The San Remo, an Italian restaurant/ coffee house/bar on Bleecker and Macdougal, had "pressed-tin ceiling, black-and-white tile floors and dollar salads with all the bread and butter you could eat" according to the PBS notes on its recent production "Collected Stories." The plate glass window in front opened the place to the street. Originally a working class neighborhood hangout, the proprietors and customers tried to prevent its takeover by the Bohemian set, at times throwing unwanted customers out and even roughing them up. James Baldwin, who was African-American, gay and a writer, credits himself for integrating it in the 1940s after being thrown out several times. He later wrote that once he was in, he was in and the owners and regulars defended him from outsiders. In 1946 it attracted the younger set of writers, less politically active than the older Village crowd and more studiously alienated. Many in the crowd smoked pot and experimented with drugs. It became New York central for the emerging beats who mixed here with musicians from the nearby jazz clubs and some of the pre-war Village leftist set. It was the place that James Agee chose to drink himself to death. Gay writers also patronized the place. Existentialism, newly imported from France was the hot topic in April 1946. Some people, such as Bayard Ruskin, were less impressed with the crowd, seeing the San Remo as a place where people fervently argued over books they had not read and plays they had not seen. In the mid-fifties an invading wave of tourists drove most of the writers away.
The Waldorf Cafeteria, a shabby place with lighting that some said made the place look like a waxwork while others compared it to a public bathroom, was a gathering spot in the 1940s for the abstract expressionists like Willem De Kooning who were allowed to hang out for hours as they discussed and argued art. Later in the decade the proprietor grew less fond of these argumentative table hogs. Writers also frequented the place and it attracted a diverse lot after the bars had closed. The owner had "Out of Order" signs on the bathrooms to discourage the use of his place as a pit stop for the neighborhood drunks.
Romany Marie ran a succession of Village restaurants and saloons from 1917 through the 1950s that were favorite spots for the Bohemian set to gather. In 1946 Romany Marie's was on Grove Street, off Sheridan Square, next to Marie's Crisis, another Village hotspot. Wikipedia has an extensive entry on her. She was the subject of a biography, Romany Marie: The Queen of Greenwich Village , inspired characters in several novels and was painted by John French Sloane. A former anarchist, she was described as an "impressively handsome woman." Despite the nickname she was not a Gypsy but a Romanian of Jewish ancestry.
Abstract Expressionists painters gathered at the Cedar Tavern, which had moved the year before from Eighth Street to University Place. The lack of atmosphere kept the tourists and the uptown crowd away.