The mystery began, as many do, with a stranger.
About a month ago, a Chicago native named Mark walked into the West Village’s Classic’s Cafe and told the manager something unexpected.
“He said, ‘Did you know this restaurant was the one from “Nighthawks”?’ ” says manager Alex Vigor. “I was star-struck for a second.”
“Nighthawks” is, of course, the famous 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that peers through the window of a city coffee shop as three customers sit at a counter.
The painting’s setting has never definitively been established, so Mark’s scoop was potentially big. Vigor and Classic’s Cafe owner, Fiko Uslu, were intrigued and began researching the building’s history.
“I am sure [this is the setting for ‘Nighthawks’],” Uslu says.
He’s so sure that he’s changing the restaurant’s name from Classic’s Cafe to Nighthawks in a couple of weeks.
Most of their evidence is based on the visual similarity between their restaurant, located at 679 Greenwich St., and the one shown in the painting. Both are triangular spaces with large windows and seating at a dark wooden bar.
Vigor says the restaurant’s wooden bar has been there since at least the 1940s, remaining no matter what business happened to occupy the space.
He wasn’t able to turn up any records showing what the space was in 1942, when the painting was done, but says that in the late 1940s, it became a funeral parlor. Over the years, the building has been home to more restaurants and, for a time, a porn store. (Vigor says the wooden bar was used as the checkout counter.)
He and Uslu also talked to elderly residents of the neighborhood, and they recalled the building housing a diner in the 1940s.
“If you see the painting and you see the restaurant, everything matches,” Vigor says.
Historians, however, aren’t so sure.
The setting for “Nighthawks” has long been a subject of curiosity, and several spots in the West Village have been identified over the years as likely possibilities.
The most accepted location is Mulry Square, a small triangular lot on Greenwich Avenue at Seventh Avenue South. Hopper expert Gail Levin had pinpointed this spot in her book “Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.” When tour buses drive by Mulry Square, the guides point out the Hopper connection.
But it’s a myth, says Jeremiah Moss, whose blog Vanishing New York has investigated probable locations for the Hopper painting.
Moss looked into Mulry Square and found that a gas station, not a diner, sat on the land when Hopper created the famous painting.
Several other triangular lots in the Village have also stoked speculation, but, using archival photos, Moss discovered none was home to a diner similar to “Nighthawks.”
The artist himself won’t be much help, as he’s been dead since 1967. In life, the only clue he gave about “Nighthawks” was that it “was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.”
That vague statement presents a problem for Classic’s Cafe, because the restaurant is on Greenwich Street, not Avenue.
“If you go to Greenwich Avenue, there’s nothing there,” Vigor says, discounting the other speculated locations.
“We know that Hopper spent a lot of time in the area around Mulry Square,” Moss says. “He spent a lot of time at the Loew’s Sheridan Theatre that was right there. Greenwich Street was not his main thoroughfare.”
Another hurdle for Classic’s is that the restaurant doesn’t have quite the same design as the one in “Nighthawks.” In particular, it lacks the single piece of curved glass that wraps around its point.
It’s quite possible that the only place the “Nighthawks” diner existed was in the artist’s head.
“With more digging, I came to the conclusion that there never was a diner. It didn’t exist,” Moss says. “Hopper took pieces from different locations, and it was out of his imagination.”
Whitney Museum curator Carter Foster has also said that “Nighthawks” is most likely not based on a single location and is instead a mash-up of various real buildings, including the Flatiron Building (which has a curved glass front).
Hopper also suggested the work was not painted straight from life. He once said, “I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Whatever the truth is, the revelation is a plus in one respect. Business has picked up at Classic’s, and several people — mostly elderly — have wandered in to take a look.
On the downside, the landlord is so delighted by the potential Hopper connection, he’s raising the restaurant’s rent.