J. M. Felson's 1929 218 West 10th Street

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Abraham Schwartz was a builder and real estate developer, head of the A. M. Schwartz Building & Construction Company.  On May 2, 1928, he purchased three three-story apartment buildings at 340 through 344 Bleecker Street and the abutting, five-story apartment house on the southwest corner of West 10th Street.  The next day, The New York Times announced that the old structures, "will be razed and replaced by a modern six-story elevator apartment building containing electric refrigeration and other modern improvements."

Schwartz commissioned the Russian-born architect Jacob M. Felson to design the building.  Completed the following year, the residential entrance was placed at the western end of the West 10th Street side.  The four stores along Bleecker Street were designed with deep arcade show windows that enabled the proprietors to create large displays.  (The corner store was double the size of the other three.)

Completed in 1929 at a cost of $238,700 (about $4.73 million in 2026), Felson's sleek, tripartite 1920s take on the Medieval Revival style included an arched corbel table below the fifth floor cornice, and stepped Tudor-inspired gables with blank shields atop the parapet.  Above the residential entrance Felson placed a carved Renaissance-inspired panel.

Abe Schwartz could not have predicted that the Stock Market would crash the year his building opened.  In August 1931, he lost the property in foreclosure.

A woman who lived here at the time (whose name was not disclosed in newspaper articles) was having an affair with a married Brooklyn man, Valentine C. Bauman.  In the meantime, Ruth C. Bauman was doing some private investigating on her own and tracked down her wandering husband to Manhattan and 218 West 10th Street.  On the evening of November 4, 1931, Ruth and "several of her friends," according to The Brooklyn Standard Union, barged into the apartment.  

Ruth told a judge on January 8, 1932, "There he was sitting on the side of the bed in two-piece underwear talking to a woman in [a] flesh-colored negligee."  According to Ruth Bauman, her husband remarked, "Here I am."  The article said that Ruth was "a free woman today."

The arcade storefronts survived as late as 1941.  via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

Jane Carabine and Margaret Dusseau shared an apartment here as early as 1932.  Margaret came home early on the night of February 26, 1933, to discover her 30-year-old roommate dead.  The New York Times reported, "Gas was escaping from a jet of the kitchen range."  Police called Jane's death accidental.

As early as 1963, Aldo's Italian restaurant occupied the southern-most commercial space.  It was replaced by Boomer's soul food and jazz restaurant around 1972.  That year New York Magazine called it "a casual Village place where spareribs and black-eyed peas are served up with great sounds by the likes of Ray Bryant, Bobby Timmons and Cedar Watson."

The De Santis-Jensen "semi-antiques shop," as described by The New York Times on August 21, 1965, filled the corner space.  Owned by Stuart Jenson and Anthony de Santis, the shop appealed to "the special kind of person who appreciates kookiness as much as we do," according to Jensen.  He told The Times, "Barbra Streisand hasn't been in here, but Tony Perkins has, and so have Eli Wallach, Leonard Bernstein and Anne Bancroft."

photo by The New York Times photographer Bill Allen, August 21, 1965

Living here by 1987 was Glenn R. Purdy, an editor for Travel Agent magazine.  On July 23 that year, Purdy did not arrive at work.  When no one could reach him, senior editor Joe Murphy went to his apartment.  Getting no response from inside, Murphy walked over to the nearby Sixth Precinct station house.

Officers returned with Murphy and entered the apartment.  "They found Mr. Purdy's body on the living room couch," reported The New York Times.  According to one of the officers, the 57-year-old had been stabbed in the back and his pockets had been "ripped apart."  Because there was no sign of forced entry, officials thought Purdy knew his killer.  A bloody kitchen knife was recovered in the apartment.

The building's most celebrated tenant was playwright, librettist and screenwriter Terrence McNally, who lived here with his life partner (and, later, husband), Broadway producer and former civil rights attorney Tom Kirdahy.

Born on November 3, 1938, McNally graduated from Columbia University in 1960.  The next year, he was hired by novelist John Steinbeck and his wife to tutor their two teenaged sons while they traveled.  (McNally was already in a relationship with playwright Edward Albee.)

His first full-length play, This Side of the Door, was produced in 1962, and his Broadway debut came in 1965 when he was just 26 years old.  He would go on to write hits like Love! Valour! Compassion!, Master Class, and The Ritz.

Terrance McNally posed in front of the marquee of his first Broadway musical, The Rink, in 1984.  from the collection of the New York Public Library.

In reviewing his Mothers and Sons in the Observer on March 26, 2014, Rex Reed called the play "a masterpiece," and McNally, "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced."  He also wrote the books for the musicals Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime.  

McNally addressed gay sexuality and the AIDS crisis.  Writing in The New York Times on March 24, 2020, Jesse Green and Neil Genzlinger said, "His gay stories never came across as a narrowing of theater's human focus but as an expansion of it, and by inviting everyone into them he helped solidify the social change he was describing."

McNally and Kirdahy were still living at 218 West 10th Street when the four-time Tony Award-winning playwright died in Sarasota, Florida on March 24, 2020 at the age of 81.

photo via streeteasy.com

For decades the southern space on Bleecker Street was home to Manatus, a diner-type restaurant, while the Village Apothecary on the corner enjoyed equal longevity.  They were replaced by the Stain Theo's restaurant and a Pdpaola jewelry store, respectively.