4th Street (Manhattan) - Historic Locations and Residents

Historic Locations and Residents

West Fourth Street has always been a center of the Village's bohemian lifestyle. The Village's first tearoom, The Mad Hatter, was located at 150 West Fourth Street and served as a meeting place for intellectuals and artists.

The infamous Golden Swan bar (known as the "Hell Hole"), at the corner of Sixth avenue, was a famous haunt of Eugene O'Neill and the setting and inspiration for his play The Iceman Cometh. Writer Willa Cather's first NY residence was at 60 Washington Square South (Fourth Street between LaGuardia Place and Thompson Place) and radical journalists John Reed and Lincoln Steffens lived nearby at 42 Washington Square South. Reed later worked in a room in the Studio Club building to complete the series of articles that became his account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, later the source for the movie Reds.

Sculptor and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney established the Whitney Studio Club in a brownstone at 147 West Fourth Street in 1918 as a place for young artists to gather and show their work. The facility operated for ten years and was the second incarnation of what would later become the Whitney Museum of American Art. It started the careers of such artists as Ashcan school painter John Sloan, Edward Hopper, whose first one-man exhibit was held there in 1920, and social realists Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop. Sloan lived at 240 West Fourth St and painted locations on the street including the Golden Swan.

The street was later home to the famous folk club Gerde's Folk City (11 West Fourth Street), which hosted the NY debuts of Bob Dylan in 1961 and Simon & Garfunkel. Dylan also lived from early-1962 until late-1964 in a small $60-per-month studio apartment at 161 West Fourth Street; the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was photographed at nearby Jones Street at West Fourth, and the street may have inspired his 1965 hit song "Positively 4th Street".