Nighthawks - Searching For The Location of The Restaurant

Searching For The Location of The Restaurant

The scene was supposedly inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper's home neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper himself said the painting "was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Additionally, he noted that "I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger."

This reference has led Hopper aficionados to engage in a search for the location of the original diner. The inspiration for this search has been summed up on the blog of one of these searchers: "I am finding it extremely difficult to let go of the notion that the Nighthawks diner was a real diner, and not a total composite built of grocery stores, hamburger joints, and bakeries all cobbled together in the painter's imagination."

The spot most usually associated with the former location is a now-vacant lot known as Mulry Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, and West 11th Street, about seven blocks west of Hopper's studio on Washington Square. However, according to a New York Times article by blogger Jeremiah Moss, this cannot be the location of the diner that inspired the painting, as a gas station occupied that lot from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Moss was able to locate a land-use map in a 1950s municipal atlas showing that “Sometime between the late ’30s and early ’50s, a new diner appeared near Mulry Square.” Specifically, the diner was located immediately to the right of the gas station, “not in the empty northern lot, but on the southwest side, where Perry Street slants.” This map is not reproduced in the Times article, but is shown on Moss’s blog.

This contemporary photograph of the imagined location of the restaurant, facing north-east towards the site from the far side of Greenwich Avenue, shows a location which would, if viewed from the nearer side of the street, closely resemble Hopper's scene---except for the complete absence of a diner. The diner identified on the municipal map would have been located in the smaller building with the three arches, to the right of the gas station. Such a diner would have been narrow and deep, presumably would have had booth seating, and would have borne little direct resemblance to the diner in the painting.

Moss comes to the conclusion that Hopper should be taken at his word: the painting was merely “suggested” by a real-life restaurant, he had “simplified the scene a great deal,” and he "made the restaurant bigger" In short, there probably never was a single real-life scene identical to the one that Hopper had created, and if one did exist, there is no longer sufficient evidence to pin down the precise location. Moss concludes, "the ultimate truth remains bitterly out of reach."