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69 Pine Street today
The Knotty Pine was established at 69 Pine Street in 1784 by Amos Vanderlynn, on the site of his father’s bar, which was called The Dutch Courage. The Vanderlynn family retained ownership of the one-story building until 1898, when Charity Vanderlynn’s husband Michael John Whitehead bought up the building and both adjacent lots, with the intention of constructing an office building on the site. The demolition of 69 Pine Street was only prevented when Charity’s cousin, Civil War veteran Adrian Vander, hired a team of Irish laborers and on Christmas Day, 1899, dismantled the entire building, loaded it up onto twelve carts, and delivered it to the back yard of 305 Bleecker Street, where it was reconstructed exactly as it had been at Pine Street, booth by booth and table by table, and reopened on January 5, 1900.
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The outer structure of the original Pine Street building, which still exists as an attachment to 303/305 Bleecker and now opens up onto a garden seating area, has undergone three separate renovations since its move to Bleecker, the latest of which was in 1954, when the famous upstairs bar, with its landmark skylight, was added to the structure. This renovation was totally financed by Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac, who put up the money on one condition -- that they would never once be banned from the Naughty Pine the way they had been continually banned from the Cedar Tavern on University.
Tomorrow: a history by tabletops (part 1).
1 comment:
Very interesting stuff, Matthew!
I do believe if I lived in NYC, I would have been banned from the Cedar Tavern too!!!!! HA!
xxoo
Mon
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