The Mad Hatter

150 West 4th Street | Greenwich Village | built 1845

Open on the map6 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1845

    A small stucco-faced house stands here by 1845, on lots owned by merchant Jonathan Southwick

    The South Village landmark survey could not pin down when 150 West 4th Street was built, but deeds show the little house was standing by 1845. From 1827 to 1845 the merchant Jonathan Southwick and his heirs held this lot and several neighbors where Sixth Avenue meets Fourth Street. The two-story building has a bracketed cornice that was still visible in a tax photograph of about 1939, and its facade is now stucco-covered.

    “It is unclear when 150 West 4th Street was built, based on conveyance and tax records it was prior to 1845.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1916

    Sculptor Edith Unger opens the Mad Hatter, the Village's first tearoom, in the cellar

    In 1916 the sculptor and costume designer Edith Unger started a cellar tearoom here and named it the Mad Hatter. It claimed to be the first tearoom in the Village, since earlier basement cafes also poured wine. Over the stairs Unger painted "Down the Rabbit Hole" spelled backward, and the back room's walls filled with artists' drawings from Alice in Wonderland. A 1916 magazine description put the front room at about twelve by fifteen feet, crowding in eighteen people.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1917

    July

    Eliza "Jimmie" Criswell takes over the Mad Hatter and starts a satirical patrons' paper

    In July 1917 Edith Unger sold the tearoom to Eliza Helen Criswell, a Bryn Mawr graduate who went by Jimmie and wore sandals, artists' smocks and, for formal occasions, a tailored suit and tie, and to her partner Mathilda Spence. Criswell later left her teaching job to run the place full time. She issued a satirical sheet for customers, Mad Hatter Mutterings, filled with stories, drawings, poems and gossip.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1920

    March

    A Ladies' Home Journal article sends crowds of uptown "slummers" to the Mad Hatter

    After the Ladies' Home Journal ran a piece on Greenwich Village in March 1920, Jimmie Criswell complained that lady slummers were swamping the tearoom and that groups of older women filled the front room. Regulars still came, and on a given night a visitor might have run into Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford, the Gish sisters or the Dutch-born journalist Hendrik Willem Van Loon.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1922

    Poet Harry Kemp meets his future wife Frances McClernan at the Mad Hatter

    One night in 1922 the poet Harry Kemp was sitting in the Mad Hatter when a red-haired Barnard graduate in her twenties walked in. He announced that he would marry her, and in 1923 he did. Frances McClernan soon learned that a well-known poet earned little; she modeled for soap and catalog ads and also managed the tearoom three nights a week to support her husband.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  6. 1945

    The Pony Stable Inn, a working-class lesbian bar, runs on the ground floor until January 1970

    From 1945 until January 1970 the ground floor of 150 West 4th Street housed the Pony Stable Inn, a lesbian bar patronized mostly by white working-class women who kept to butch and femme roles. Like most gay bars of the era it was Mafia-run and often raided by police. The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project quotes Audre Lorde on 1954, when gay bars were the only meeting places she knew. The bar closed months after the Stonewall uprising.

    Source: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

Further reading

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