These themed-to-the-extreme bars-pirate ships, prisons, farms, wigwams-will pop up throughout the Village in the 20s, earning the neighborhood a reputation for its quirky take on nightlife. The Toby Club has cobwebs hanging off its ceiling like stalactites, and skull and crossbones made from real skeletons mounted on the walls. The Village's first "goofy club" opens at the corner of Charles St and West 4th, two blocks north of Christopher Street. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city: it has a riper, richer, more honorable look of the upper ramifications of the great longitude thoroughfare-the look of having had something of a social history." Henry James' novel Washington Square is published in book form, in which he writes of Greenwich Village: "This portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. Originally called Skinner Road after the British Colonel William Skinner, the oldest street in Greenwich Village is renamed Christopher Street in 1799 after one of Warren's heirs, Charles Christopher Amos. Along the southern boundary of the Warren Estate is its main thoroughfare-a long street that cuts a slight diagonal as it runs west from the Hudson River right into the heart of the village. In the 1740s, Sir Peter Warren, a wealthy Irish admiral builds an expansive estate in the Village of Greenwich, two miles north of New York City.
THUMP's News Editor, Anna Codrea-Rado, has compiled a timeline of the key events that happened in and around Christopher Street to take a closer look at its role in shaping the history of New York nightlife and LGBTQ culture worldwide. It remains to this day an important symbol of LGBTQ life in New York (photographs of the sign at its intersection with Gay Street are tourist souvenir shop staples), even though it's now more populated with luxury shops and extravagant gyms than the nightlife hotspots that it was once famous for.