Welcome toWest Village

My letter to the West Village

I moved to New York on October 2nd of 1994.  The West Village was my first neighborhood.  Sight unseen (by me anyway), my childhood friend, Holter Graham, and I moved into an in-the-back ground floor one-bedroom at 3 Weehawken Street with high ceilings and a little patio with a sickly Japanese Maple smack dab in the middle of it. I built a loft in the living room, which became my space for the next three years and we got a dog named Payphone. Our phone number was 212.727.1417 if you’d like to say hello to whomever has that one now. Back in those days, the West Side Highway was massively under construction, the Christopher Street Pier was a wide open cold and empty swath paved with black bricks and bodies up to nothing legal.  Where 150 Charles now stands was a long term storage facility with unsightly and rarely-used loading docks along 10th and Charles. Chumly’s was still in its original state with sawdust on the floors and a huge fire in the dining room.  Long night-walks with Payphone gazing up at the dimly lit townhouse windows were the every-evening wind down from long days on set. Twenty dollar lobster nights every Monday was our weekly go-to splurge and you could buy a townhouse for around $800,000.  Me oh my how things have changed!  Still, at the very top of my list in New York, the West Village has changed, but that's what New York does.  Let’s go for a walk…There are plenty more stories to be written and told.