New York Songlines: University Place

West:

^
||
||

B
R
O
A
D
W
A
Y

East:

West:

Hartford Building

41: Bruce Kayton reports that Emma Goldman had a massage parlor at the corner of 17th and Broadway; it seems likely to have been this 1895 building. Later housed Partisan Review offices, and the office of Allen Ginsberg.

37: Republic, Pan-Asian noodles--noisy but styley (and affordable)

35: Heartland Brewery has good beer, fratty crowd

Decker Building

33: The Puma Store replaced Union Square Wine & Spirits on the ground floor of this 1893 building. Also known as the Union Building, it was designed by John Edelmann, Louis Sullivan's mentor. It originally had a minaret on top, which was removed for safety reasons. The building housed Andy Warhol's Factory from 1968 to 1974. Warhol was shot here, on June 3, 1968, by crazed playwright Valerie Solanis.

Bank of the Metropolis

31 (corner): Building with Blue Water Grill, noted seafood restaurant, housed a bank whose directors included prominent local businessmen, including the Tiffany of Tiffany's, the Sloane of Sloane's, the Arnold of Arnold Constable and the Steinway of the Steinway piano company. The building was designed by Bruce Price, the father of Emily Post. It later served as a Parsons School of Design dorm. On September 15, 1984, Michael Stewart was beaten to death in front of this building by the NYPD for the crime of writing with magic marker on a subway wall. The cops were all acquitted.

W <===         W 16th ST

Union Square Coffee Shop

29 (corner): Building with turquoise stripes looks like a diner, but it's actually a fancy restaurant that's very popular with the beautiful people. The Sex and the City girls often ate here.

27: Union Square Ballroom

W <===         W 15th ST

11-15 (corner): Labor-owned Amalgamated Bank is a regrettable modernization of Tiffany's jewelry store (1870-1905), which was designed by John Kellum to resemble a Venetian palace. A previous occupant was James Renwick's Church of the Puritans.

5-9: Spingler Building, an 1896 Romanesque structure designed by William Hume, takes its name from Spingler House, a hotel that previously occupied this spot; it in turn was named for Henry Spingler, who bought most of Union Square in 1788, when it was still farmland.

Lincoln Building

1 (corner): An 1889 Romanesque Revival landmark by R.H. Robertson, an early and influential example of skyscraper design.

U
N
I
O
N

S
Q
U
A
R
E

W
E
S
T

East:

Union Square

Union Square was not named for labor or for the North, but for the fact that Broadway meets and briefly converges with the Bowery (now 4th Avenue), once Broadway's rival as NYC's main street. In the city plan of 1811, Broadway was supposed to be eliminated north of 14th Street, permanently uniting it with Fourth Avenue. Fortunately, NYC was unable to raise money to reroute Broadway, saving Manhattan above Downtown from complete predictability.

The parking lot at the north end of the park hosts Union Square Greenmarket; Manhattan's best farmers' market. It used to be a meeting place for the Society for Creative Anachronism.

Union Square has a rich political history: 250,000 gathered to support the Union during the Civil War (1861), the largest crowd ever assembled in North America up to that point. Here was the first U.S. labor day parade (1882), Emma Goldman's arrest for telling unemployed to steal bread (1893), the funeral march for Triangle Shirtwaist Fire victims (1911), and protests against Sacco & Vanzetti's execution (1927) and the Rosenbergs' (1953).

After the destruction of the World Trade Center, Union Square became the site of an impromptu memorial and peace vigil.

James Fountain

This 1881 work by Karl Adolph Donndorf, surmounted by a statue of Charity, was intended to promote temperance. ''Here's something else you can drink--water!'' was a popular anti-alcohol message.

The south end of the square in particular is one of Manhattan's great public spaces, a haven for political ranters, skateboarders and breakdancers--and for those who want to watch the passing scene. The Critical Mass bicycle rallies gather here on the last Friday of every month. There's a craft fair here every year in December.

Gandhi Statue

West:

U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y

East:

Corner (40 E 14th): DSW, Designer Shoe Warehouse, allows you to find your own size without a clerk; Forever 21, frighteningly named designer knockoffs; Whole Foods. Used to be a Bradlees, which used to be May's, and before that Ohrbach's.

West:

110: Bowlmor Lanes

One of a very few bowling alleys in Manhattan. On the roof is Pressure, a pressurized dome that contains the most beautiful bar in New York.

U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y

East:

101: University Restaurant; long-time diner

West:

90: Poet Frank O'Hara lived here from February 1957 until the summer of 1959.

82: Cedar Tavern, storied bar; see No. 24 below.

80 (corner): In the late 1960s, this building housed the offices of the counter-cultural Grove Press. On July 26, 1968, a grenade was thrown through a window here, apparently in retaliation for Grove's publishing the writings of Cuban revolutionaries.

U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y

East:

West:

70: Bradley's Bar & Grill was a jazz bar, but is now semi-country.

64: Grove Press was located here before it moved up the street. Now houses the Institute for Audio Research, a school for sound engineers.

U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y

East:

75: Dean & Deluca Cafe, one of several; Felicity works here in the TV show of the same name.

67: Patsy's, some of the best pizza in Manhattan.

Albert Apartments

63 (corner): Formerly the Hotel Albert, named for painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose brother owned it. Robert Louis Stevenson stayed here, making a big impression on local writers. Novelist Thomas Wolfe lived here (1923-26) when he first moved to New York to teach English at NYU. Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, Lovin' Spoonful, Michael Bloomfield and electronica pioneers the Silver Apples all lived here at the same time c. 1966. John Phillips wrote "California Dreaming" here.

West:

70: Was The Stirrup, 1960s-era bar.

60: Spice; mod Thai

U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y

East:

51: La Petite Coquette; spendy lingerie

West:

Brevoort East

Apartments named for the Brevoort Hotel, which was on the west end of this block.

On this site, at No. 24, was the original site of Cedar Tavern, where artists like Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline gathered in the 1950s. Jackson Pollack was banned from the place for kicking down the men's room door. The bar was also favored by beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara and LeRoi Jones. Jack Kerouac was kicked out at about the same time Pollack was, allegedly for pissing in an ashtray. The bar was fictionalized by Dawn Powell as "The Golden Spur" in the novel of the same name.

The bar moved up the street in 1963.

U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y

East:

Lafayette Apartments

33: Built on the site of the Lafayette Hotel, a longtime gathering place of the bohemian elite; it appears as the "Cafe Julien" in Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion. The owner of the Lafayette, Raymond Orteig (who also owned the Brevoort), put up the prize money for flying across the Atlantic that Charles Lindbergh won. Torn down in 1950. On the ground floor today is the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill, which claims to have the marble bar on which Lindbergh signed the contract for his trans-Atlantic flight.

21: Dallas BBQ; local chain

West:

Corner (4-26 E 8th): These buildings date back to 1834, but were converted to fanciful Tudor-style apartments intended for artists by Harvey Wiley Corbett in 1916. Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, lived in No. 12 in 1917; from 1930 to 1935, E.B. White lived at No. 16 on the third and fourth floors; accused spy Alger Hiss lived at No. 22 from 1947 until his perjury conviction in 1950.

WASHINGTON MEWS

Corner (1 Washington Square): Novelists Henry James, William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton are all said to have lived and worked here at some point. (I suspect that none of them actually did.)

U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y

East:

5-11: The Weinstein Center for Student Living, an NYU dorm built in the 1960s, was where Matthew Broderick lived in the 1990 film The Freshman.

1 (corner): Clifford Odets moved to a sparsely furnished room in this building in 1935, just before the opening of his first play, Awake and Sing!. He stayed here even though the play was a success, explaining: "All I wanted was two clean rooms to live in, a phonograph, some records, and to buy things for a girl. Nothing more I wanted."

Poet Elinor Wylie moved to a previous building at this address after her divorce in 1922. (The current building was completed in 1930.) Critic Edmund Wilson moved here in 1923 (from No. 3 Washington Square) after marrying actress Mary Blair. British occultist Aleister Crowley lived here in 1918. Notables who have lived here more recently include Ricky Lake, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Calista Flockhart.

The White Turkey Town House, a restaurant, used to be on the ground floor. "They used to give out molded-wax white turkeys at the end of the meal that, if you could bear to crack off the wax, had solid chocolate insides," a reader recalls. More recently there was Posman Books, which I miss.

West:

Washington Square Park

Originally a marsh surrounding Minetta Brook, in the early years of New York this area was used as a graveyard for slaves and yellow fever victims, a dueling ground and a place of execution. In 1826 it was designated the Washington Military Parade Grounds, which soon was transformed into a public park.

Washington Square was at one point the center of New York society, later becoming the unofficial quadrangle of NYU. In 1961 it was the site of protests over a police crackdown on folksinging, and in 1963, a plan to extend Fifth Avenue through the park was defeated. The present landscaping of the park dates to 1971.

Garibaldi Statue

Giuseppe Garibaldi, a guerrilla fighter, is the hero of Italian reunification. While in exile, he lived briefly in New York City, first on Irving Place and then on Staten Island.

W
A
S
H
I
N
G
T
O
N

S
Q
U
A
R
E

E
A
S
T

East:

Hemmerdinger Hall

100 (corner): NYU's Main Building. Built 1895; first seven floors originally housed the American Bank Note Co.

Building replaced NYU's Old Main, a gothic tower completed in 1835; the use of prison labor from Sing-Sing sparked the Stonecutter's Riot in 1834, the first labor riot in NYC. In the old building, Samuel Colt developed the revolver and Samuel Morse invented the telegraph; John William Draper in 1840 took one of the first photographs of a person on the roof. Walt Whitman taught poetry here, Winslow Homer painted here, and architects Alexander Jackson Davis and Richard Morris Hunt had offices here. Despite this incredible history, NYU tore down the building because it decided it could make more money with a new building whose ground floor could be rented to a bank.

WASHINGTON PL  ==> E

Corner (26 Washington Place): NYU's Press Building

The Benedict

80: This 1879 NYU building, originally built to house single men, was named after Much Ado About Nothing's confirmed bachelor. Painters Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder lived here, as did architect William Mead and stained-glass artist John La Farge. The Sewer Club used to meet here for undisclosed activities; Mead's partner Stanford White was a founder. Now houses the 80 Washington Square East Galleries.

Goddard Hall

79 (corner): NYU dorm named for actress Paulette Goddard, whose fourth husband (following Charlie Chaplin and Burgess Meredith) was novelist Erich Maria Remarque, an NYU donor. The hall, called ''dour and delightful'' by the AIA Guide, combines the 1879 Tuckerman Building (one of New York's first apartments) and the 1894 Lies and Stern Building.