Washington Mews

(Originally published in Our Town Downtown 1/29/07)

Discussed: Belgian bricking, Romanesque arches, boule availability
By David Crohn
Before I set foot there, it was the name that turned me on. Mews. Or, to locals, just The Mews.
I wanted to go, if only to find out what a Mew was (and whether or not they can exist as a singular entity, or if, like “commons,” they are always plural).
Then I went, and discovered a place so special that, as it turns out, deserves a word as strange as Mews to name it.
Strange, because specific. Mews: noun, “a row or street of houses or apartments that have been converted from stables or built to look like former stables.” We didn’t invent this one—it comes from Britain, where one can assume there are lots of rows of houses that used to be stables. In New York City, private homes that used to be stables can be found nowhere else but here, according to the Luther Harris, a historian who lives next door to the Mews. No other alley in the city is called the Mews, because the city has no other mews of which to speak.
“Quaint” does not even begin to describe the essence of this alley, and thanks are due to New York University, which owns the Mews, for keeping it as an open source of delight and musings for the rest of us. At night the gates are closed. And although this is a private alley, during the day Washington Mews remains open to the public, allowing the masses to take the short stroll from one end to the other. There are few, if any, other public spaces kept quite as pristine as the Mews; if there were more blocklets like this in Manhattan, the Vespa people would have taken over ages ago.
Tourists and sentimental New Yorkers like me are drawn to the Mews because unlike, say, the Empire State Building or Rockefeller Center, its aesthetics are distinctively old-fashioned and highbrow—wisteria vines, Romanesque arches, Belgian-style bricks-in-concrete streets. (They aren’t cobblestones, according to ForgottenNY.com. The stones have just eroded over time to look like them.)
While NYU has been a favored bogeyman for preservationists over the years, the school has done a hell of a job at preserving the Mews. Along with faculty housing, it’s lined with the headquarters for the university’s German, Irish and French Studies Departments, respectively: the Deutsches Haus, Glucksman Ireland House, Maison Francais. The Haus, House and Maison host lectures and events, and are home to research libraries and professors’ offices.
Buying
Don’t even think about it. As you’ll find below, even those lucky enough to live on the Mews don’t own their apartments.
Renting
Want to live in New York’s Little Paris? Hit the books. The Mews alley is home to NYU professors and their families only. They rent their homes from the school. Although an NYU spokeswoman couldn’t get more information to me before deadline, I was able to confirm that not all the profs there year round. Get straight As, and maybe you can earn a sublet opportunity.
What Happened Here
The Mews were (was?) born in the early part of the 19th century, when residents who were leasing the property from Sailor’s Snug Harbor—a kind of old folks’ home for retired sailors—built homes along the north side of Washington Square Park and 8th Street’s south side. They needed a place for their horses, so they plopped down stables in a back alley that divided the developments on either side. That’s how it was used, for the most part, until 1916, when the automobile had replaced the horse and carriage. The stables were remodeled and offered up as airy and light studios for artists attracted to the bohemian atmosphere burgeoning in Greenwich Village even then. See how the buildings along the south side all look the same? That’s because they were built all at once, in 1939. The artists’ era ended in about 1950, when NYU acquired the entire property from Sailor’s Snug Harbor. The painter Edward Hopper was one of the last artists to live there; he died at home in 1967.
Amenities
If I lived here, I’d want Continental amenities to match the Parisian character of my block. You know—baguettes, a different store for each meat, wine sold out of vats on the street. The closest you can come to all that is a Le Pain Qoutidien franchise, at the corner of 8th Street and Fifth Avenue, which sells fresh baguettes, boules and ciabattas. No vats or fish stores though. Just the rest of 8th Street, which is famous for its shoe stores, cheap-jewelry stores and combination tattoo parlor/head shops.

11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues

Oh, the stories it could tell…

(Originally appeared in Our Town Downtown, 1/8/07)

By David Crohn

History, it has been said, is written by the winners. Near the water was where all the nastiness was during the formidable years of our island’s maturation. So if you had the means, you went toward the center. Thus, Fifth Avenue became ritzy, and clean. Substitute “winners” for the rich—a not entirely counterintuitive proposition—and you can see why this block is replete with notable things that happened long ago to people who could afford to build things.
As any seasoned urban explorer with a grumbling stomach knows, you won’t find a hot dog on 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues; the curbs are low to allow easy access to your taxicab, trolley or carriage. The late Jane Jacobs, the celebrated, self-taught urban theorist, cited this block as “both dignified and interesting to walk on.” It is both those things, although nowadays you won’t find the mixed uses she praised in her seminal work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” It’s almost entirely residential; townhouses mostly, along with a grand apartment building at the southeast end whose splendor makes it easy to forget that it’s little more than a glorified filing cabinet.
Musical iconoclast Charles Ives, playwright Oscar Wilde and famed New Yorker editor Harold Ross liked the block so much they once called it home, but my favorite residence is still occupied by some of its original inhabitants. The Second Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, near Sixth Avenue, is small and leafy, with ancient tombstones that are so weathered they are mostly illegible—at least from behind the locked gates. It’s a place to stop and peer in, a place that to me that is as evocative and rich with association as a long novel or a great portrait. The lettering has been blasted away by wind and rain. How very long does it take to make a stone melt like a watch in a Dali painting, I wonder. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; not just for men, but for their monuments as well.

What Happened Here
This block has its dark side; it’s not all literary luminaries. The poet James Merrill was born at number 18 in 1926, but by 1970 it was the headquarters for the Weathermen, those creepy left-wing extremists named for a Bob Dylan lyric (“You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.”) They made bombs here—or rather, they tried to. On March 6, 1970, while they were mucking about with 60 sticks of dynamite, hoping to retaliate for the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton, the explosives went off. Three members died, and the building was virtually destroyed. Number 18 was rebuilt 8 years later.

Buying
To buy on this block, you might have to go through a so-called “boutique” agency like M. Woods and Associates. They specialize in very old, very special properties. Like the one at 24 W. 11th Street. It’s a 19th century, four-story townhouse going for $6.95 million. It’s actually a co-listing, being offered simultaneously by M. Woods and Corcoran, broker to the stars. But Corcoran doesn’t even have the townhouse on its Web site, and the contact info on the for-sale sign lists the company’s Senior Vice President, Sharon Baum. Neither she nor anyone at M. Woods returned phone calls for this article.

Renting
That might be a challenge. It’s not just the price—a fair amount of would-be renters can afford $1,500 to $2,000 a month, plus broker’s fee—but the background check. As a recent New York Times article stated, this seller’s market means the owner can often afford to turn down prospectives for any number of reasons. Some of which can be arbitrary. Take one listing we found for a $1,500-a-month “two-room” studio (not sure what that means) on 11th Street at 5th Avenue. The “owner is a private landlady who maintains her buildings to a ‘t.’” That sounds to me like an ornery crone suspicious of roustabouts—even if you do make 80 times (or whatever it is nowadays) the annual rent.

Amenities
This block has your Sunday mornings covered. On the east end is the famous First Presbyterian Church, built in 1846 and still going strong. At the corner of 6th Avenue and 11th Street sits the famous (some would say infamous, for the atrocious service) French Roast, a 24-hour bistro where the French Toast is made from baguettes and the omelets come with fresh grapes on the side.

dcrohn@gmail.com