The Dual Life of a Village Alley
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
MacDougal Alley is an old stable mews running east from MacDougal Street behind the houses of Washington Square North. The stables once served the Greenwich Village bourgeoisie of the socially halcyon years depicted by Henry James in “Washington Square,” set in the 1840s. As New York’s ever-restless upper class moved to the next fashionable uptown faubourgs, it took its horses with them, but left the stables.
In 1902, sculptor Frederick Triebel leased a stable in MacDougal Alley. He installed skylights and a large north window, and moved in with his family. The New York Sun had once described MacDougal Alley as a “dirty, foul-smelling court” populated by “back-alley gamblers and the rougher element.” After Triebel’s remodeling, The Sun declared it “the most unique studio in town.”Soon after, other sculptors followed Triebel into the alley: Daniel Chester French, Henry Kirke Bush-Brown, and James Earle Fraser.In 1906 the Craftsman magazine said of MacDougal Alley that “in the summertime the doors of the studios are thrown open, and the artists’ wives take their chairs on the clean, cemented court, while the children play in perfect safety around them.”
MacDougal Alley reached a peak of sorts in 1907, when Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney moved in. The alley had then been an artists’ colony for five years. Whitney was the daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and had grown up in one of the city’s most stupendous mansions, on the site of Bergdorf-Goodman. She summered in the family “cottage,” the Breakers, in Newport. She was a precocious girl socially overshadowed by her ravishing cousin Consuelo, who married the duke of Marlborough. Gertrude feared young men were interested in her for her money, so she married someone as rich as she, Harry Payne Whitney, the son of traction mogul William C. Whitney. Gertrude and Harry had three children and, though both conducted extra-marital affairs, stayed married out of concern for the children as well as a genuine companionableness.
Indeed, Gertrude spent a good bit of her time playing her prescribed role as society hostess at her estate in Westbury. But in the other half of her strikingly dual life she lived and worked in the alley and partook of the adventuresome society of the Village in its greatest bohemian years. In 1903 she’d begun taking sculpture lessons from alley denizen Fraser, at the Art Students League, and became a major sculptor in her own right. When she moved to the alley she not only made her own works there, but provided space to struggling artists whose fairy godmother she became. In 1931 she and Juliana Force opened the Whitney Museum of American Art in three 1830s houses that stood on 8th Street in back of her alley studio.The museum remained there until 1954, eight years after Gertrude’s death. The buildings now house the New York Studio School.
While Gertrude operated from the finest of motives, she may also be seen to represent the diaspora of uptown plutocrats’ children whose residence in the Village in the 1910s and 1920s brought about one of the first major waves of “gentrification” in New York. The Village was never the same.
