Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Actual Diner

In my original first post of this blog, I mentioned the property tax records for the rumored location of the actual diner portrayed in Hopper's "Nighthawks" painting and how they made no reference to a diner ever being at the corner of Greenwich and Seventh. While creating the entries you see in this blog, I had secretly started working on another site last year that was a very detailed and researched follow on to that little tidbit. It was my intention to attempt to find out where the actual diner once stood (if it had ever existed at all) and perhaps get an actual photograph of the place that we are all so familiar with.

My site is still a work in progress and is located HERE. There is still much to do on the site, but so far it has been concluded that there was no diner at Mulry Square and that Hopper based many of his previous works off of combinations and fragments of other real scenes, and sometimes completely from his own imagination.

Within the last week, it has come to my attention that another popular blog titled "Jeremiah's Vanishing New York" has embarked on a 3 part series to find the location of the actual diner shown in the painting, just like I had secretly been doing. Jeremiah had gone through just about all of the painstaking research steps I had gone through and arrived at the same conclusions, BUT he took the research one step further and decided to check out additional corners along Greenwich to see if there was any that could be another possible location for the famed diner! Please take the time to read through these three entries and the "coda" finale to follow the fascinating progress that Jeremiah has made in this neverending quest!

Finding Nighthawks, Part 1
Finding Nighthawks, Part 2
Finding Nighthawks, Part 3
Finding Nighthawks, Coda

Please stay tuned both here and to Jeremiah's blog as I will update if there are any new improvements found, and Im sure that even though Jeremiah may have concluded his mission having not found any solid evidence, I think the door may still be open for further investigation if credible leads come out of hiding! Also, I will be making updates to my Diner site very soon, as I still have a lots more pictures to add!!