Nighthawks State of Mind JEREMIAH MOSS

Sep Oct pages cut_SI new design masters 8/1/12 9:54 AM Page 30 Nighthawks State of Mind JEREMIAH MOSS 1941, Edward Hopper began what would become his most recognizable work, one that IN has become an emblem of New York City. “Nighthawks,” Hop per said in an interview later, “was suggested by a restaurant on Green wich Av- enue where two streets meet.” The location was pin- pointed by a Hopper expert, Gail Levin, as the “empty triangular lot” where Green wich meets 11th Street and Seventh Avenue, otherwise known as Mulry Square. This has become accepted city folklore. Green wich Village tour guides point to the lot, now owned by the Metro politan Transpor ta tion Author ity, and tell visi- tors that Hopper’s diner stood there. But did it? Not long ago, one of the readers of my blog, Van- ishing New York, sent in an old photo of the lot. There was no diner, only an Esso gas station and a White Tower burger joint that looked nothing like the moody, curved, wedge-shaped lunch counter in Night - hawks. An urban mystery had just revealed itself: If the diner wasn’t in the empty lot, then where was it? Being an obsessive type, prone to delve, I began searching for Hopper’s diner with the help of two of my readers. Multiple streets converge at Mulry Square, creating a shattered-glass array of triangular corners. The buildings wedge themselves into these tight an- gles, bricks tapering to near points, each structure bear- ing a Hopperesque resemblance. I snapped photos of every possibility and checked them against their ancestral images in the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery. I made a trip to the city’s Municipal Archives, where I scanned the 1930s atlases of Man hattan known as “land books,” matched block and lot numbers to scratchy rolls of microfilm, After hours of hunting the archives, I was about to give up when I and scrolled through muddy 1940s tax photos. Slowly, found a new clue in a 1950s land book. There in the map of Mulry I began ruling out suspects. Square, not in the empty northern lot but on the southwest side, where The empty lot at Mulry Square held a gas station Perry Street slants, the mapmaker has written in all caps a single rev- from at least the 1930s through the 1970s, not a diner. elatory word: DINER. I had to rule out the buildings on nearby corners of I went into a state of panicky thrill. Sometime between the late the square as well: West Village Florist was a news- 1930s and the early 1950s, a new diner appeared near Mulry Square. stand. Fan tasy World was a liquor store. Two Boots This was it. I could smell the coffee brewing. After decoding the block Pizza, with its lovely prow wrapped in rounded glass and lot number, written in script so small it required a Sherlockian and chrome, was the Hanscom Bake Shop. And the magnifying glass, after retrieving the microfilm spool and scrolling to pie-slice of a luncheonette that stood behind the lost the specified location, I discovered ... nothing. Loew’s Sheridan cinema was too blocky, too bricky to The tax photo showed only that old Esso station. I scrolled back be the elegant diner in the painting. and forth to be sure but found no photo of the southwest corner, no So I expanded my search, looking at nearly every photo of the diner in question. Did the tax photographers forget to curvilinear corner where “two streets meet” off Green- take its picture? Did they mislabel the lot? It’s possible that I started wich Avenue. With each rejected candidate, my hopes muttering out loud to myself in the quiet of the Municipal Archives, of finding the Nighthawks diner fell. because people began to stare. 30 Volume 36 Issue 5 | Skeptical Inquirer Sep Oct pages cut_SI new design masters 8/1/12 9:54 AM Page 31 Back home, I dug through my book shelves and unearthed curved window and the liquor store’s ghostly wedge, in the dark Gail Levin’s Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. The book bricks that loom in the background of every Village street. is autographed by the author—I had gone to hear Ms. Levin Over the past years, I’ve watched bakeries, luncheonettes, read in a bookshop that is now gone—and dated from a time cobbler shops, and much more come tumbling down at an when I was still new to the city and knew it largely, romanti- alarming rate, making space for condos and office towers. Now cally, as a sprawling Hopper painting filled with golden, the discovery that the Nighthawks diner never existed, except as melancholy light. In the book, Ms. Levin reported that an in- a collage inside Hop per’s imagination, feels like yet another ter- terviewer wrote that the diner was “based partly on an all- rible demolition, though no bricks have fallen. night coffee stand Hopper saw on Greenwich Avenue . ‘only It seems the longer you live in New York, the more you love more so,’” and that Hop per himself said: “I simplified the a city that has vanished. For those of us well versed in the art of scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Un con - loving what is lost, it’s an easy leap to missing something that n sciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” was never really there. Partly. More so. Simplified. The hidden truth became clearer. The diner began to fade. And then I saw it—on every Jeremiah Moss is the author of the blog Vanishing New York (vanish- triangular corner, in the candy shop’s cornice and the news- ingnewyork.blogspot.com). A version of this article appeared in print on stand’s advertisement for five-cent cigars, in the bakery’s July 5, 2010, on page A17 of the New York Times. Skeptical Inquirer | September/October 2012 31.

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