4th Street is a street in Lower Manhattan, New York City. It starts at Avenue D as East 4th Street and continues to Broadway, where it becomes West 4th Street. It continues west until the Avenue of the Americas, where West 4th Street turns north and confusingly intersects with West 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th Streets in Greenwich Village. Most of the street has the same width between curbstones as others in the prevailing street grid, striped as two curbside lanes and one traffic lane, with one-way traffic eastbound. The portion from Seventh to Eighth Avenues is westbound and is approximately wide, a legacy of the original Greenwich Village street grid. The section of four short blocks from MacDougal Street to University Place which forms the southern border of Washington Square Park is called Washington Square South. The north/south portion was formerly called Asylum Street, after the Orphan Asylum Society, which stood on Asylum Street between Bank Street and Troy Street. The asylum was demolished in 1833 and the street was renamed West 4th Street. Later, the cross streets were renamed West 10th, 11th, and 12th Streets, causing the current confusion.
West 4th Street has always been a center of the Village's bohemian lifestyle. The Village's first tearoom, The Mad Hatter, was located at 150 West 4th Street and served as a meeting place for intellectuals and artists. The infamous Golden Swan bar, at the corner of Sixth Avenue, was a famous haunt of Eugene O'Neill and the setting and inspiration for his play The Iceman Cometh. Writer Willa Cather's first New York residence was at 60 Washington Square South and radical journalists John Reed and Lincoln Steffens lived nearby at 42 Washington Square South. Reed later worked in a room in the Studio Club building to complete the series of articles that became his account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, later the source for the film Reds. Sculptor and art patronGertrude Vanderbilt Whitney established the Whitney Studio Club in a brownstone at 147 West 4th Street in 1918 as a place for young artists to gather and show their work. The facility operated for ten years and was the second incarnation of what would later become the Whitney Museum of American Art. It started the careers of such artists as Ashcan School painter John Sloan, Edward Hopper, whose first one-man exhibit was held there in 1920, and social realists Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop. Sloan lived at 240 West 4th St and painted locations on the street including the Golden Swan. The street was later home to the famous folk clubGerde's Folk City, which hosted the New York debuts of Bob Dylan in 1961 and Simon & Garfunkel. Dylan also lived from early-1962 until late-1964 in a small $60-per-monthstudio apartment at 161 West 4th Street; the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was photographed at nearby Jones Street at West 4th, and the street may have inspired his 1965 hit song "Positively 4th Street". Music venue The Bottom Line was at 15th West 4th Street from 1974 to 2004.
