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20 unusual facts about Greenwich Village


Abandoned Love

Only one live performance of this song is known of, at the Bitter End cafe on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village on July 3, 1975, during a show with Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

Carmen Lundy

She moved to New York in 1978 where she was hired by the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra and performed her first New York engagement at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village.

Cecily Brownstone

She lived in Greenwich Village, appropriately enough in a brownstone house, in a duplex apartment that included a spectacular test kitchen, and that housed her large cookbook collection.

East 34th Street Heliport

On May 23, 1974, David Frank Kamaiko, a 22-year man from Greenwich Village claiming to be a member of the Jewish Defense League, hijacked a helicopter from the East 34th Street Heliport and demanded $2 million in ransom.

Fifth and Madison Avenues Line

Though the routes also run along other major avenues, the majority of their route is along Madison and Fifth Avenues between Greenwich Village to Harlem.

Hugh Blumenfeld

He was active in the Greenwich Village music scene in the 1980s, attending the Cornelia Street Songwriters Exchange and performing at Folk City and Speak Easy while working on a PhD in Poetics from New York University.

Isaac H. Brown

Isaac H. Brown (1812-1880) was the sexton at Grace Episcopal Church in Greenwich Village, and arbiter of style in Manhattan where he planned weddings, arranged soirées and funerals for the wealthy of New York City.

Jeannette Knoll

In 1961, at the age of eighteen, Knoll won a scholarship from the New Orleans Opera Guild and the Metropolitan Opera Association to study voice at the Mannes College of Music in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Joseph Krumgold

He married Helen Litwin in 1947; they had one son, Adam, and lived in Greenwich Village, and Hope, New Jersey.

Kryptonite lock

In an early test of the Kryptonite lock, a bicycle was locked to a signpost in Greenwich Village in New York City for thirty days.

Manfred Stern

The apparatus kept a safe apartment on West 57th Street, owned by Paula Levine, later part of a Soviet spy ring in Paris, and kept a photographic studio on Gay Street in Greenwich Village, where "Charlie," in actuality Leon Minster the brother-in-law of Vyacheslav Molotov, microfilmed the stolen documents.

Murder of Sakia Gunn

On the night of May 11, 2003, Gunn was returning from a night out in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, with her friends.

New York's 29th State Senate district

District 29 stretches along Manhattan's West Side from 85th Street to Canal Street, and includes the following neighborhoods: Upper West Side, Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, and part of the East Side, including the East Village, Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village and Waterside Plaza.

Pansy Craze

By the end of the 1920s much of the public image of gay people was still limited to the various drag balls in Village and in Harlem, but the early 1930s saw a new development within a highly commercial context, bringing the gay subculture of the enclaves of Greenwich Village and Harlem onto the mainstream stages of midtown Manhattan in a veritable Pansy Craze from 1930 until the repeal of prohibition in 1933.

Rats in New York City

In 2007, a morning news program featured a live report of a pack of rats overrunning a pair of fast food restaurants in Greenwich Village.

Red Maps

The New Yorker set lays out detailed block by block shopping guides and restaurants of SoHo, Nolita, Chelsea, Meatpacking District, Greenwich Village, Midtown, Brooklyn and Long Island City.

Strawberry Shortcake in Big Apple City

A "Spinach Village" is also mentioned, a reference to Greenwich Village.

The Greenbriar Boys

The trio often played the Greenwich Village scene, but were notable enough to be the first Northern group to win the likes of the Union Grove Fiddler's Convention competition, where Yellin also took top honors for banjo.

Tom Intondi

Tom Intondi was an American singer-songwriter first based in Greenwich Village and later in the Northwest.

Wicked Lester

The recording of Wicked Lester's album, which began in November 1971 at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, took place over multiple sessions and was finished in July 1972.


2 Horatio Street

In April 1929 the developer brothers Bing & Bing announced that they had acquired all the necessary land on Horatio, West Twelfth and Christopher Streets to build five high-end residential buildings in a concerted effort to "recreate" the Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Athabaskan languages

He presents some scandalous events, such as the reason why Gladys Reichard was not particularly positive about Sapir’s work: “it was in fact common knowledge in some circles that she was shacked up, living in sin, in Greenwich Village for years with none other than P.E. Goddard” (p. 63), with whom Sapir had “strange and strained relations” (p. 64).

Billy Faier

Active in the Washington Square Park folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1940s, he recorded two albums for Riverside Records, The Art of the Five-String Banjo (1957) and Travelin' Man (1958).

Brad Prowly

Brad Prowly aka "Super Bad Brad" born in 1962 is a New York City street performer frequently appearing in the Greenwich Village area, performing R&B classics with the aid of a Boombox and microphone.

Cinema 16

In 1946, she booked the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village for a public exhibition titled Three Abandoned Films, which consisted of showings of Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and A Study in Choreography for the Camera.

Deborah Norton

She worked in Britain until she toured America with The Beggar's Opera, staying on in Greenwich Village after the tour had finished.

Eighth Street Crosstown Line

The Eighth Street Crosstown Line is a public transit line in Manhattan, New York City, United States, running mostly along Eighth Street, Ninth Street, Tenth Street, and Christopher Street through the West Village, Greenwich Village, and East Village.

Folksong '59

According to the Izzy Young, owner of the Folklore Center, and chronicler of the Greenwich Village folk music scene, the audience booed when Alan Lomax told them to lay down their prejudices and listen to rock 'n' roll.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Eventually, she maintained art studios in Greenwich Village and in Passy, a fashionable Parisian neighborhood in the XVI arrondissement.

Hudson Dusters

According to author Luc Sante, activist Dorothy Day, by her own admission, spent much of her youth partying with the Dusters in Greenwich Village.

Judith Godwin

She lives in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, but as a native Virginian, remains a member of the Jamestowne Society.

Kossoy Sisters

They quickly discovered the bustling folk music scene in the Greenwich Village section of New York City and mingled with the people who congregated in Washington Square Park.

Oliver La Farge

After La Farge and Matthews divorced in 1935, Oliver Albee changed his name to Peter La Farge and became a Greenwich Village folksinger with five Folkways Records albums.

Ralph Rinzler

After graduation he went to New York City where he eventually became one of the famous Greenbriar Boys, a popular folk group that was the main event at Greenwich Village's Gerde's Folk City, with Bob Dylan as his warm-up opening act.

Ramblin' Boy

Ramblin' Boy is referred to as Paxton's debut album, since it was his first album released on a major record label (Elektra Records), although he had previously released a live album recorded at the The Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village entitled, I'm the Man That Built the Bridges (which was released on the small Gaslight label in 1962).

Ray Stark

While putting together the Broadway musical Funny Girl—the highly fictionalized account of the life of his mother-in-law, Fanny Brice—its producer David Merrick took Stark and his wife, Frances, to see an unknown singer perform at the Bon Soir in Greenwich Village.

Richard Castucci

When Castucci found out that Winter Hill members Joseph "Joe Mac" McDonald and James Sims were hiding from the authorities in the Greenwich Village section of New York City, he passed that information to his FBI handlers.

Rose O'Neill

Her properties included Bonniebrook; an apartment in Washington Square in Greenwich Village that inspired the song Rose of Washington Square; Castle Carabas in Connecticut; and Villa Narcissus on the Isle of Capri, Italy.

Ruth McKenney

Ruth McKenney (November 18, 1911 – July 25, 1972) was an American author and journalist, best remembered for My Sister Eileen, a memoir of her experiences growing up in Ohio and moving to Greenwich Village with her sister Eileen McKenney.

Sunset Junction, Los Angeles

Sunset Junction is the site of one of the first actions in the nation against police harassment of gay bars, the Black Cat Tavern protest, which began on February 11, 1967, almost two and a half years before the more famous protest at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village.

The D-Men

They played continuously around the US and in many New York clubs, including Trude Heller's and The World, and in many Greenwich Village clubs such as The Bottom Line and The Downtown.

The Initiative Collective

Founded in New York City in 2009 by "Zero," "Tsaf," "Lucid," and Zimmer Barnes, the group's initial goal was to patrol the streets of Greenwich Village to stem a rising tide of anti-gay violence.

Village South Theatre

Located on Vandam Street in Greenwich Village, the theatre opened in 1962 with the original production of Jean Erdman's award-winning musical play The Coach with the Six Insides which was based upon James Joyce's last novel Finnegans Wake.