Jennifer Aniston Proposal at Storied Village Restaurant
Blue Hill, the one-star Michelin rated restaurant located on Washington Place between Washington Square Park and Sixth Avenue, just added another star to its roster. On August 10, actor-screenwriter Justin Theroux proposed to Jennifer Aniston during a quiet dinner at the Greenwich Village restaurant. Blue Hill, which features farm-to-table dining, has been featured in the entertainment news since. So we thought we’d take this opportunity to explore the restaurant’s home at 75 Washington Place a little further.
The Blue Hill website notes that the “restaurant occupies a landmark ‘speakeasy’ just off Washington Square Park.” Opened in 2000, patrons descend three steps below street level to access the lovely interior of this landmarked Greek Revival townhouse built in 1847. A little digging revealed that the restaurant Marta occupied this space from at least 1921 to 1993.
While there are many mentions of Marta in advertisements from the 1950s onward, it is a bit harder to find references to the restaurant before then. There is a reference to Marta’s in the 2005 book Bloom’s Literary Places: New York. Apparently, it was the preferred eatery of such writers as John Dos Passos, Elinor Wylie, and William Rose Benét. But there is no mention of the place as a speakeasy. A group called the Quiet Birdman, a private club for aviators, met at Marta a few times in 1921. There records indicate they were asked to take their meetings elsewhere because they were too noisy.
An advertisement for the restaurant in the 1959 Greenwich Village Guide, recently featured here on the Off the Grid, mentions the food is French and Italian, two ethnicities that made this neighborhood home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. GVSHP published a thorough study of the neighborhood’s Italian history as part of our efforts to landmark the South Village neighborhood.
There are also various mentions of the restaurant in New York Magazine, including a listing from the February 1992 edition that lists the menu as casual, northern Italian. So while its speakeasy history may never be solved, the space has certainly had a long life as a restaurant.
Looking for more Aniston-connected reading? Check out this Off the Grid post on the Friends-Village connection from last fall.