381 Bleecker Street

West Village | built 1868

Open on the map3 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. 1868

    Plumbers Brien & Adams build twin apartment houses on the Perry Street corner

    Nos. 381 and 383 went up in 1866-68 as an investment by the plumbing firm Brien & Adams, to designs by R. G. Hatfield. They are twin five-story brick apartment houses in plain period style, with modillioned cornices. The same architect designed the houses around the corner at 84 and 86 Perry Street, where William Adams Jr. made his home at No. 84.

    “These twin apartment houses, five stories high, are built of brick in the vernacular of the period.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1945

    Berenice Abbott photographs the Hacker Book Store at No. 381

    Berenice Abbott made a 1945 photograph titled Hacker Book Store, Bleecker Street that shows a man at the shop door. Ephemeral New York identified the building as 381 Bleecker, near Perry Street, and the man as probably the bookseller Seymour Hacker. The blog noted that nobody knows why Abbott picked this shop. It credits the photo to the Museum of the City of New York.

    Source: Ephemeral New York

  3. 1946

    Seymour Hacker opens Hacker Art Books, serving painters Pollock and de Kooning

    Seymour Hacker, a bookseller trained on Fourth Avenue's Book Row, opened Hacker Art Books at 381 Bleecker Street in 1946 and moved uptown to 57th Street in 1948. Customers at the Greenwich Village shop included the poet Delmore Schwartz, the painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and his friend the comic actor Zero Mostel, according to his New York Times obituary.

    Source: Ephemeral New York

Further reading

Nearby

All 1,156 buildings with stories in West Village