By Barbara Crane
Easily missed in the bustling streets of Greenwich Village today is a small bronze plaque installed almost 100 years ago in honor of Thomas Paine. The memorial is at 59 Grove Street in a building now standing on the location of Paine’s death in 1809.
Historical accounts indicate starting in 1802, Paine had a house on Herring Street, now 309 Bleecker Street, the site of a modern commercial building.
Paine likely was happier in Greenwich Village than on his isolated farm in New Rochelle. Freethinkers in the Village clearly admired him. To honor The Age of Reason, a short city street nearby in 1828 was renamed as Reason Street. Today it’s called Barrow Street.
The building now at 59 Grove Street, built in 1839, opened its doors in 1928 as a restaurant (and speakeasy) called Marie’s Crisis Cafe. Marie DuMont, a French national, named it for The Crisis papers Paine wrote to support the American Revolution. The establishment still operates today as a popular Village piano bar known for sing-along showtunes.
Marie DuMont inset the 1928 Paine plaque beside the entrance to the brick building.
Samilla Love Jameson Heinzmann designed the plaque. The Indiana-born artist was a member of the Greenwich Village Historical Society,, founded in 1922 by Catherine Clivette, wife of artist and magician Merton Clivette. Their daughter, Juanita, known as the “Sappho” of the already Bohemian Village, read a poem at the unveiling of the plaque.
Barbara Crane serves on the TPNHA Board. She thanks and credits Sarah Bean Apmann at Village Preservation and Tom Miller at Daytonian in Manhattan, with additional information from Maria’s Crisis Cafe.