161 W 4th Street — Dylan and Suze Rotolo's apartment

Dylan moved into the apartment at 161 West 4th Street in December 1961, shortly after recording his debut album for Columbia Records. He shared the 4th-floor apartment with girlfriend Suze Rotolo, and the building was home to folk-scene fixture Miki Isaacson, whose living room served as a permanent gathering place for folk singers and writers. It was in this apartment and on the streets surrounding it that Dylan wrote the bulk of his landmark second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), including 'Blowin' in the Wind', 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall', and 'Masters of War'. The Jones Street location of the Freewheelin' cover photo (two blocks away) is where the photograph was taken, but this was the apartment the couple walked out of that February 1963 morning for the shoot. The West 4th Street address was Dylan's primary creative base during the most generative stretch of his early career -- a period that also saw him becoming a central figure in the civil rights movement through his songwriting. Suze Rotolo, who appears on the Freewheelin' cover, wrote in her memoir A Freewheelin' Time that the apartment was small, cold, and alive with music and political conversation. The building at 161 West 4th Street still stands and remains a residential apartment building. It is not officially landmarked for its Dylan connection, though it appears on virtually every self-guided Bob Dylan Greenwich Village walking tour. The building's facade is largely unchanged since the early 1960s and sits within the Greenwich Village Historic District.