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MORI RESTAURANT An Italian restaurant founded in 1884, Mori's was a Greenwich Village favorite among neighborhood regulars and tourists for over 50 years. Its unusual facade, which combined two federal-style houses at 144 and 146 Bleecker, was designed by renowned modernist architect Raymond Hood (1881-1934), who lived above the Mori family on Washington Square North. The restaurant's elegant appearance formed a sharp contrast to the neighborhood's shabbiness. Surviving Prohibition and the depression, Mori's filed for bankruptcy in 1938, before Abbott's photograph appeared in Changing New York. In the 1960s and 1970s, the building housed another Village landmark, the Bleecker Street Cinema, which showed art films until the availability of films on videotape eroded its audience. Abbott gained entry to the second floor of the shop at 145 Bleecker Street to take this straightforward photograph of Mori's facade. Turning the camera slightly to the left, she subtly animated the strict symmetry of Hood's design. A man momentarily pausing to light a cigarette was a fortuitous addition to the scene. Return to Greenwich Village |