West Fourth Street runs east-west through most of eastern and central Manhattan and then turns north at Sixth Avenue to intersect with West 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th Streets in Greenwich Village. Most of the street has the same 40 foot (13 m) width between curbstones as others in the prevailing street grid, striped as two curbside lanes and one traffic lane, with one-way traffic south- and eastbound. The portion from Seventh to Eighth Avenues is approximately 35 feet (11 m) wide, a legacy of the original Greenwich Village street grid, striped as one parking lane on the west and one wide traffic lane, northbound only. The approximate three block section of West Fourth on the southern border of Washington Square Park is also called Washington Square South. The north/south portion was formerly called Asylum Street.
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Located near Washington Square Park's south-west corner, between Macdougal Street and Sixth Avenue, The Washington Square Methodist Church (135 West Fourth) is an early Romanesque Revival marble edifice designed by Gamaliel King and built in 1859-60.[1] Dubbed the "Peace Church" for its support of Vietnam War protesters, Washington Square Church long provided a neighborhood base for activist groups such as the Black Panthers and Gay Men's Health Crisis. The church was sold in 2005 to a developer for conversion into residential units.[2]
Judson Memorial Church, located at the corner of Thompson Street and Washington Square South, was designed by architect Stanford White and stained glass master John La Farge.
The West Fourth Street subway station (A B C D E F M trains) at Sixth Avenue is one of the major transfer points in the IND portion of the New York City Subway.
The street is also home to "The Cage" basketball and handball courts, a hangout for some of New York's best basketball players and the site of a city-wide streetball tournament.[3]
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.[4]
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.[5] 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[6] studio apartment at 161 West Fourth Street[7]; 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".