129 MacDougal Street House
129 MacDougal Street | Greenwich Village | built 1829
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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.
- 1829
Hat merchant Alonzo Alvord builds No. 129 MacDougal Street as one of four speculative Federal rowhouses
The 2-1/2-story Federal house, built around 1828-29, was one of four, Nos. 125 to 131, built on speculation by the downtown hat dealer Alonzo Alwyn Alvord while Washington Square, a potter's field until 1826-28, was becoming an elite residential neighborhood. It has Flemish bond brickwork, a low stoop with wrought iron, Ionic columns at the door and double pedimented dormers. Until 1881 it was owned by and leased to merchant-class families.
“This was one of four houses (Nos. 125-131) speculatively built on lots owned by Alonzo Alwyn Alvord , a downtown hat merchant…”
- 1829
Merchants buy 129 and 131 MacDougal Street for $8,000 as soon as the row is finished
Construction of the four Alvord houses began in 1828 and was finished by March 1829, at which point John W. Harris and William Chauncey, downtown merchants, paid $8,000 for Nos. 129 and 131. The first known tenant of No. 129, from 1832 to 1839, was the merchant Benjamin Ellis. In 1836 the wealthy flour commission merchant Elias Hicks Herrick bought both houses.
- 1920
Photographer Nickolas Muray opens his first portrait studio in the house and throws Wednesday-night parties
The Hungarian-born Nickolas Muray (1892-1965) worked here from 1920 to 1924, in what was his first portrait studio. He had come to New York in 1913 and joined Conde Nast in 1915. His Wednesday-night studio parties drew a mix of uptown and downtown figures from theater, literature, music and art. Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar and the New York Tribune bought his photographs, which built his international reputation.
“No. 129 was Muray' s first portrait studio.”
- 1920
Harold and Dorothy Donnell Calhoun begin 41 years of owning the house
Harold G. Calhoun, who from 1936 to 1945 worked under the U.S. Attorney General as an assistant, and his wife Dorothy Donnell Calhoun bought No. 129 in 1920, along with No. 127. She edited a motion picture magazine from 1927 to 1935, then assisted Labor Secretary Frances Perkins until 1940; she also wrote plays, short stories and children's books. Their son Donald lived in the house around 1939, and the couple held on until 1961.
“From 1920 to 1961, Nos . 127 and 129 were owned by Harold Gilmore and Dorothy Donnell Calhoun…”
- 1925
Eva Kotchever opens a lesbian tearoom, Eve's Hangout, in the lower level of 129 MacDougal Street
Eva Kotchever, a Polish-Jewish lesbian who had made her way to Greenwich Village, ran a small tearoom here that she called Eve's Hangout, using the name Eve Adams. It offered weekly poetry readings, discussion groups that often turned to sexual subjects, and music. Village activists became regulars, and a local paper judged the place unhealthy for young women and uncomfortable for masculine men.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1926
Police arrest Eve Adams at her MacDougal Street tearoom; she is convicted and deported
Eve Adams was arrested at her tearoom on June 17, 1926, after a policewoman's entrapment. In July she was convicted of obscenity for her story collection Lesbian Love and of disorderly conduct, and she was jailed in the women's penitentiary on what was then Welfare Island. Hearings ran from October 1926 to May 1927, and she was deported to Poland on December 7, 1927. She was arrested in Nazi-occupied Nice in 1943 and murdered at Auschwitz.
Source: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
- 1978
La Lanterna di Vittorio Caffe settles into the house as a pizzeria and wine bar
A tenant from 1978, La Lanterna di Vittorio Caffe was still operating here as a pizzeria and wine bar when the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building in 2004. Before it, from about 1959 to 1976, Pinata Party, also known as Fiesta Pinata, sold Peruvian clothing, handcrafts and folk art from the address.
- 2004
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designates the 129 MacDougal Street House a landmark
After a hearing on April 20, 2004, at which nine speakers backed designation, the commission designated the house and its tax lot as a landmark on June 8, 2004. It had first held a hearing on the house in 1966. The report called it one of the relatively rare surviving, significantly intact Federal rowhouses of its type in Manhattan.
Further reading
- "Men Are Admitted, But Not Welcome" -- 129 MacDougal StreetDaytonian in Manhattan
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