Dylan Thomas Walking Tour printable PDF to take with you.
113 MacDougal Street
(on the corner of MacDougal Street and Minetta Lane)
Continue on Commerce back to Bedford. Turn right on Bedford to Carmine. Turn left on Carmine to 6th Avenue where Carmine becomes Minetta Lane. Continue east on Minetta Lane to MacDougal. Minetta Tavern is on the south west corner of Minetta Lane and MacDougal.
“His drinking was not a means of denying or fleeing life… but of fiercely embracing it.”The Minetta Tavern, which was a speakeasy during Prohibition, was known as The Black Rabbit until 1929. The Minetta Brook, which began on 23rd Street on its way to the Hudson, inspired its name. The brook still flows underground.
~from Dylan Thomas in America by John Malcom Brinnin
The old wood panelling and time-honoured candelabra, which are still part of the attraction for today’s customers, appealed to decades of poets and writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Eugene O’Neill, e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas.
The black-and-white ink caricature drawings and aged photos, now yellowing, and the murals are testimony to its Bohemian days when celebrities sought out its convivial cosiness.
Dylan became a good friend of Joe Gould, who was known as “Professor Seagull.” A Harvard graduate, Gould claimed to understand the language of sea gulls and wrote several thousand pages of his imaginary great work, An Oral History of Our Time.
It has been claimed that Reader’s Digest originated in the basement of the property in 1923. More recently the Minetta was featured in the film Jimmy Blue Eyes, which is about the New York mobster Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo (1904-2001).
