Finding Nighthawks, Part 3

For days now we've been searching for Edward Hopper's Nighthawks diner. We discovered that it was not on the MTA property at Mulry Square, as popularly believed, nor did it exist on the other possible prow-shaped corners in the area. Just as I'm about to call it quits, a clue turns up in a 1950s Land Book.


1930s Land Book

At the Municipal Archives, you use Land Books to determine the block and lot numbers of the building you seek, then match them up with the tax photos on the microfilm. In these Land Books, here and there, a business is described in a word or two. The Land Book from the 1930s makes no mention of a diner anywhere at Mulry Square. But the updated 1950s Land Book shows a new addition.


1950s Land Book

In Block 613, Lot 62, on the corner where 7th Avenue South hits Perry Street, the 1950s mapmaker has drawn a rectangle and written the word DINER.

Sometime between the late 1930s and the 1950s, a diner appeared on the southwest corner of the Mulry Square triangle. Hopper painted Nighthawks in 1942.


close up of Mulry Square, 1950s

Excited to at last be on the verge of solving this mystery, I quickly locate the microfilm and scroll to the tax photo at Block 613, Lot 62. My eyes are bleary by the time I get to it, but all I see is the Esso gas station on the northernmost corner of the triangle. I check and recheck my numbers. I scroll back and forth, again and again. Nothing.

There is no photo on that microfilm showing the southwest corner--no photo of the spot where the mapmaker wrote in "DINER." The Esso station occupied Block 613, Lot 59—not Lot 62. Maybe someone screwed up the lots. Maybe the photo is missing.

I think, with an irrational tinge of paranoia, "Maybe someone removed the photo. Maybe they don't want us to know the truth!"


1933: SW corner of Mulry Square, no diner yet

I go to the 1980 tax photos, hoping the mystery diner will still be standing in those 30-year-old shots, but whatever diner was there at mid-century has already been demolished and replaced with the building that today houses Empire Szechuan Village.

In the 1940s and 50s, people coming out of the Village Vanguard would have looked right at the diner. They might have crossed the avenue to go in for a late-night bite. But lost between photographic documentations, the diner at 613 - 62 remains a ghost to us.


Southwest corner of Mulry Square today, Google

I hit a wall. The missing photo of Block 613, Lot 62 puts me in a foul, defeated mood. I go back to the drawing board. But nothing in the New York Public Library's 1930s photos, nothing in the Municipal Archives' 1940 and 1980 photos, and nothing standing today looks like a good match for Hopper's Nighthawks diner.

The one photographed restaurant in the Mulry Square triangle is a castle-shaped burger joint attached to the gas station on the northeast side--so very not Nighthawks.


NYPL, 1933

Could the Nighthawks inspiration have been the mystery diner at Block 613, Lot 62 behind the Esso gas station? Possibly. If the diner was built in time, Hopper might have decided to paint it in 1942 because it was new. He may have been attracted to the novelty of it. If only I could find some further evidence of its existence.

After my trip to the Archives, I go online and search for images of that corner. I come up empty, but I do find a Certificate of Occupancy from 1942. It states that a one-story commercial building went up in this spot, Block 613, Lot 62, also known as 173 7th Ave. So. The date of completion was February 26, 1942, the year Nighthawks is dated. But was it the Hopper diner?



Trying to fit the dates together, I dig through my bookshelves for Gail Levin's biography of Hopper. There she tells us that the painting was begun in December 1941, three months before the date on the Certificate of Occupancy for the mystery diner.

It's possible. The diner at Perry and 7th may not have been open for business, but it was standing when Hopper made his sketches.

Right? I'm not sure of anything at this point.



I look back at the 6 prow-shaped corners, at the paper print-outs and notes I took from the Archives. I zoom in on the photos from the NYPL. What did I miss?

Could the Nighthawks diner have been in the narrow wedge that is today's West Village Florist? Could it also have been that little vanished slice behind the Loew's Sheridan theater? Yes to both, if Hopper took some liberties with the facades. And the backgrounds.


Christie's

In the charcoal studies for Nighthawks, you can see that the background is quite vague, messy pencil scribbles with details that appear and disappear from sketch to sketch. As Teri Tynes noted in an email to me, "Some people think Hopper essentially spliced in his Sunday Morning painting for the background."

We know that the woman in the diner is Hopper's wife, Jo. The brick buildings in back probably came from another painting. Maybe the diner, too, is a composite.



There is more evidence for this explanation than for any other.

In the Hopper biography, Levin tells us that a Vogue interviewer discerned that the diner was "based partly on an all-night coffee stand Hopper saw on Greenwich Avenue...'only more so.'" Hopper said, "I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city."

Partly. More so. Simplified.



As the truth becomes clearer, I am finding it difficult to bear this idea that, outside of Hopper's imagination, there was no Nighthawks diner at all.

Certainly, there was something of substance among those many triangular corners. I look through my muddy print-outs of the tax photos. Here’s a familiar-looking wedge. There’s a glassy corner. And that’s a background of dark bricks. The curved window may have belonged to that grocery store or that bakery. The cornice might have come from this shop that sold wines and liquors.

After all the searching, I know only one thing for sure: The Hopper diner never stood at Mulry Square’s northern tip. Until a photo of the lost diner at Perry and 7th appears, we have to assume that the Nighthawks diner stood everywhere, that it came from every possible corner, from bits and pieces of the city, the large and lonely city that Hopper's art holds for us.

And that should be the end of our story. It's poetic, a bit tragic. But I'm still not satisfied. More evidence is out there. Stay tuned for one last gasp in a final coda...

Go to Finding Nighthawks: Coda


*Thanks again to blogger Teri Tynes and singer/songwriter Don Everett Pearce, who emailed me with links to photos, quotes, and their own guesses, all of which helped put this whole thing together.

Read:
Finding Nighthawks Part 1
Finding Nighthawks Part 2

*Everyday Chatter

At Bushwick Open Studios, a scene of New School meets Old School:


I've got a post about noise wars and blogs in HuffPo today, starring Jill and Grieve.

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Finding Nighthawks, Part 2

In Finding Nighthawks Part 1, we determined that the diner that inspired Edward Hopper to paint Nighthawks was never located in the empty lot on the northern corner of Mulry Square. So where was it?

In the vicinity of 11th Street, 7th Avenue South, and Greenwich, there are several corners where two streets come together to make the "wedge form of the restaurant, thrusting from right to left like the prow of a ship," as art historian Lloyd Goodrich described it. In this crossroads of triangles and tightly wedged corners, I count six (possibly eight) potential locations.



Today, West Village Florist (#2 on the map; #1 is the Mulry Square lot) points sharply between 11th and Greenwich. A good possibility. However, throughout the 1930s it was a corner store with an awning that sold "soda, cigars, fruit." The point of it was glassed, but flattened at the end, not like the curved Nighthawks diner window.


NYPL, 1930

Gail Levin also states in Hopper's Places that the "candy store" across the street from the Mulry Square empty lot could not have been the diner. Of course, the diner wasn't in the empty lot, where Levin says it was. Still, the florist shop is not a match, and I put it in the rule-out column.


NYPL, 1938

Moving counterclockwise to the corner that is now a garden (#3), we find the former location of the Loew’s Sheridan theater. No diner there. But the spot behind the Sheridan (#4) looks like a possibility.

An aerial photo from 1933 shows a pie-shaped slice where 12th Street heads east on the left and Greenwich goes south on the right. In between is a triangular one-story building that, from a bird’s eye view, could be Hopper’s diner.


NYPL, 1933

This corner, demolished with the Sheridan, is now occupied by the Materials Handling Center for St. Vincent's Hospital. It still resembles the prow of a ship; however, it's a little farther north than expected--not the meeting place of 11th and 7th that Gail Levin cited.



Also, when we zoom in close (with this shot and the one below), we can see that, while it is a luncheonette, the structure lacked the curved glass window that so enthralled the artist--the facade has a flattened front with double doors. I decide to rule this one out, too.


NYPL, 1932

That leaves just two more good possibilities: the current homes of Two Boots Pizza (#5) and the Fantasy World adult emporium (#6).

Looking at it, you can see that the Two Boots corner is not nearly as prow-like as the Fantasy World corner. I’m rooting for Fantasy World, imagining that its yellow brick building was constructed after 1942, after the painting and the demolition of the Nighthawks diner.



To check my hunches, I make a trip to the city’s Municipal Archives’ cache of tax photographs. The diner, I am certain, will be found in those scratchy spools of microfilm.

Instead, the microfilm yields nothing but roadblocks and disappointments. All taken between 1939 and 1941, the tax photos show that Fantasy World’s yellow bricks held a liquor store and looked exactly the same as they do today. Two Boots, I discover, was the Hanscom Bakery, complete with all its lovely, rounded chrome. But again, no diner.



On the microfilm, I look at every corner where Hopper’s diner might have stood. In addition to those noted above, I check the wedge where Waverly meets 7th, but it was a grocery store. I double-check the West Village Florist spot (Block 606, Lot 30M), but the photo is too dark to see if it was still a newsstand in 1941. Let's throw the Day-O corner in to be totally thorough, but that looks like a miss, too.

I begin to wonder if the Nighthawks diner ever existed, if Hopper dreamed it up out of the ether. And then I see it. In small print, in a 1950s Land Book, a new clue.

Stay tuned...

Go to Finding Nighthawks, Part 3


*Thanks again to blogger Teri Tynes and singer/songwriter Don Everett Pearce, who emailed me with links to photos, quotes, and inquiries, all of which helped put this whole thing together.

*Everyday Chatter

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Finding Nighthawks, Part 1

Much ado has been made recently of the triangular plot of land that juts like a shark fin between 7th Avenue South, Perry Street, and Greenwich. The MTA owns the property and recently proposed to build a faux-townhouse there to conceal their planned ventilation plant, a controversial development.

Also known as Mulry Square, the triangle is famous for being the supposed location of the inspiration for Edward Hopper's most well-known painting, Nighthawks.

But was it?



A couple of JVNY readers, blogger Teri Tynes and singer/songwriter Don Everett Pearce, recently contacted me with questions and suggestions about the location of the Hopper diner. With their help, and research of my own, I set off onto a trail of clues, possibilities, and dead ends. I started at Mulry Square.



In Hopper expert Gail Levin's book Hopper's Places and her Hopper biography, she writes that the painter himself claimed that Nighthawks "was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Those streets, adds Levin, were "Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue." She goes on to say that the diner "was surely on the empty triangular lot" in that spot.

Tour guides, news stories, and blogs all refer to the MTA’s lot as the singular birthplace of Nighthawks. It is accepted Village folklore. But there is ample evidence to the contrary. Nighthawks Forever points to a cities data file that has no record of a diner ever being on the spot. And the New York Public Library’s digital archives supplies the photo evidence.

In a shot from 1933, a Kesbec Esso gas station stands in that location. There is no diner.


NYPL, 1933

The gas station turns up in photos as late as 1940. Nighthawks is dated 1942. So perhaps the gas station was demolished and replaced with a diner in 1941. The city's taxmen photographed the corner again in 1980. In that photo, there is still no diner and no remnants of it, though the Esso station buildings were still standing there, graffitied and abandoned beneath a painted advertisement for London’s Hard Rock Cafe.

The supposed diner tiles that reporters from Wikipedia to The Villager say you can see in the MTA’s lot most likely belonged to the gas station. In fact, there's a scruffy white-brick chunk that looks like the old Esso still standing there today.



From the evidence, we can only conclude that the empty lot at Mulry Square is not the birthplace of Nighthawks.

So where was Hopper’s famous diner?

Stay tuned...

Read: Finding Nighthawks Part 2

*Everyday Chatter

We've long worried that Mars Bar would soon be lost. Now it has happened. Mars Bar the cat, that is. If you've seen this fella in the vicinity of 16 W. 11th St., please call the owners:


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*Everyday Chatter

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