MacDougal Alley

MacDougal Alley

This exceptional Greenwich Village mews is probably the city's first example of artist-driven gentrification. Built as a row of stable-houses for the fashionable townhomes that lined Washington Square North or Eighth Street, the alley was a no-frills staging ground for the New York society set until outmoded by the automobile and abandoned by the wealthy, who moved uptown in droves just before the turn of the twentieth century. The street had been thoroughly repurposed by gamblers, prostitutes, and other assorted low-lifes from the margins of fin-de-siecle New York when the sculptor Frederick Triebel, returning from Europe, leased 6 MacDougal for a studio, installing skylights and an expansive front window, and drawing one crap-player off the street to sit for a sculpture. Hoping to establish a kind of artist's district along the street, he encouraged his friends and acquaintances to move in beside him. By 1906, the street was remade. The next year, Gertrude Whitney took a studio there; she would later establish her Whitney Museum on the street. In 1944, Isamu Noguchi, returning from a Japanese-American interment camp, leased a spot. Though some of the studios have been renovated again into residences, many of the studios remain in continual use, and the alley retains the eclectic energy of a collective creative space. The street had the last operational gas lights in New York.