342 Bleecker Street

also 346 Bleecker Street, 218 West 10th Street, 338 Bleecker Street | West Village | built 1928

Open on the map5 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. 1928

    May 2

    Builder Abraham Schwartz buys four old apartment buildings and replaces them with a six-story apartment house

    Abraham Schwartz bought three small apartment buildings on Bleecker Street and the five-story apartment house at the West 10th Street corner on May 2, 1928. The next day The New York Times reported they would be razed for a modern six-story elevator building. The Russian-born architect Jacob M. Felson designed it with four deep-windowed arcade stores along Bleecker, and it cost $238,700 when finished in 1929.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1931

    November 4

    A wife and her friends burst into an apartment and find her husband with another woman

    Ruth Bauman of Brooklyn tracked her husband Valentine to an apartment here, where a woman lived who was not named in the papers. On November 4, 1931 she entered with several friends. She testified in January 1932 that he was seated on the bed in his underwear, in conversation with a woman wearing a flesh-colored negligee, and that he said, "Here I am." A newspaper called her a free woman that day.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1965

    August 21

    A shop of kooky semi-antiques claims Tony Perkins, Leonard Bernstein and Anne Bancroft as customers

    The New York Times profiled the De Santis-Jensen shop, a self-described "semi-antiques" store in the corner space, on August 21, 1965. Its owners, Stuart Jensen and Anthony de Santis, said it drew people who enjoyed kookiness. Jensen named Perkins, Eli Wallach, Bernstein and Bancroft as visitors, and added that Barbra Streisand had not yet come in.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1969

    Boomer's opens at 340 Bleecker Street and becomes one of the Village's popular jazz clubs

    Stanley Cohen, a lawyer with the Village Independent Democrats, asked the musician and chef Bob Cooper to take over a failing bar and restaurant at 340 Bleecker Street. Reopened in 1969 as Boomer's, it gained a following when pianist Bobby Timmons began playing regularly and a New York Times critic praised its soul food. Live albums were recorded there, it supplied nightclub scenes for the 1972 film Super Fly, and it closed in 1977.

    Source: westviewnews.org

  5. 1987

    July 23

    An editor is found stabbed to death in his apartment after missing a day at work

    Glenn R. Purdy, a 57-year-old editor at Travel Agent magazine, did not show up at work on July 23, 1987. A senior editor, Joe Murphy, went to his apartment and, getting no answer, fetched officers from the Sixth Precinct. They found Purdy dead on the living room couch, stabbed in the back, with his pockets ripped open. With no sign of forced entry, investigators believed he knew his killer.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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