A Tale of a Changing Neighborhood

David's Pot Belly Stove, Christopher Street, New York, NY, in 1979.

Local joints are among my favorite topics to cover because they are at the same time completely insignificant to the world at large and yet loom large in our memories. They thus receive little attention despite the huge impact they had and have on local residents. 

A continuing theme of this blog is that tectonic social shifts in a big city can pass almost unnoticed if you aren't intimately involved. The buildings and streets remain the same, but everything around them and the way they are used can evolve in unexpected ways. Social changes form cross-currents around the more permanent parts of society that are made of steel and stone. They barely leave a trace unless you go looking for them.

Well, here we're looking at some of those changes. While going through old photos of Manhattan, I noticed the photo above and it caused me to reflect on how changing social patterns give a neighborhood its character. So, we'll take a then-and-now look at David's Pot Belly at 94 Christopher Street, NYC, from 1979 to the present.

David's Pot Belly was not some earthshaking establishment that goes into the history books like a Lutece or a Four Seasons. It was just a burger joint that opened in 1971 near the corner of Christopher Street and Bleecker Street. The "David" in the name was David Levine. He quickly opened another David's Pot Belly (people now remember the name as David's Pot Belly Stove, but it's unclear if that was ever its official name) on Hope Street in Providence, Rhode Island, so perhaps his intent was to start a chain. If that was the plan, it failed, because both restaurants are long gone. However, the restaurants made an impact. Musicians David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth, for instance, worked at the Providence David's Pot Belly in the early 1970s and that led (very indirectly) to the founding of Talking Heads. Byrne and the others were attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD, pronounced "riz-dee") at the time. RISD has always attracted an artistic crowd that contrasted nicely with the more staid Brown U. crowd nearby. Incidentally, and this is getting way off track, but Byrne, who was really only interested in music at the time, got the job at the Providence Pot Belly after being fired from a hot dog stand for having hairy arms (true story). But, let's get back on track...

The David's Pot Belly location was located in a classic four-story 1910 residential building that is typical of Greenwich Village.

Havana Alma de Cuba occupied the site at 94 Christopher Street before it, too, closed.

The old David's Pot Belly location as of October 2019 (Google Street View).

I hope you enjoyed this wandering walk down the winding streets of Greenwich Village. The world around them may change, but the streets of New York endure. Please visit some of our other pages in this "the more things change, the more they stay the same" series!
2021

Bedford Street at Downing Street, NYC

Bedford at Downing Street, looking west, during the 1970s.

Bedford Street is in the West Village of Manhattan. It connects Christopher Street in the north with Sixth Avenue and West Houston Street in the south. It predates the 1811 grid pattern of Manhattan and is oriented slightly more to the north than the grid-pattern streets as they approach the Hudson River. It is a classic West Village residential area that doesn't change much from decade to decade. I found the above picture identified only as "Bedford Street" and decided to see if I could find the exact corner. Having found the spot, here is a comparison of Bedford Street at Downing Street in the West Village from the 1970s to 2018.

Bedford at Downing Street, looking west, in November 2017 (Google Street View).

Fortunately, the area has barely changed at all in four decades, so it only took a few minutes to identify this side street as Downing Street. The original photograph shows a building with distinctive crosses etched into its side, and fortunately (for our purposes) they are still there. The other buildings on both sides of Downing Street still have their fire escapes, and the building all the way down the block still has its distinctive humps. Thus, it appears we have the same spot, and comparison of the two photos shows that

The northwest corner of Downing and Bedford Streets, November 2017 (Google Street View).

While the pictures look pretty darn similar despite being separated by about 40 years, there are some subtle changes that may tell us something about the changes in the inhabitants over that time. One thing I noticed was that the supermarket visible on the corner in the 1970s shot has morphed into a restaurant, "Emily," located at 35 Downing Streets. Supposedly, she has the best burgers in town, though I've never been there. Replacing a supermarket with a restaurant is telling because it seems as though people don't cook for themselves as much as they used to. Why that is I will leave to the experts, but there seem to be far fewer of those little neighborhood markets these days and more fast-food type places. So, while it's dangerous to draw too many conclusions from one small change, this one seems to be part of a broader societal pattern.

Downing Street, NYC (Google Street View).

Another thing that struck me was the trees. Unlike so many photos from New York City in the 1970s, there actually were some trees on Downing Street back then. I'm no tree expert, but they appear to me at least to be the same trees, with some more added. They certainly are taller now than they were four decades ago. This tells me that Downing Street already was nicely arranged back in the 1970s and someone has been taking care of things there. That's the sign of a well-maintained area populated by people who care about their neighborhood.

225 Varick Street, NYC, in November 2017 (Google Street View).

The large building in the distance of the 1970s photo (now partially obscured by trees) is 225 Varick Street. That building, built in 1926, now happens to be home to Squarespace, which signed its lease in 2014. It runs through 2029. This is another sign of the times, as the Lower Manhattan neighborhoods of Tribeca, the West Village, Soho, Chelsea, and the Flatiron District have become favored spots for big tech companies. Google has a major presence in Chelsea, and Amazon has been looking for a spot on the West Side. The times change, and while the buildings stay the same, the neighborhoods change with them.

Thanks for visiting this entry in my "the more things change, the more they stay the same" series. That simple photo taken forty years ago from Bedford Street unwittingly took us into the Internet age. Please visit some of the other pages in the series!

2019