What happened here?
On a grey February afternoon in 1963, CBS photographer Don Hunstein led Bob Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo out of their apartment at 161 West 4th Street and around the corner to Jones Street — a single short block in Greenwich Village — for what became one of the most recognisable album cover photographs in music history. Dylan, 21, wore a thin jacket against the winter cold. Rotolo, in a green Loden coat she'd bought in Italy, leaned into him. They walked toward the camera down the middle of the snowy street.
The image captured something that felt entirely unposed — two young people, in love, in the Village, in the early 1960s, at the very moment folk music was becoming something urgent. The album it graced, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, contained 'Blowin' in the Wind', 'Girl from the North Country', and 'Don't Think Twice, It's All Right'. It was Dylan's second album and the one that announced him to the world.
Jones Street today is a quiet, tree-lined block barely a hundred metres long, nestled between Bleecker and West 4th Street. The buildings look almost identical to how they appear on the cover. Fans regularly recreate the photograph on the same stretch of road, walking arm-in-arm toward the intersection exactly as Dylan and Rotolo did, and the image they produce is immediately recognisable to anyone who knows the original.
Plan your visit
No details provided for this visit.