August 1970.

Which 1911 disaster killed 146 garment workers in a Greenwich Village building that still stands near Washington Square?

Triangle Shirtwaist fire victims were trapped because a stairway door was kept locked to stop theft. Most were young immigrants, and the outcry led to new factory safety laws.

Which Greenwich Village writer fought Robert Moses's road plans and wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities?

Jane Jacobs helped kill the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a highway that would have cut through what became SoHo. She later moved to Toronto and fought an expressway there too.

Which New York art institution was opened in Greenwich Village in 1931 by a sculptor from the Vanderbilt family?

Whitney Museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened it on West 8th Street after the Metropolitan Museum turned down her offer of her own collection of modern works.

Which Edward Hopper painting of a diner was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue?

Nighthawks grew from a corner where two streets meet, though Hopper said he simplified the scene and made the place bigger. His studio was a few blocks east on Washington Square.

Which treat is Greenwich Village's Magnolia Bakery, opened in 1996, credited with turning into a craze?

Cupcakes began there as a way to use up spare cake batter. The Bleecker Street shop went on to appear in Sex and the City and a Saturday Night Live short.

Which sport draws crowds to the Cage, a famously undersized public court above a Greenwich Village subway station?

Basketball at the Cage is a rough, physical game because the court is smaller than regulation size. NBA forward Anthony Mason learned his tough style there.

In Searching for Bobby Fischer, a seven-year-old boy discovers which game by watching players in Washington Square Park?

Chess hooked Josh Waitzkin, the real prodigy whose father wrote the book behind the film. The park still sets aside an area for players.

Which literary movement of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg made Greenwich Village its East Coast home in the 1950s?

Beat Generation writers came for the low rents and the small-town feel, and shared the neighborhood's bars with the Abstract Expressionist painters.

Which numbered crosstown route turns north in Greenwich Village and manages to cross 10th, 11th and 12th?

West 4th Street runs east to west across most of Manhattan, then swerves in the Village, where the old lanes of a country hamlet were never forced into the 1811 grid.

Which novelist, born near Washington Square in 1843, made the square the title of an 1880 novel?

Henry James was taken to Europe before his first birthday and spent much of his life abroad. The book became the play and Oscar-winning film The Heiress.

Which playwright, later a Nobel laureate, was among the original Provincetown Players on MacDougal Street?

Eugene O'Neill saw many of his early works staged by the troupe, which turned a former stable and wine-bottling plant into its Village playhouse in 1918.

At which Greenwich Village bar did the Welsh poet who wrote Under Milk Wood drink days before his death in 1953?

White Horse Tavern was a longshoremen's bar until writers adopted it in the early 1950s. Jack Kerouac was thrown out of it more than once.

Which novelist, famous for The Naked and the Dead, co-founded The Village Voice newspaper in 1955?

Norman Mailer and his partners launched the paper from a two-bedroom apartment. It became the country's first alternative newsweekly and went on to win three Pulitzer Prizes.

Which folk singer, nicknamed the Mayor of MacDougal Street, partly inspired the film Inside Llewyn Davis?

Dave Van Ronk's memoir fed the story of the film's struggling musician. The book takes his nickname as its title, and so does a posthumous album.

Which militant group accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970 while building bombs in the basement?

Weather Underground members were assembling a device meant for Fort Dix when it went off, killing three of them. The blast also badly damaged the house next door, home of actor Dustin Hoffman.

Greenwich Village housed New York State's first what, opened in 1797 near today's Christopher Street pier?

Penitentiary inmates were held at Newgate Prison until 1829. It stood north of the city limits of the day, on the riverbank at what is now West 10th Street.

Which French artist climbed the Washington Square Arch in 1917 to proclaim Greenwich Village an independent republic?

Marcel Duchamp and his companions set off balloons from the top of the arch that January, a prank now filed among the neighborhood's more frivolous acts of rebellion.

Which architect of the Washington Square Arch was shot dead in 1906 at Madison Square Garden?

Stanford White adapted the form of a Roman triumphal arch for the marble monument. His killer was Harry Thaw, a wealthy heir whose case was dubbed the Trial of the Century.

Which Greenwich Village poet wrote The New Colossus, the sonnet displayed inside the Statue of Liberty's pedestal?

Emma Lazarus wrote the poem in 1883, but its lines only reached the monument on a bronze plaque in 1903, sixteen years after her death.

Which pamphleteer of the American Revolution died at 59 Grove Street in Greenwich Village in 1809?

Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, died there at 72. A decade later an English journalist dug up his bones and shipped them home for a grand reburial that never happened; they were later lost.

Westbeth, a Greenwich Village housing complex for artists, occupies the former research labs of which company?

Bell Telephone ran its laboratories there from 1898 to 1966, when the site was one of the world's most important industrial research centers. Architect Richard Meier oversaw the conversion.

Which painter was banned from Greenwich Village's Cedar Tavern for tearing a bathroom door off its hinges?

Jackson Pollock then hurled the door across the room at fellow painter Franz Kline. The bar is remembered as an incubator of the whole movement.

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay's middle name honors which kind of New York institution, where her uncle's life was saved?

A hospital, St. Vincent's in the Village, treated her uncle after an accident at sea just before she was born. It served the neighborhood from 1849 until it closed in 2010.

Which brothers wrote and directed Inside Llewyn Davis, set in the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961?

Joel and Ethan Coen follow one week in the life of a struggling singer, played by Oscar Isaac in his breakthrough role.

The Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village, with its Gothic clock tower, was built in the 1870s as what?

A courthouse in its first life, the building faced demolition in 1958 until a public outcry saved it. It was reused as a branch of the New York Public Library.

Chumley's, opened in 1922 at 86 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village with no sign outside, was what kind of business?

A speakeasy through Prohibition, it was set up in a former blacksmith's shop by the activist Leland Chumley. Its doors stayed unmarked long after drinking was legal again.

Which stream, covered over in the 19th century, once ran through what is now Washington Square Park?

Minetta Creek was diverted into a covered sewer in the 1820s, and people have argued ever since about whether it still flows under the Village.

Which hero of Italian unification has a statue in Washington Square Park, unveiled in 1888?

Giuseppe Garibaldi had lived in New York himself: he arrived in 1850 and worked for a time in a candle factory on Staten Island.

Sapokanikan, the Lenape name for a spot in what is now Greenwich Village, is usually translated as what?

Tobacco field fits what came next: in the 1630s the Dutch governor Wouter van Twiller grew the same crop on 200 acres there.