New York Songlines: Barrow Street

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Corner (384 West St): Was Keller's, perhaps New York's first leather bar--dating to the 1950s. It's also been credited as the birthplace of disco; the Village People were photographed here for an album cover. Closed in 1998. Originally the Keller Hotel, built in 1898.

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Corner: Village Nursing Home.

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The Archives

110 (block): Built in 1892-99 as the U.S. Appraiser's Store, a warehouse for goods awaiting customs inspection; later the U.S. Federal Archives Building. Converted to mixed use, 1988.

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Corner (463 Hudson):
Barrow's Pub, neighborhood joint. Opened in the early 20th Century as Lynch's, a "little dive bar by the docks" for longshoreman and sympathizers with the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

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90-96: Rowhouses put up in 1827 by Chelsea developer James N. Wells.

St. Luke-in-the-Fields

Corner: Gardens of St. Luke-in-the-Fields. This episcopal church was founded in 1820 to serve the growing Greenwich community; it was named for the patron saint of physicians, since many New Yorkers moved to Greenwich to escape Yellow Fever epidemics. One of the founders was Clement Clarke Moore, Chelsea landowner and biblical scholar remembered (probably inaccurately) as the author of "A Visit From St. Nicholas."

From 1891 to 1976 St. Luke's was a chapel of downtown's Trinity Church.

The beautiful Barrow Street Gardens were laid out in 1950--open to the public on Sunday afternoons and worth a trip. A tree grown from a cutting from the legendary Glastonbury Thorn--reputed to have sprouted miraculously from a staff cut from the tree that produced Jesus' crown of thorns--grew here from 1847 until 1990.

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85 (corner): Mutulu Shakur, organizer of the 1981 Brink's robbery attempted by the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters, hid out here for six weeks after the bungled effort resulted in the deaths of a guard and two police officers. He was eventually apprehended in 1986. (Shakur is Tupac's stepfather.)

Corner (50 Commerce):
Commerce, the restaurant in this 1912 building, has been known variously as the Blue Mill Tavern and The Grange Hall. It appears in The Brothers McMullen, Woody Allen's Anything Else and the final episode of Sex in the City. Supposedly Eugene O'Neill and the Rosenbergs used to hang out here.

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Twin Houses

Corner (39-41 Commerce): Legend has it that they were built by a sea captain for his feuding daughters, with a garden between them in hopes they would reconcile. Sadly, they were actually built in 1831 by milkman Peter Huyler; history does not record how his children got along. The mansard roofs date to 1873.

Corner (81 Bedford): An apartment in 81 Bedford was used as a safe house from 1952-54 by the CIA for LSD experiments-- sometimes administered by prostitutes on unwitting non-volunteers.

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72 (corner): Green Gardens apartment complex (1926); note inner courtyard.

70: Built in 1852 for the Empire House Company, a volunteer fire brigade.

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43: Poet and critic Mark Van Doren lived here in the 1920s.

39: Note grapevine.

Corner (74 7th Ave S): Centro Vinoteca, run by Anne Burrell, Mario Batali's sidekick on Iron Chef.

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Corner (82 Bedford): Originally a two- or three-story house with ground floor store built in 1846, this corner structure at some point became merged with 84 Bedford next door, an 1826 Greek Revival townhouse.

Pamela Court

58: The "secret" entrance to Chumley's, a former speakeasy that still has no outside sign. A literary hangout for Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Anais Nin, Orson Welles, Edna St. Vincent Millay, etc. It's been closed since a chimney collapse in 2007 -- but word is it's being restored and will reopen sometime in 2010.

52: In the movie Pollack, this doorway is used as the entrance to the artist's apartment.

50 1/2: Poet e.e. cummings kept a studio here during his first marriage.

48: Was Ithaka, wonderful Greek restaurant named for Odysseus' home; relocated to East 86th Street. Before that it was Barrow Street Bistro, Melrose, Paris Bistro-- that takes us back to c. 1980. From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, it was The Finale--a gay restaurant with a candy-striped marquee in the garden.

Greenwich House Music School

44-46: A project of the Green- wich House settlement house launched in 1905 and based here since 1914. Its students have included John Cage, Harry Chapin, Henry Cowell and Edgard Varese. Note musical railing. This place also seems to be the home or at least the namesake of the poetry journal Barrow Street.

36: Singer Bette Midler has lived in this 1828 building.

34 1/2-36 1/2: Passageway leads to garden house.

34: Built in 1828, this address was for a couple years the home of Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky--in the late 1980s or early '90s.

Corner (296 Bleecker): Mitali West, Bengali; eastern version is on East 6th Street.

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Corner (73 7th Ave S): Parsley Sage bookstore is in a two-story building designed by Samuel H. Brooks in 1927.

Greenwich House

27: A community center founded in 1902, by Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, Jacob Riis, Carl Schurz, Felix Adler and others, to uplift the then-decaying neighborhood; this settlement house was built in 1917. The still-active group claims to have written the country's first tenant manual, started the city's first neighborhood association and pioneered daycare, after-school and drug rehab programs. The Barrow Street Theatre is located here.

25: The oldest house on the block, built 1826.

17: Romantic, extremely expensive restaurant One If By Land, Two If By Sea claims to be located in what was once Aaron Burr's carriage house; real estate historian Christopher Gray says this is unlikely if not impossible. The building dates to 1834, two years before Burr's ignominious death on Staten Island. It got its wide entrance in 1897, when it was turned into a horseshoeing operation by Irish immigrant Michael Hallanan.

15: Barrow Street Ale House was Cafe Bohemia, jazz club that showcased Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. Earlier Café Latino. Originally Conrad Schaper's four-story trucking stable. (Note horse heads.)

13: Annisa, pricey international

11: Was Sandolino's, American restaurant. A reader recalls eating omelets here in the 1970s after getting off work at 4 a.m.--and overtipping a waitress he had a crush on.

9 (corner): Oliver's City Tavern (aka Oliver's Bar & Grill), noted for its horseshoe bar and vaulted brick ceiling. Featured in Robert DeNiro's 1992 Night and the City; Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin meet here in Sea of Love. Formerly Boxer's, Barney Mac, Jimmy Day's. The address was the original site of Hallanan's horseshoeing business; he made enough money with the invention of a rubber horseshoeing pad to build this nine-floor loft in 1897, which still says "MH" on it. (Hallanan is credited with naming Sheridan Square for fellow Irishman Philip Sheridan.)

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16: Baseball MVP Hank Greenberg was born here in 1911.

4: Poet Ted Joans lived in a tiny one-room apartment here in the early 1950s. Jazz great Charlie Parker and another friend stayed with him for a while--taking turns sleeping in the single bed.

Corner (3 Sheridan Sq): This 1972 apartment building replaced several historic structures, including Louis' Tavern, a hangout for Beats, writers and actors like James Dean, Steve McQueen, Jason Robards and William Styron.

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2 Sheridan Square (block): This 1834 building includes the entrance to the Axis Company, an innovative off-Broadway theater which is in the basement of No. 1 Sheridan Square. That space was from 1967-95 the home of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Earlier it was Cafe Society, a left-wing, integrated club backed by Benny Goodman; performers like Lena Horne and Billie Holiday (who famously sang "Strange Fruit" here) played for the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Robeson and Lillian Hellman. It closed in 1950.

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Sheridan Square