Greenwich Literary Tour

Start: Bleecker Street between La Guardia Place and Thompson Street.

Subway: Take the 6 to Bleecker Street, which lets you out at Bleecker and Lafayette Streets. Walk west on Bleecker.

Finish: 14 West 10th St.

Time: Approximately 4 to 5 hours.

Best Time: If you plan to do the whole tour, start fairly early in the day (there's a breakfast break near the start).

The Village has always attracted rebels, radicals, and creative types, from earnest 18th-century revolutionary Thomas Paine, to early 20th-century radicals, such as John Reed and Mabel Dodge, to the Stonewall rioters who gave birth to the gay liberation movement in 1969. Much of Village life centers around Washington Square Park, the site of hippie rallies and counterculture demonstrations, as well as the former stomping ground of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

Many other American writers have at some time made their homes in the Village. As early as the 19th century, it was New York's literary hub and a venue for salons and other intellectual gatherings. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art came into being here, albeit some 60 years apart.

The 20th century saw Greenwich Village transformed from a bastion of old New York families to a bohemian enclave of struggling writers and artists. Though skyrocketing rents made the Village less accessible to aspiring artists after the late 1920s, it remained a mecca for creative people--so much so that almost every building is a literary landmark--though I promise not to take you to every one. Nonetheless, this tour is a long one, and you may want to break it up into two visits.

Begin on Bleecker Street, named for a writer, Anthony Bleecker, whose friends included Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant, at:

145 Bleecker St.

James Fenimore Cooper, author of 32 novels, plus a dozen works of nonfiction, lived here in 1833. Though he is primarily remembered for romantic adventure stories of American frontier--especially Leatherstocking Tales, the epic of frontiersman Natty Bumppo (written over a period of 19 years)--Cooper also wrote political commentary, naval history, sea stories, and a group of novels about the Middle Ages.

Continue west (walk right) to:

Circle in the Square Theater (159 Bleecker St.)

Founded by Ted Mann and Jose Quintero in 1951 at the site of an abandoned nightclub on Sheridan Square, the theater moved to Bleecker Street in 1959. It was one of the first arena, or "in-the-round," theaters in the United States. Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke (starring Geraldine Page), Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (starring Jason Robards, Jr.), Thorton Wilder's Plays for Bleecker Street, Truman Capote's The Grass Harp, and Jean Genet's The Balcony all premiered here. Actors Colleen Dewhurst, Dustin Hoffman, James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Jason Robards, George C. Scott, and Peter Falk honed their craft on the Circle in the Square stage. The theater continues to present high-quality productions.

Across the street is:

The Atrium (no. 160)

This 19th-century beaux arts building by Ernest Flagg is today a posh apartment building. Before becoming the sadly defunct Village Gate jazz club in the late 1950s, this former flophouse was Theodore Dreiser's first New York residence (in 1895, he paid 25¢ a night for a cell-like room).

Further west is:

172 Bleecker St.

This is where James Agee lived in a top-floor railroad flat from 1941 to 1951, after he completed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Though the book enjoyed a great vogue in the 1960s, it was originally scathingly reviewed and went out of print in 1948 after selling a mere 1,025 copies. Time magazine called it "the most distinguished failure of the season."

Rallying from critical buffets during his Bleecker Street tenancy, Agee created the screenplay for The African Queen and worked as a movie critic for both Time and The Nation. He had to move from this walk-up apartment after he suffered a heart attack.

Nearby, the quintessential Village corner of Bleecker and MacDougal is a good spot for a breakfast break.

Take a Break--Café Figaro (tel. 212/677-1100 ) at 184-186 Bleecker St. is an old beat-generation haunt. In 1969, Village residents were disheartened to see the Figaro close and in its place arise an uninspired and sterile Blimpie's. In 1976, the present owner completely restored Figaro to its earlier appearance, replastering its walls once again with shellacked copies of the French newspaper Le Figaro. Stop in for pastries and coffee or an omelet and absorb the atmosphere, or sit at a sidewalk table to watch the Village parade by.

On the opposite corner is:

189 Bleecker St.

For several decades, beginning in the late 1920s, the San Remo (today Carpo's Cafe), an Italian restaurant at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, was a writer's hangout frequented by James Baldwin, William Styron, Jack Kerouac, James Agee, Frank O'Hara, Gregory Corso, Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. John Clellon Holmes wrote about the San Remo in his 1952 novel, Go, one of the first published works of the beat generation.

Take a right and head north on MacDougal Street to the:

Minetta Tavern

Located at 113 MacDougal St. at Minetta Lane (tel. 212/475-3850 ), the Minetta Tavern was a speakeasy called the Black Rabbit during Prohibition. The most unlikely event to take place here in those wild days was the founding of De Witt Wallace's very unbohemian Reader's Digest on the premises in 1923; the magazine was published in the basement in its early days. Since 1937, the Minetta has been a simpatico Italian restaurant and meeting place for writers and other creative folk, including Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Louis Bromfield, and Ernest Hemingway.

The Minetta still evokes the old Village. Walls are covered with photographs of famous patrons and caricatures (about 20 of which artist Franz Kline scrawled in exchange for drinks and food), and the rustic pine-paneled back room is adorned with murals of local landmarks. Stop in for a drink or a meal. The Minetta is open daily from noon to midnight and serves traditional Italian fare.

A little farther up and across the street stands an 1852 house fronted by twin entrances and a wisteria-covered portico, at:

130-132 MacDougal St.

This house belonged to Louisa May Alcott's uncle, and after the Civil War, Alcott lived and worked here. Historians believe it was here that she penned her best-known work, the autobiographical children's classic Little Women (Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth were based on Alcott and her sisters Abbie, Anna, and Lizzie, respectively). Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the daughter of transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott. Emerson was a close family friend, and Thoreau taught the young Louisa botany. During the Civil War, Alcott briefly served as a Union hospital nurse in Washington, D.C., until a case of typhoid fever nearly killed her. Alcott later published a book of letters documenting that time under the title Hospital Sketches. Mercury poisoning from the medication she was given left her in fragile health the rest of her life.

Across the street, at 133 MacDougal St., is:

The Provincetown Playhouse

The playhouse at 133 MacDougal St. (tel. 212/477-5048 ) was first established in 1915 on a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Founders George Cram "Jig" Cook and his wife Susan Glaspell began by producing their own plays. One day, however, an intense 27-year-old named Eugene O'Neill arrived in Provincetown with a trunk full of plays, a few of which he brought for Cook and Glaspell to read. They immediately recognized his genius and were inspired to create a theater dedicated to experimental drama. It moved to this converted stable, where O'Neill managed it through 1927. Many of O'Neill's early plays premiered here: Bound East for Cardiff, The Hairy Ape, The Long Voyage Home, The Emperor Jones, and All God's Chillun's Got Wings.

Other seminal figures in the theater's early days were Max Eastman, Djuna Barnes, Edna Ferber, and John Reed. Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose unlikely life plan was to support herself as a poet by earning her living as an actress, snagged both the lead in Fred Dell's An Angel Intrudes and Dell himself (their love affair inspired her poems "Weeds" and "Journal"). Katharine Cornell, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis (who made her stage debut here), and Eva Le Gallienne also appeared on the Provincetown stage in its early years. The theater was a great success, and O'Neill's plays went on to Broadway. But instead of basking in their popularity, Cook and Glaspell disbanded the company and moved on to Greece, convinced that acceptance by the establishment signaled their failure as revolutionary artists. Though the Provincetown Players gave their last performance on December 14, 1929, this theater, fully restored in 1997, now presents plays by and for young people, as well as community playhouse-produced O'Neill works.

Next door is:

137 MacDougal St.

Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Vachel Lindsay, Louis Untermeyer, Max Eastman, Theodore Dreiser, Lincoln Steffens, and Sinclair Lewis hashed over life theories at the Liberal Club, "A Meeting Place for Those Interested in New Ideas," founded in 1913 on the second floor of the house that once stood here. Margaret Sanger lectured the club on birth control, an on-premises organization called Heterodoxy worked to promote feminist causes, and cubist art was displayed on the walls.

Downstairs were Polly's Restaurant (run by Polly Holladay and Hippolyte Havel) and the radical Washington Square Book Shop, from which Liberal Club members more often borrowed than bought. Holladay, a staunch anarchist, refused to join even the Liberal Club, which, however bohemian, was still an "organization." The apoplectic Havel, who was on the editorial board of The Masses (see stop 37), once shouted out at a meeting where fellow members were debating which literary contributions to accept: "Bourgeois pigs! Voting! Voting on poetry! Poetry is something from the soul! You can't vote on poetry!" When Floyd Dell pointed out to Havel that he had once made editorial selections for the radical magazine Mother Earth, Havel shot back, "Yes, but we didn't abide by the results!" Hugo Kalmar, a character in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, is purportedly based on Havel. In a previous incarnation, this building was the home of Nathaniel Currier (of Currier and Ives).

Turn left onto West 4th Street and continue to the corner of:

Sixth Avenue and West 4th Street

Eugene O'Neill, a heavy drinker, nightly frequented a bar called the Golden Swan (more familiarly known as the "Hell Hole" or "Bucket of Blood") where the small park now stands and later used it as a setting for his play The Iceman Cometh, a play that was 12 years in the writing. The bar was patronized by prostitutes, gangsters, longshoremen, anarchists, and politicians, as well as artists and writers. Eccentric owner Tom Wallace, on whom O'Neill modeled saloon proprietor Harry Hope, kept a pig in the basement and seldom ventured off the premises.

Cross Sixth Avenue, angle up the continuation of West 4th Street, and make your first left onto Cornelia Street looking for:

33 Cornelia St.

Throughout the 1940s, film critic/poet/novelist/screenwriter James Agee lived on Bleecker Street and worked in a studio at this address. Here he completed final revisions on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which portrayed the bleak lives of Alabama sharecroppers.

Next door, at 31 Cornelia St., once stood the Caffè Cino, which opened in 1958 and served cappuccino in shaving mugs. In the early 1960s, owner Joe Cino encouraged aspiring playwrights, such as Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, and John Guare, to stage readings and performances in his cramped storefront space. Experimentation in this tiny cafe gave birth to New York's off-Broadway theater. Plagued by money troubles, Cino committed suicide in 1967; Caffè Cino closed a year later.

Continue down Cornelia Street to Bleecker Street and turn right. Cross Seventh Avenue and angle back to your left into Commerce Street. Near the corner stands:

11 Commerce St.

Washington Irving wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" while living in this quaint three-story brick building. Born into a prosperous New York family, he penned biographies of naval heroes as an officer in the War of 1812. In 1819, under the name Geoffrey Crayon, he wrote The Sketch Book, which contained the stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Westminster Abbey," and "Rip Van Winkle." Irving was one of the elite New Yorkers who served on the planning commission for Central Park and was ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He coined the phrase "the almighty dollar" and once observed that "A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only tool that grows keener with constant use."

Continue walking west on Commerce and turn left at Bedford Street to find:

75 1/2 Bedford St.

The narrowest house in the Village (a mere 9 1/2 ft. across), this unlikely three-story brick residence was built on the site of a former carriage alley in 1873. Pretty, redheaded, feminist poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who arrived in the Village fresh from Vassar, lived here from 1923 (the year she won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry) to 1925.

Other famous occupants of the narrow house have included a young Cary Grant and John Barrymore.

Return to Commerce Street and turn left, where you'll find:

The Cherry Lane Theatre

Nestled in a bend at 38 Commerce St., the Cherry Lane Theatre was founded in 1924 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Famed scenic designer Cleon Throckmorton transformed the Revolutionary-era building (originally a farm silo, later a brewery and a box factory) into a playhouse that presented works by Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot and Endgame premiered here), Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter. In 1951, Judith Malina and Julian Beck founded the ultra-experimental Living Theatre on its premises. Before rising to megafame, Barbra Streisand worked as a Cherry Lane usher.

Nearby, in Commerce Street's bend, is no. 48, a Greek Revival house fronted by a bona-fide working gas lamp and built in 1844 for malicious merchant maven A.T. Stewart.

Continue around Commerce Street's bend to Barrow Street, where you turn right, and then turn left back onto Bedford Street. A few doors up on the right is:

Chumley's

Chumley's (86 Bedford St.; tel. 212/675-4449 ) opened in 1926 in a former blacksmith's shop. During Prohibition, it was a speakeasy with a casino upstairs. Its convoluted entranceway with four steps up and four down (designed to slow police raiders), the lack of a sign outside, and a back door that opens on an alleyway are remnants of that era.

Original owner Lee Chumley was a radical labor sympathizer who held secret meetings of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) on the premises. Chumley's has long been a writer's bar. Its walls are lined with book jackets of works by famous patrons who, over the years, have included Edna St. Vincent Millay (she once lived upstairs), John Steinbeck, Eugene O' Neill, e.e. cummings, Edna Ferber, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Gregory Corso, Norman Mailer, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling, Harvey Fierstein, Calvin Trillin, and numerous others. Even the elusive J.D. Salinger hoisted a few at the bar here, and Simone de Beauvoir came by when she was in town.

With its working fireplaces (converted blacksmith forges), wood-plank flooring, amber lighting, and old, carved-up oak tables, Chumley's lacks nothing in the way of mellowed atmosphere. Think about returning for drinks or dinner. A blackboard menu features fresh pasta and grilled fish. Open nightly from 5pm to an arbitrary closing time, Chumley's also offers brunch on weekends.

Continue up Bedford to Grove Street, named in the 19th century for its many gardens and groves, and make a right to:

17 Grove St.

Parts of this picturesque wood-frame house date to the early 1800s. A friend of James Baldwin's lived here in the 1960s, and Baldwin frequently stayed at the house. Baldwin, whose fiery writings coincided with the inception of the civil rights movement, once said, "The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose."

Further along this street is:

45 Grove St.

Originally a freestanding two-story building, this was, in the 19th century, one of the Village's most elegant mansions, surrounded by verdant lawns with greenhouses and stables. Built in 1830, it was refurbished with Italianate influences in 1870. In the movie Reds, which is based on the life of John Reed, 45 Grove was portrayed (inaccurately) as Eugene O'Neill's house.

Ohio-born poet Hart Crane rented a second-floor room at 45 Grove St. in 1923 and began writing his poetic portrait of America, The Bridge (Hart depicted the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol of America's westward expansion). During his childhood, Crane was constantly traveling with his mother, which kept him from finishing school; nonetheless, he was a voracious reader and brilliantly self-educated. By the time he was 17, his poetry had been published in prestigious New York magazines.

In later years, frustrated by frequent rejection from magazines and other exigencies of his craft, Crane would occasionally toss his typewriter out the window. Often moody and despondent, he was chronically in debt, plagued by guilt over homosexual encounters on the nearby docks, and given to almost nightly alcoholic binges; fellow Villager e.e. cummings once found him passed out on a sidewalk, bundled him into a taxi, and had him driven home. In 1932, returning by ship from Mexico (where, on a Guggenheim fellowship, he had been attempting to write an epic poem about Montezuma), Crane made sexual advances to a crew member, was badly beaten up, and jumped into the waters to his death at the age of 33.

Continue up the street to:

59 Grove St.

English-born American revolutionary/political theorist/writer Thomas Paine died here in 1809. Paine came to America (with the help of Benjamin Franklin) in 1774, and in 1776 he produced his famous pamphlet, The Crisis, which begins with the words: "These are the times that try men's souls." After fighting in the American Revolution, he returned to England to advocate the overthrow of the British monarchy. Indicted for treason, he escaped to Paris and became a French citizen; while imprisoned there during the Terror, he wrote The Age of Reason. He returned to the United States in 1802, where he was vilified for his atheism. Benjamin Franklin once said to Paine, "Where liberty is, there is my country." To which Paine replied: "Where liberty is not, there is mine."

The downstairs space has always been a restaurant, which today is called Marie's Crisis Cafe (tel. 212/243-9323 ). Though the building Paine lived in burned down, some of the interior brickwork is original. Of note is a WPA-era mural behind the bar depicting the French and American Revolutions. Up a flight of stairs is another mural (a wood-relief carving) called La Convention, depicting Robespierre, Danton, and Thomas Paine. In the 1920s, you might have spotted anyone from Eugene O'Neill to Edward VIII of England here.

At Seventh Avenue, cross to the opposite side of the wide intersection, walk around to the left of the little park, and head half a block up Christopher Street, the hub of New York's gay community, to no. 53:

The Stonewall

The current bar in this spot shares a name with its more famous predecessor, the Stonewall Inn. This bar was the scene of the Stonewall riots of June 1969, when gay customers decided to resist the police during a routine raid. The event launched the lesbian and gay rights movement and is commemorated throughout the country every year with gay pride parades.

Continue up the block to:

The Corner of Waverly Place and Christopher Street

The wedge-shaped Georgian Northern Dispensary building dates from 1831. Edgar Allan Poe was treated for a head cold here in 1836, the year he came to New York with his 13-year-old bride for whom he would later compose the pain-filled requiems "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee":

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee.

Keep walking up Christopher Street to take a right onto:

Gay Street

Famous residents of this tiny street (originally a stable alley) have included New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, who owned the 18th-century town house at no. 12. More recently, Frank Paris, creator of Howdy Doody, lived here.

In the 1920s, Ruth McKenney lived in the basement of no. 14 with her sister Eileen, who later married Nathanael West. It was the setting for McKenney's zany My Sister Eileen stories, which were first published in the New Yorker and then collected into a book. They were then turned into a popular stage comedy that ran on Broadway from 1940 to 1942, followed by a Broadway musical version called Wonderful Town and two movie versions.

During Prohibition, the street held several speakeasies.

At the end of the short street, take a left onto Waverly Place and look for:

139 Waverly Place

Edna St. Vincent Millay lived here with her sister, Norma, in 1918. Radical playwright Floyd Dell, her lover, who found the apartment for her, commented: "She lived in that gay poverty which is traditional of the Village, and one may find vivid reminiscences of that life in her poetry."

Cross Sixth Avenue to check out:

116 Waverly Place

Dating from 1891, the building has hosted William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, and Herman Melville. Here Poe read his latest poem, "The Raven," to assembled literati. Waverly Place, by the way, was named in 1833 for Sir Walter Scott's novel, Waverley.

Return to Sixth Avenue and turn left (south) down it. Take another left onto Washington Place to:

82 Washington Place

This was the residence from 1908 to 1912 of Willa Cather, whose books celebrated pioneer life and the beauty of her native Nebraska landscape. Cather came to New York in 1906 at the age of 31 to work at the prestigious McClure's magazine and rose to managing editor before resigning to write full time. As her career advanced, and she found herself besieged with requests for lectures and interviews, Cather became almost reclusive and fiercely protective of her privacy.

Bandleader John Philip Sousa owned the beautiful 1839 building next door (no. 80 ).

Washington Place ends at:

Washington Square Park

Once a swamp frequented largely by duck hunters, this is the hub of the Village. Minetta Brook meandered through it. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was a potter's field (more than 10,000 people are buried under the park) and an execution site (one of the makeshift gallows survives--a towering English elm in the northwest corner of the park). The park was dedicated in 1826, and elegant residential dwellings, some of which have survived NYU's cannibalization of the neighborhood, went up around the square. At this time, it was the citadel of stifling patrician gentility so evocatively depicted in the novels of Edith Wharton. She defined Washington Square society as "a little set with its private catch-words, observances, and amusements" indifferent to "anything outside its charmed circle."

The white marble Memorial Arch (1892) at the Fifth Avenue entrance, which replaced a wooden arch erected in 1889 to commemorate the centenary of Washington's inauguration, was designed by Stanford White. One night in 1917, a group of Liberal Club pranksters climbed the Washington Square Arch, fired cap guns, and proclaimed the "independent republic of Greenwich Village," a utopia dedicated to "socialism, sex, poetry, conversation, dawn-greeting, anything--so long as it is taboo in the Middle West." Today, Washington Square Park would probably surpass any of this group's most cherished anarchist fantasies.

Along the square's north edge stand many of the surviving old homes, including, just west of Fifth Avenue:

19 Washington Square North (Waverly Place)

Henry James's grandmother, Elizabeth Walsh, lived at this now-defunct address. (The no. 19 that exists today is a different house, the numbering system having changed since James's day.) Young Henry spent much time at her house, which was the inspiration for his novel Washington Square.

Further east is:

7 Washington Square North

Edith Wharton, age 20, and her mother lived here in 1882. A wealthy aristocrat, born Edith Jones, Wharton maintained a close friendship with Henry James and, like him, left New York's stultifying upper-class social scene for Europe (Paris) in 1910, where she wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence. Both she and James were immensely popular in Europe and were deluged with invitations (James once admitted to accepting 107 dinner invitations in a single year). Wharton wrote almost a book a year her entire adult life, while also finding time to feed French and Belgian refugees during World War I and take charge of 600 Belgian orphans.

Nearby is:

3 Washington Square North (today the NYU School of Social Work)

Critic Edmund Wilson, managing editor of the New Republic, lived here from 1921 to 1923. Another resident, John Dos Passos, a fiery 1920s radical, wrote Manhattan Transfer here.

Make a left at University Place and another immediate left into:

Washington Mews

This picturesque 19th-century cobblestone street, lined with vine-covered, two-story buildings (converted stables and carriage houses constructed to serve posh Washington Sq. town houses), has had several famous residents, among them John Dos Passos, artist Edward Hopper (no. 14A), and Sherwood Anderson (no. 54). The latter building dates from 1834.

Double back to University Place and turn left to head north to the southeast corner of 9th Street, where stands the first of two possible places to:

Take a Break--The Knickerbocker Bar and Grill (southeast corner of 9th St. and University Place; tel. 212/228-8490 ) is a comfortable wood-paneled restaurant and jazz club that attracts an interesting clientele, including writers (Jack Newfield, E.L. Doctorow, Erica Jong, Sidney Zion, Christopher Cerf) and actors (Richard Gere, F. Murray Abraham, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins). Harry Connick Jr. got his start playing piano here and Charles Lindbergh signed the contract for his transatlantic flight at the bar. The restaurant offers an eclectic menu.

For superior light fare (pastries, croissants, sandwiches), head two blocks up to a branch of Dean and Deluca, 75 University Place, at 11th Street (tel. 212/869-6890 ). to 11pm, and Sunday 9am to 8pm.

This address is also a stop on the tour. When Thomas Wolfe graduated from Harvard in 1923, he came to New York to teach at NYU and lived at the Hotel Albert (depicted as the Hotel Leopold in his novel Of Time and the River) at this address. Today the Albert Apartments occupy the site.

From University Place, turn left onto 11th Street.

25 East 11th St.

The unhappy and sexually confused poet Hart Crane (whom you met at stop 17) lived here for a short time.

21 East 11th St.

Crane's neighbor was Mary Cadwaller Jones, who was married to Edith Wharton's brother. Her home was the setting of literary salons; Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent often came to lunch, and Henry James was a houseguest when he visited America from Europe.

Continue to Fifth Avenue, cross it, and turn right. On your right is:

Salmagundi Club

This club, located at 47 Fifth Ave., began as an artist's club in 1871 and was originally located at 596 Broadway. The name comes from the Salmagundi papers, in which Washington Irving mocked his fellow New Yorkers and first used the term Gotham to describe the city. Salmagundi, which means "a stew of many ingredients," was thought an appropriate term to describe the club's diverse membership of painters, sculptors, writers, and musicians. The club moved to this mid-19th-century brownstone mansion in 1917. Theodore Dreiser lived at the Salmagundi in 1897, when it was located across the street where the First Presbyterian Church stands today, and probably wrote Sister Carrie there, a work based on the experiences of his own sister, Emma.

Cross 12th Street. At the northwest corner is:

Forbes Magazine Building

Located at 60-62 Fifth Ave., the Forbes Magazine Building houses a museum (tel. 212/206-5548 ) featuring exhibits from the varied collections of the late Malcolm Forbes, who was famous as a financier, magazine magnate, frequent Liz Taylor escort, and father of one-time presidential hopeful Steve Forbes. On display are hundreds of model ships; legions formed from a collection of more than 100,000 military miniatures; thousands of signed letters, papers, and other paraphernalia from almost every American president; a remarkable even dozen of Fabergé eggs and other objets d'art fashioned for the czars; the evolution of the game Monopoly (natch); and changing exhibits and art shows. Admission is free. The galleries are open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 4pm.

Make a left on 12th Street and you'll see:

New School for Social Research

The New School (66 West 12th St.) was founded in 1919 as a forum for professors too liberal-minded for Columbia University's then stiflingly traditional attitude. In the 1930s, it became a "University in Exile" for intelligentsia fleeing Nazi Germany. Many great writers have taught or lectured in its classrooms over the decades: William Styron, Joseph Heller, Edward Albee, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Nadine Gordimer, Max Lerner, Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, Arthur Miller, I.B. Singer, Susan Sontag, and numerous others.

Turn right up Sixth Avenue and left onto 13th Street to:

138 West 13th St.

Max Eastman and other radicals urged revolution in the pages of the Liberator, headquartered in this lovely building on a pleasant tree-lined street. The magazine published works by John Reed, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ernest Hemingway, Elinor Wylie, e.e. cummings (who later became very right-wing and a passionate supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunts), John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams. The Liberator, established in 1919, succeeded The Masses, an earlier Eastman publication (see stop 37).

Further west along the block is:

152 West 13th St.

Offices of the Dial, a major avant-garde literary magazine of the 1920s, occupied this beautiful Greek Revival brick town house. The magazine dated from 1840 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where transcendentalists Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson were its seminal editors. In the '20s, its aim was to offer "the best of European and American art, experimental and conventional." Contributors included Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Conrad Aiken, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, T.S. Eliot, and artist Marc Chagall.

Continue west on 13th Street, and make a left on Seventh Avenue, a right on 12th Street, and then another right for some afternoon tea at:

Take a Break--Tea and Sympathy (tel. 212/807-8329 ), at 108 Greenwich Ave., is straight out of the English countryside, a charming hole-in-the-wall crammed with just a few tables. The wonderful $14 full afternoon tea includes a tiered serving tray stuffed full of finger sandwiches, cakes, biscuits, scones, jam, and clotted cream, plus, of course, a pot of tea (go for the Typhoo). Cheaper, bona fide British dishes include shepherd's pie and bangers and mash. Open daily from 11:30am to 10:30pm.

From Tea and Sympathy, turn left to walk back down Greenwich Avenue to the corner of 12th Street.

91 Greenwich Ave.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Max Eastman was editor of a radical left-wing literary magazine called The Masses. The magazine at this address published, among others, John Reed, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Edgar Lee Masters, e.e. cummings, and Louis Untermeyer. John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Picasso, and George Bellows provided art for its pages, which a newspaper columnist dismissed thusly:

They draw nude women for The Masses,
Thick, fat, ungainly lasses--
How does that help the working classes?

The Masses was suppressed by the Justice Department in 1918 because of its opposition to World War I and Reed, Eastman, political cartoonist Art Young, and writer/literary critic Floyd Dell were put on trial under the Espionage Act and charged with conspiracy to obstruct recruiting and prevent enlistment. Pacifist Edna St. Vincent Millay read poems to the accused to help pass the time while juries were out. The trials all ended in hung juries.

Continue another block down Greenwich Avenue; turn right on Bank Street and look for:

1 Bank St.

In 1913, shortly after the publication of O Pioneers!, Willa Cather, age 40, moved to a seven-room, second-floor apartment in a large brick house here. She lived with her companion Edith Lewis and wrote My Antonia (the third of a trilogy about immigrants in the United States), Death Comes to the Archbishop, and several other novels.

When she became successful, Cather rented the apartment above hers and kept it empty to ensure perfect quiet. Her Friday afternoon at-homes here were frequented by D.H. Lawrence, among others. Unlike many Village writers of her day, Cather eschewed the radical scene and took little interest in politics.

From Bank Street, take a left onto Waverly Place, cross 11th Street to take another left on Perry Street, and make a final right back onto Greenwich Avenue to:

45 Greenwich Ave.

In 1947, William Styron came to New York from North Carolina to work as a junior editor at McGraw-Hill. He moved here in 1951 after a stint in the marines and the success of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness. Styron originally showed manuscript pages from that novel, begun at age 23, to Hiram Haydn, a Bobbs-Merrill editor whose writing class he was taking at the New School. Haydn told Styron he was too advanced for the class and took an option on the novel.

Continue down Greenwich Avenue to West 10th Street and detour right to:

139 West 10th St.

Today an Italian restaurant, this was the site, for decades, of a popular Village bar called the Ninth Circle. But it was in 1954 at a former bar at this location that playwright Edward Albee saw graffiti on a mirror reading, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and, years later, appropriated it. He recalled the incident in a Paris Review interview: "When I started to write the play, it cropped up in my mind again. And, of course, 'Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf' means...who's afraid of living life without false illusions."

Double back up West 10th Street, cross Greenwich Avenue, and walk a block where you will see the gated entry to:

Patchin Place

The gate closing off Patchin Place is never locked; feel free to pass through it. This tranquil, tree-shaded cul-de-sac has sheltered many illustrious residents. From 1923 to 1962, e.e. cummings lived at no. 4, where visitors included T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas. The highly acclaimed but little-known Djuna Barnes (literary critics have compared her to James Joyce) lived in a tiny one-room apartment at no. 5. Reclusive and eccentric, she almost never left the premises for 40 years, prompting cummings to occasionally shout from his window, "Are you still alive, Djuna?"

Louise Bryant and John Reed maintained a residence at Patchin Place for several years until Reed's death in 1920. During this time, he wrote his eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. To avoid interruptions from callers at Patchin Place, Reed rented a room atop a restaurant at 147 West 4th Street to do his writing. Theodore Dreiser and John Masefield were also Patchin Place residents, the former in 1895 when he was still an unknown journalist.

Turn left out of Patchin Place to cross Sixth Avenue. Continue down West 10th Street, but look to your right as you cross Sixth Avenue to see the:

Jefferson Market Library (425 Sixth Ave.)

This library was a former produce market. The turreted, red brick-and-granite, Victorian-Gothic castle was built as a courthouse in 1877 and named for Thomas Jefferson. Topped by a lofty clock/bell tower (originally intended as a fire lookout), with tracery and stained-glass windows, gables, and steeply sloping roofs, the building was inspired by a Bavarian castle. In the 1880s, architects voted it one of the 10 most beautiful buildings in America.

Head east down 10th Street to:

50 West 10th St.

After his great success with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee bought this late 19th-century converted carriage house in the early 1960s. It's a gem of a building, with highly polished wooden carriage doors. Albee wrote Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance here, the latter being a Pulitzer Prize winner. In 1994, he won a second Pulitzer Prize for Three Tall Women.

Now look for:

37 West 10th St.

Sinclair Lewis, already a famous writer by the mid-1920s, lived in this early 19th-century house with his wife, journalist Dorothy Thompson, from 1928 to 1929. Lewis fell in love with the recently divorced Thompson at first sight in 1927 and immediately proposed to her. Once, when asked to speak at a dinner party, he stood up and said, "Dorothy, will you marry me?" and resumed his seat. Lewis later followed her to Russia and all over Europe until she accepted his proposal. Unfortunately, the marriage didn't last.

Your final stop is:

14 West 10th St.

When Mark Twain came to New York at the turn of the century (at the age of 65), he lived in this gorgeous 1855 mansion. An extremely successful writer (Twain's first book was a travel book, The Innocents Abroad), he entertained lavishly. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain was once a riverboat captain, and he took his pseudonym from the sing-song calls of the sounding men stationed at the prows of Mississippi paddle boats ("mark twain" meant the waters were a safe 2 fathoms deep). Twain was famous for his witticisms, including a quip on the art of quipping: "How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before."