Which Village, Exactly?

Greenwich Village’s legacy is wealth and Bohemia. Which is correct?

By Jake Neenan

In 1800 Joshua Isaacs built a house on land he bought from Aaron Burr, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton. 

The house stood at 77 Bedford St. and in time the neighborhood around it would acquire a name: Greenwich Village.

The house still stands. The neighborhood has long since entered the American imagination as the home of artists, musicians, poets, and muses, none of whom had a lot of money.

The village of legend is scruffy and creative, which stands at odds with the house at 77 Bedford. Wealth did not come to Greenwich Village recently with multi-million dollar brownstones and new glass and steel high rises.

Consider the story of its oldest house. 

It’s unassuming now, clearly old if you stop to look but just the right shade of brick to fade into the periphery as you walk by. The side of the house facing Commerce Street, evidence it did not always sit on the corner of a crowded urban block, consists of white wooden slats and small, rectangular windows. Two federal-style chimneys brush against the branches of a tree growing on the sidewalk.

Greenwich Village was still largely open farmland, maps of the time show, and the house that Joshua Isaacs built was freestanding. Isaacs, a businessman, quickly fell into financial trouble. City conveyance records indicate his brother-in-law, Harmon Hendricks, purchased the house from him in 1808. 

This was the beginning of the house’s tenure as property of the wealthy. Hendricks, the son of an English businessman, made his living trading copper and other metals. He would work with Paul Revere to supply the American military in the War of 1812.

Hendricks’s metallurgy business made him a millionaire. Upon his death in 1838, he spread donations of tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to museums and local Jewish organizations to which he belonged.

Hendricks had already put the house at 77 Bedford and other properties in a trust for his daughter, Hetty, in 1828. Around this time, urban development began to gradually encroach on the neighborhood, which was still separate from the city, according to University of Massachusetts historian Gerald Macfarland in his book Inside Greenwich Village: a New York City Neighborhood.

Hetty and her husband Aaron Gomez leased the building to various wealthy people and businesses, including a manufacturing company, members of prosperous local families, and a future colonel in the Confederate Army, until leaving 77 Bedford to their son Horatio in 1865.

MacFarland writes that while the Washington Square area, including 77 Bedford, was “occupied by some of the city’s wealthiest families,” during the period, the developments which had by now fully expanded and integrated the Village into the city were home to a diverse body of working and middle class residents.

Against this backdrop Horatio split his time between being a physician, writing for the Jewish Messenger – a local periodical – and managing the Hendricks-Gomez estate properties until his death in 1909. He and Hetty continued to live close by as the area developed, which is not entirely unusual for wealthy New York families over the years, according to Nicholas Dagan Bloom, a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College. “There was a long era, I think, of heterogeneity in property,” he said. He pointed to areas including Harlem, Brooklyn, and Chelsea where, like the Gomez family, the upper class owners of townhouses and brownstones were not persuaded to leave as they became surrounded by new developments and working class or impoverished neighbors.

The house stayed in the family until 1923, when a group of artists and other investors used a web of legal entities to purchase several houses including 77 Bedford and prevent the construction of an apartment building.

This coincided with the Village’s bohemian heyday, but the house even then managed to be sheltered from the pendulum swing away from the neighborhood’s monied past. The buyers had resources, enough to renovate the houses and establish the famous Cherry Lane Theatre, which they did the same year.

Evelyn Vaughan, a successful stage and silent film actress who was directly involved with the theater’s founding, lived at 77 Bedford and planned at the time to add “at least one, and perhaps more, baths” according to the New York Times. Her neighbors, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband, a Dutch coffee importer, fully remodeled what is still the narrowest house in Manhattan.

The house remained in the hands of the artist syndicate until 1952 when Kenneth Carroad, a lawyer and business owner, scooped up the house and some other property in the area. Carroad also owned a weekend home in a section of Long Island so wealthy that his next door neighbor’s family “held the property for more than 300 years on a direct grant from King William III of England,” according to the Times.

Carroad was not alone in buying up property in the Village. Jeffrey Trask, a historian at Georgia State University, wrote in the Journal of Urban History that a wave of purchases and renovations in the area began in the 1950, as people began “recognizing aesthetic and historic value in old Federal-style homes.”

This was eventually seen across the city, Bloom said. “The individual townhomes owned by older genteel families or wealthy newcomers, they were a lot of the force for the renovation” that became common in the subsequent decades.

Villagers of course took notice; a piece in the Times lamented as early as 1944 that “there are still many artists living in the village, but the air is no longer full of the high talk of a great Art Get-together. Art is no longer a sacred word, success is no longer a disgrace.”

The historic narrative of the Village is seemingly a narrative of the tension between the neighborhood’s seed of wealthy townhouses and the economically diverse, sometimes bohemian, urbanity that surrounds them. In truth, these are both the story of the village. They existed simultaneously, one occasionally eclipsing the other.

Carroad would sell the Bedford Street house in 1981 to a woman named Muffy Fitzgerald, who signed the building over within a year to Gerald L. Friedman. Friedman had recently stepped down as CEO of MCIG, what was at the time the country’s largest private insurance company.

This house continued in the hands of the ultra-wealthy, passing next to French socialite Jacqueline Thion De La Chaume who bought it for $147,000 in 1989. Her estate sold it in 2013 to a company called M&A Bedford Properties. The price was just under $7 million.