Next Stop MacDougal
While looking around for a short walk recently I settled on MacDougal St., which many think of as the commercial north-south spine of Greenwich Village. The street runs north from Prince, just east of 6th Ave. north to W. 8th, skirting the west end of Washington Square Park. Streets in this part of town are named for Revolutionary War generals. Alexander MacDougall (1733-1786) was born in the Hebrides and became a caption aboard a British privateer vessel before switching sides and joining the Revolution. When captured and imprisoned, he had so many visitors, appointments had to be set up. Rising to major general, he succeeded Benedict Arnold in defending West Point. When independence was won he became a representative in the Continental Congress and first president of the Bank of New York. He died at 53.
Where does MacDougal St. begin? Before the 1920s, it began (in this context, where the house numbering begins) at Spring St. Today MacDougal begins a couple of blocks north, at Prince. What happened to the south end? I’ve always been fascinated with 6th Ave. south of Bleecker, because that’s the “newest” section of 6th Ave., even though it’s about a century old. The IND subway was constructed here in the 1920s and opened for service on the 8th Ave. line in 1932 and the 6th Ave. line in 1940, and was built in part so NYC could raze the 6th and 9th Ave. Elevated lines. When 6th Ave. was extended south from Carmine St. in the 1920s it severely interrupted the existing street pattern. Some streets were eliminated entirely, some were “orphaned” and some were absorbed into 6th Ave. MacDougal is both of the latter two.
The Butterick Building at Spring St. and 6th Ave. has a slanted edge, or chamfer, that considerably widens the sidewalk. The slant corresponds to MacDougal’s former route, and is the only trace of MacDougal at Spring.
But it’s not the only slanted area along 6th Ave. Walking north you notice some of the buildings start slanting away from 6th Ave. at Vandam St.; in fact, seven addresses in total. These buildings have 6th Ave. house numbering, but they were once on the east side of the south end of MacDougal St. #196 6th Ave. was built in 1987, before the Sullivan-Thompson landmarked district was added in 2016, preventing alterations. The original building was constructed in 1896 and designed by the architect Nathaniel Bush as the NYPD 10th Precinct and once had holding cells in the rear. When the original precinct building was torn down, the replacement you see here took its place.
I’ve had a fascination for #205 Prince St., corner of MacDougal, for its unusual arched window treatment and cacti collection. It gets your attention as you wander north. It was constructed in 1834 for John Haff. The roof, known as a mansard roof, was popular in the 1870s and was likely added around that time. In 2009 the house was owned by filmmaker Simon Nuchtern and wife, Anna. Soho Windows mentions the cacti in the windows then, so it’s likely the building still has the same ownership; Mr. Nuchtern turns 88 this year. In 1976 he co-directed the infamous Snuff, which didn’t, despite opinion at the time, depict actual murders.
Both of the Manhattan “street books” in my possession, Naming New York by Sanna Feirstein and The Street Book by Henry Moscow claim that Prince St. is a leftover moniker from the British occupation of NYC that ended in 1783, but the above item that says otherwise is from the Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania” by John Jordan of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Edgar Green and George Ettinger (1905).
#44-48 MacDougal were brick row houses, all built in 1826, but as you can see they’ve been altered considerably before landmarking in 2016 made this much harder to do. #44 had a garage added in 1985 in this hardly car-centric neighborhood.
#52 MacDougal, by architect John P. Schweikert, was built in 1884. I was struck by the Native-American with headdress above the front entrance.
The title The Twelve Chairs has been used often. In 1928 it was a satirical novel by Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov, published in 1928. Mel Brooks adapted it as a vehicle for Dom DeLuise in one of its many film versions in 1970, and here the name turns up again, as a restaurant at #56 MacDougal, serving Middle Eastern and Mediterranean dishes. The now-demolished three-story walkup #54 MacDougal, originally in place of the new building on the right, was the Rosenberg Jewelry Store in the original Men in Black in the 1990s.
I’m capable of eating hamburgers three times a week, so I’ll have to check out Hamburger America, #51 MacDougal, corner of Houston. The location was formerly Something Special, a shop frequented by the likes of Patti Smith, the Beastie Boys, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. The street corner is sub-named for the shop’s founders in 1962, Lucy and Lenny Cecere.
I’d never been on the stretch of MacDougal between Houston and Bleecker, so I hadn’t seen this handsome grouping of attached brick buildings painted in tasteful, unobtrusive colors. They’re part of another Landmarks Preservation Commission designated historic district, MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens, which as you may expect extends a block east to the west side of Sullivan. The district is also one of NYC’s oldest, designated in 1967. The houses were constructed between 1844 and 1850, but had become run down within a few decades until they were purchased by William Sloane Coffin Senior of W&J Sloane Furniture, who developed them into what was, at the time, affordable housing; today, space here is very expensive. Coffin Senior’s son, W.S. Coffin Jr., became a well-known clergyman and peace activist.
If you’re from Flushing you know the clock-towered W&J Sloane Furniture Building on College Point Blvd., which became a Serval Zipper factory and is now a U-Haul center.
#93 MacDougal/189 Bleecker, NW corner of Bleecker, was home to the storied San Remo Cafe from 1925-1967, a Mob-owned establishment that evolved into a haunt for the literary cognoscenti between World War II and the end of the 1950s such as Allen Ginsberg, Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Frank O’Hara and W.H. Auden.
I was fascinated by the purple exterior of the franchise Insomnia Cookies at #116 MacDougal, but also by the odd object I found at the basement entrance. It’s a remnant of the Scrap Bar which occupied the space from 1986-1995. Owner Steve Trimboli decorated it with auto parts and junk as it became a hangout for punks and then “hair metal” bands and fans. MTV regularly threw parties and filmed at the Scrap Bar. A door down, #114 MacDougal was the original location of Kettle of Fish, established in 1950, now at #59 Christopher.
Of all of NYC’s longstanding bars and taverns, I’ve somehow missed Minetta Tavern, which has held down the SW corner of Minetta La. and MacDougal St. since 1937, but it had operated as the Black Rabbit speakeasy in the Prohibition era. From its early days, the Minetta was a writer’s bar and counted E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway among its customers, which also included the New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell and his discovery, wild-eyed homeless bohemian Joe Gould, who imitated seagulls and bamboozled Mitchell into believing he was producing a multi-volume, the Oral History of Our Time; in the end, it amounted to only a few notebooks of Gould’s scribbled imaginings.
In 2008, restaurateur Keith McNally reopened the Tavern not as a neighborhood watering hole but an upscale, expensive French restaurant. One thing hasn’t changed, though: its hanging neon sign, which hopefully will be there a few more decades.
Players Theatre and Cafe Wha? share the building at the NW corner of MacDougal and Minetta La. Manny Roth (1919-2014) opened Cafe Wha? in 1959 in the basement of a garage constructed in 1905 that was previously a horse stable; the trough once used for horse dung was still there. Roth converted it into a coffeehouse and performance space. When Bob Dylan arrived in NYC in 1960 he was employed as a harmonica player and had his first paying gig as a folksinger here in 1961. Mary Travers was a waitress here before becoming part of the trio, Peter, Paul and Mary. In the 1960s, Woody Allen, Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby and Richard Prior all performed here early in their careers. The Cafe originally closed in the late-1960s, but it reopened in the 1980s under a new owner.
The 250-seat Players Theatre, meanwhile, has had an even longer tenure than Cafe Wha, going back to the late 1940s. For several years it has hosted A Christmas Carol—The Musical and Sleepy Hollow—The Musical, both composed by theatre owner Michael Sgouros.
A block south of Washington Square Park, #125 MacDougal, NW corner of W. 3rd, kicks off a row of the oldest buildings on the street. 125 MacDougal St. was originally built as a 2½ story Federal style house for Alonzo A. Alvord in 1829, as were the three buildings north of it. In 1868 it was given a fourth floor and its mansard roof and dormer windows. From 1901 to 1906 it was the original Knickerbocker Hotel (now in Times Square) and since 1998 the ground floor has hosted Club Groove.
E. 8th St. ends MacDougal St.’s northern progress. Half a block south of that, MacDougal Alley was conceived as a stable row or mews in 1833. Like Grove Ct. and Milligan Pl. further west, it’s protected from auto traffic by a locked gate, which also keeps out skulkers with cameras, like me. I gained admission to Grove Court many years ago when a resident happened by, but no luck here.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)