GAY STREET, NOS. 14-16
Between Christopher Street and Waverly Place
OCTOBER 16, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 263

Only 260 feet long, Gay Street was originally an alley entrance to stables. In 1827 a row of houses, including nos. 14 and 16, were built on the west side of the street, and in the 1840s the eastside stables were replaced with houses. Among the residents were African-American servants who worked for wealthy families on nearby Washington Square. In 1833, the street was named for Sidney Howard Gay, a prominent editor, historian, and abolitionist. In the teens, Gay Street was, according to the Changing New York caption, "the only Negro street in the Washington Square neighborhood," and was known especially as home to African-American musicians. In the 1920s, like many of the Village's antiquated byways, it attracted aspiring artists and writers, who flocked to New York from the American heartland. Among them was Ohio-born Ruth McKenney, whose popular My Sister Eileen stories appeared in the New Yorker and were published as a book in 1938; the stories immortalized Gay Street as the archetypal bohemian address.

Although Abbott was probably drawn to the architectural detail and ironwork railings of nos. 14 and 16 Gay Street, she would certainly have known the street's reputation as an artist's haunt, and she may have thought of McKenney's stories, which were written in the basement apartment of no. 14.

The Gay Street houses appear as they do in Abbott's photograph, although many are in disrepair.

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