Greenwich Village
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50 free Greenwich Village trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Greenwich Village packs more stories into a few dozen crooked blocks than most cities manage in a square mile. For generations it has drawn poets, painters, musicians, comedians and troublemakers, and the brownstones, coffeehouses and basement clubs they used are still standing on streets that ignore the rest of Manhattan's grid. This quiz walks the whole neighborhood: the park and its marble arch, the tiny landmarks tourists stroll straight past, the writers and artists who lived upstairs, the protests that changed the country, and the films, sitcoms and comic books that borrowed the Village as a backdrop. It is written for locals, visitors planning a walk, and trivia night hosts who want a New York round. The opening questions are easy enough for kids and families, the later ones will test longtime New Yorkers, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The building at 75½ Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, built in 1873, is famous as New York's what?
Narrowest house
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.
Q 02Which NBC sitcom, on air from 1994 to 2004, is set in Greenwich Village but was filmed in California?
Friends
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.
Q 03Which Marvel hero lives in the Sanctum Sanctorum, a mansion at 177A Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village?
Doctor Strange
Doctor Strange moved in after his training as a sorcerer, sharing the townhouse with his assistant Wong and a library of magical books.
Q 04At Greenwich Village's Gaslight Cafe, what did audiences do instead of clapping, to spare the neighbors upstairs?
Snapped their fingers
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.
Q 05What is the Hess triangle, a small mosaic set into a Greenwich Village sidewalk on Seventh Avenue South?
A plot of private land
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.
Q 06Which holiday does Greenwich Village mark with a nighttime parade of giant puppets, begun in the 1970s?
Halloween
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.
Q 07In which 2004 superhero film is the hero fired from his delivery job at Joe's Pizza in Greenwich Village?
Spider-Man 2
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.
Q 08Which singer walks down Jones Street in Greenwich Village with Suze Rotolo on the cover of a 1963 album?
Bob Dylan
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.
Q 09Which Greenwich Village bar, raided by police in June 1969, became the birthplace of the gay rights movement?
Stonewall Inn
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.
Q 10Caffe Reggio, open on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village since 1927, says it introduced which drink to America?
Cappuccino
Cappuccino was brought over by founder Domenico Parisi, whose original 1902 espresso machine still stands against the back wall of the coffeehouse.
Q 11Which Manhattan thoroughfare starts at the Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village and runs north past Central Park?
Fifth Avenue
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.
Q 12Which school, founded by Albert Gallatin, has kept its main campus around Washington Square Park since the 1830s?
New York University
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.
Q 13Which actress played Alex Russo, a teenage wizard living in Greenwich Village, on the Disney Channel?
Selena Gomez
Q 21Which guitarist had Electric Lady Studios built in Greenwich Village but recorded there for only ten weeks?
Jimi Hendrix
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.
Q 22Which 1911 disaster killed 146 garment workers in a Greenwich Village building that still stands near Washington Square?
Triangle Shirtwaist fire
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.
Q 23Which Greenwich Village writer fought Robert Moses's road plans and wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities?
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.
Q 14Which New York mayor, born in Greenwich Village in 1882, later gave his name to an airport in Queens?
Fiorello La Guardia
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.
Q 15The Village Vanguard, opened by Max Gordon in the 1930s, is New York's oldest operating club for which kind of music?
Jazz
Jazz took over in 1957. Before that, the Seventh Avenue South club was known for poetry readings and folk singers.
Q 16From 1797 until the 1820s, the land that is now Washington Square Park served New York City as what?
A potter's field
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.
Q 17Greenwich Village stretches from Houston in the south to which crosstown thoroughfare on its northern edge?
14th Street
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.
Q 18Greenwich Street once ran along the shore of which waterway, now the western boundary of Greenwich Village?
Hudson River
Hudson River water once reached Greenwich Street, so the blocks to the west of it stand on landfill added later.
Q 19In which Alfred Hitchcock thriller does James Stewart, stuck in a cast, spy on his Greenwich Village neighbors?
Rear Window
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.
Q 20Which US president made a small Greenwich Village park America's first national monument to LGBTQ rights?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama signed the designation in June 2016, protecting Christopher Park and the surrounding streets where the 1969 uprising took place.
Jane Jacobs
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.
Q 24Which New York art institution was opened in Greenwich Village in 1931 by a sculptor from the Vanderbilt family?
Whitney Museum
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.
Q 25Which Edward Hopper painting of a diner was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue?
Nighthawks
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.
Q 26Which treat is Greenwich Village's Magnolia Bakery, opened in 1996, credited with turning into a craze?
Cupcakes
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.
Q 27Which sport draws crowds to the Cage, a famously undersized public court above a Greenwich Village subway station?
Basketball
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.
Q 28In Searching for Bobby Fischer, a seven-year-old boy discovers which game by watching players in Washington Square Park?
Chess
Chess hooked Josh Waitzkin, the real prodigy whose father wrote the book behind the film. The park still sets aside an area for players.
Q 29Which literary movement of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg made Greenwich Village its East Coast home in the 1950s?
Beat Generation
Beat Generation writers came for the low rents and the small-town feel, and shared the neighborhood's bars with the Abstract Expressionist painters.
Q 30Which numbered crosstown route turns north in Greenwich Village and manages to cross 10th, 11th and 12th?
West 4th Street
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.