12 Minetta Street
Greenwich Village | built 1848
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1847
Abraham Van Nest builds three Greek Revival houses on Minetta Street, including No. 12
Around 1847 Abraham Van Nest, president of the Greenwich Savings Bank, puts up three brick-faced Greek Revival houses on the curving lane that follows the old Minetta brook. Nos. 10 through 14 stand three stories tall above three-step stoops on a 50-foot plot, so each house is just over 16 feet wide.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1889
Longshoreman James Hobson, a tenant at No. 12, is burned in a deadly pier fire
Among the tenants of No. 12 in 1889 are James Hobson and his wife. Hobson works as a longshoreman unloading and loading ships at the National Steamship Line's Hudson River pier, one of only eight Black men among about 200 longshoremen there. On December 7 a fire breaks out among cotton bales on the pier just after the steamship Holland docks and spreads through it in moments. Four men die and seven are injured, Hobson with burns to his hands and face and a serious lung injury, and his neighbor Gilbert Farmer of No. 15 with burns and cuts.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1897
A resident of No. 12 confronts her boyfriend on Sixth Avenue and is cut with a razor
Laximia Lewis, 25, who lives at No. 12, catches her boyfriend Frank Smith with another woman near Carmine Street at about 10 p.m. She punches him in the face, and he answers by slashing her cheek with a razor. Her screams bring Policeman Berow, both are locked up overnight, and the next morning she declines to press charges.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1924
Architect Arthur C. Holden remodels Nos. 12 and 14 as artists replace the street's poor tenants
By 1920 Minetta Street is being promoted as part of the Latin Quarter of America, after a plan to wipe it out in 1916 never advanced. In 1924 the architect Arthur C. Holden is hired to remodel Nos. 12 and 14 into two-family homes. Where poor families once crowded into single rooms, artists and writers soon move in.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1939
Lyricist John Latouche takes a five-room apartment here and writes "Taking a Chance on Love"
In 1939 the lyricist and author John Latouche moves into a five-room apartment at No. 12, which Collier's magazine calls bizarre, and shares it with his friend, the writer-editor Robert Faulkner. While living here he writes the words to "Taking a Chance on Love," a song in the show Cabin in the Sky. He marries Theodora Griffis on October 30, 1940, and moves on.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1946
George Auerbach runs the American Creative Theatre from his apartment and courts Saul Bellow
George Auerbach, a film and stage writer and producer, organizes the American Creative Theatre in his apartment at No. 12. In early 1946 he writes to novelist Saul Bellow asking whether he would dramatize his novel The Victim. Bellow tells his agent, Henry Volkening, in a letter dated February 4 that he checked with Eric Bentley, who spoke very favorably of Auerbach.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1949
Lighting designer Peggy Clark is living at No. 12 by 1949
By 1949 Margaret Brownson Clark, known professionally as Peggy Clark, lives at No. 12 and stays past the mid-1950s. She attended Smith College and studied scenic design and lighting at the Yale School of Fine Arts, and she helps establish lighting design as a profession on Broadway. In 1968 she is elected president of the United States Scenic Artists.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
Further reading
- Nos. 12 and 14 Minetta StreetDaytonian in Manhattan
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