Corner Bistro, which has sat in a creaky, centuries-old three-story building on the leafy corner of West Fourth Street and Jane Street, in the West Village, since 1961, has never had the artistic cred of certain other downtown bars.
Unlike the now bulldozed Cedar Tavern, it was not the spot where de Kooning and Pollock crammed into booths during the 50s and 60s and brooded over bottles of cheap Beaujolais, in between posing for Life-magazine shoots. Nor does it possess the literary lineage of its haphazardly gentrified neighbor to the west, the White Horse Tavern (most of whose writerly cachet seems generated by tourists eager to see where Dylan Thomas reportedly drank himself to death).
