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Manhattan's Secret Streets
Story
While Manhattan's streets were largely laid out with the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, this grid system was only implemented between Houston and 155th Streets. The plan left Greenwich Village with its long-established mews, alleys, and courts, many of which date to the city's early colonial period, intact. While not exclusively in the Village, most of the secret streets on this list are located there among the organically developed 18th-century street plan. While some changes have come to these streetscapes in the last century, in most cases their concealment and a healthy dose of historic preservation work have aided in their continued survival in the 21st century.
Great Jones Alley
Post
Great Jones Alley, ca. 1980s. Great Jones Street was named for a lawyer, Samuel Jones, who donated land to the city in 1789 and stipulated that his name be attached to the resulting road. The donation allowed the city to complete 3rd Street between Broadway and Bowery. A problem arose in that another street, in the West Village, had already been named for a Jones (Samuel's brother-in-law, a Dr. Gardiner Jones). The newer street had to settle for the "great" moniker. The small alley that runs south from Great Jones Street, mid-block between Broadway and Lafayette, is called Great Jones Alley. According to rumors, the term “jonesin(g),” meaning an intense craving for a drug, can trace its inception to this small dead-end street where addicts hung out in the 1960s.
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682 Broadway
Manhattan: Broadway - Bond Street Broadway, north from the head of Bond to East 10th Streets and showing Grace P.E. Church at that point. This instantaneous photo is taken from the Grand Central Hotel (now the Broadway Central Hotel), a portion of which appears on the left. Note the East River National Bank, No. 682 Broadway, at the S.E. corner of Great Jones Street. In Bromley's Atlas of New York 1922 this institution is shown at No. 680, a 4-story structure adjoining the same corner. Broadway in the distance, veers true northward because of the refusal of one Brevcort to permit the Commissioners Plan of 1811 to be placed into effect; he thereby saving a favorite tree that would have been destroyed. af About 1875. Gift of H. D. Jewett. 21, -AN S fE : .St : v N2G ~ 57G
Great Jones Alley
Great Jones Alley looking south from Great Jones Street, 1 Great Jones Street at right
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