30 West 8th Street

also 182 MacDougal Street | Greenwich Village | built 1900

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.

1838
Merchant Joseph W. Alsop Jr. builds the corner house as an investment
Merchant Joseph W. Alsop Jr. had this house and its neighbors to the west built in 1838 as an investment. In 1885, architect Emile Greuve designed a new cast-iron storefront for the corner, plus a small two-story extension along MacDougal Street, for owner Diedrich H. Muller. The storefront later housed the Eighth Street Bookshop.
Source: media.villagepreservation.org
1965
The Eighth Street Bookshop, a Beat Generation hub, relocates across the street
Brothers Elias and Ted Wilentz ran the Eighth Street Bookshop from this corner, where browsers wandered three floors of titles, with an especially large paperback selection. It became a meeting place for the nonconformist writers whose lives and work lent the Beat Generation its name, and customers might run into e. e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, W. H. Auden, or Marianne Moore. The shop moved to 17 West Eighth Street in 1965, suffered a fire there in 1976, and closed in 1979.
Source: Ephemeral New York

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