161 West 4th Street — Bob Dylan's Greenwich Village Apartment

161 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village was one of Bob Dylan's early New York addresses, associated with his first years in the city from 1961. Dylan arrived in New York from Minnesota in January 1961, reportedly to visit Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Hospital in New Jersey, and quickly embedded himself in the Village folk scene centred around the coffeehouses of MacDougal Street and Bleecker Street — Café Wha?, the Gaslight, Folk City. He lived in various apartments in the neighbourhood during these years, relying on the hospitality of friends and the loose community of folkies who gathered in the Village.

The Greenwich Village of the early 1960s was the most important incubator of the folk revival in America. The streets around 4th Street, MacDougal, and Bleecker were dense with performance venues, record shops, bookstores, and the apartments of musicians, poets, and activists. Dylan absorbed the folk tradition at extraordinary speed, moved through Woody Guthrie's songbook, and began writing original material that drew on folk forms but pointed toward something entirely new. He was signed to Columbia Records in October 1961 by John Hammond and released his debut album in March 1962.

The neighbourhood associations are thoroughly documented in Dylan biography and in his own memoir Chronicles, Volume One. The streets of Greenwich Village that shaped his early style — including the Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street, where he performed regularly — have changed substantially since the early 1960s, but the area remains closely identified with Dylan's origins. Various commemorative projects have marked key locations in the neighbourhood.