1926

Manhattan: Bleecker Street - Hancock Street

Bleecker Street, north from Hancock Street (in the line of the future Sixth Avenue Extension) and Minetta Street (right). At this point, which is on the old line between the West Bayard Farm on the east and the Herring Farm on the west, there is a bend of about 30 degrees in Bleecker Street, where two separate streets once met. The section of Bleecker Street from here north to Christopher Street was originally Herring Street. It gave up its own name in 1829. At the left, on the south corner of Downing Street, is the Church of our Lady of Pompeii, organized in 1901, and occupying the building which used to be the Church of St. Benedict the Moor, the negro Roman Catholic Church. In the mid-nineteenth century this part of Bleecker Street was in the middle of the Greenwich Village negro colony, which at that time was numerically quite strong. All the buildings in the immediate foreground are slated for demolition, being directly in the path of the Sixth Avenue Extension and municipal subway. The new Church of Our Lady of Pompeii is under construction at the N.W. corner of Carmine Street; the skeleton of its tower may be seen behind the lamp-post. Autumn 1926.

Photo from the New York Public Library - Milstein Collection