Greenwich Village: Bleecker St. between Thompson and Sullivan

(I’m working through the backlog of photos from the summer. Be patient. Sit back. We’ll get through this together.)

If you want to distill the tangled history of Greenwich Village into a single block, this little slice of Bleecker Street west of NYU would be a strong contender. It’s been a center for music and nightlife—both legal and otherwise—for more than a century.

Characterized on the north side mostly by older tenements and apartments and the south side by the imposing Mills House, the freewheeling vibe is still present here, even though it’s been buried in layers of reinvention.

Take a peek on Google Maps here.

157 Bleecker Street, “The Slide” | 1835

In the the 1890s, like today, this strip had a reputation that drew people looking to party. One of these good time joints was a bar here at 157 Bleecker Street, widely described as one of New York’s earliest gay bars and known for cross-dressing performers and prostitution. Regulars included patrons with names like Princess Toto, Madam Fisher, Phoebe Pinafore, and Queen of the Slide. Maybe mobilized by newspaper articles claiming that “London, Paris or Berlin, with all their iniquity, have nothing to parallel this sink of vice and depravity,” police raided the bar in 1892, leading to its closure. (A century or so later, the future owners would locate wooden boards in the basement advertising the prices for a night with one of the women here.)

By the early 1900s, this building belonged to Luigi Fugazy, a padrone who leveraged his Tammany Hall connections to help Italian immigrants secure steamship tickets to the old country, send money home, find work, start businesses, or get documents notarized.

By the end of the last century, this space was home to Kenny’s Castaways, a beloved music venue that championed first-timers and seasoned performers. “This is precisely the kind of place that entices people to come to New York City in the first place,” an art handler having a Sunday afternoon pint told the New York Times before it closed its doors in 2012. Today, the Federal-style building is home to Carroll Place, which seems to have faithfully embraced the history of the building.

Mills House No. 1 | 1897

This is a classy building with an ornate oval window, limestone entrance and a sophisticated but unadorned facade that was probably typical of institutional buildings of that time. It was funded by Darius Ogden Mills—who sought to create clean, affordable places for men to stay—and designed by Ernest Flagg, who went on to design the Singer Building, the future world’s tallest skyscraper.

For 20 cents a night, working-class men could find cheap digs in a tiny room with a mattress and pillow. Over time, building took on a darker reputation as a flophouse with chaotic conditions. One rumor was that a passer-by was killed by a table thrown from a window.

In 1958, Art D’Lugoff, a local show producer opened the Village Gate in the basement, a jazz, salsa, and counterculture hub where legends like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin performed.

(There’s no way you’ll spend the next eight minutes better than with this Nina Simone 1961 live recording from the Village Gate, but that’s up to you.)

It closed in 1994, but the sign for the long-gone venue still hangs over the corner outside, advertising the ghosts of Jaques Brel revivals and shows by performance artist Penny Arcade.

Today it’s home to a CVS—which, you know, obviously—and La Poisson Rouge, which is a great venue in its own right. Hey, there’s still fun to be had, as this fella can attest:

155 Bleecker Street | est. 1835

Shortly before Halloween 1917, six men were found dead in and around the Mills House. Police soon traced the cause of these deaths to a bar here at 155 Bleecker Street, where bottled labeled “Kentucky’s Best Whiskey” were actually filled with toxic wood alcohol. More recently, this was home to The Back Fence, another rowdy live music space which was felled in 2012 by a far more common killer these days: a steep rent increase.

The place that’s there now has an Instagram friendly vibe that hosts afternoon tea. (I can’t afford it, but it looks fun.)

163 Bleecker Street

Not much to say here. This two story building is being rebuilt or renovated after a fire in 2021 burned through a Chinese food restaurant and yoga studio.

Block Rating: 7.25/10¹