HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

James Cagney, Margaret Hamilton, and Emma Thursby

New York, New York, New York

Marker Inscription

James Cagney 1899-1986 Actor, who set the standard for gangster roles in movies such as Angels With Dirty Faces and The Public Enemy, lived here from 1965 to 1968. Other residents were actress Margaret Hamilton and soprano Emma Thursby.

Erected by Historic Landmarks Preservation Center

The Story

This New York building sheltered a remarkable trio of American performers. James Cagney (1899–1986), who set the movie standard for the tough gangster in films like The Public Enemy and Angels With Dirty Faces, lived here in the late 1960s. Its other residents included actress Margaret Hamilton—forever the Wicked Witch of the West—and the celebrated 19th-century soprano Emma Thursby.

Why it matters

The address is a small monument to the American entertainment tradition, linking the golden age of film and stage to the city that helped launch it.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

To understand this address, picture New York in the decades when it became the beating heart of American entertainment. By the turn of the twentieth century, the city was already the country's stage — a place where opera houses, vaudeville halls, and later movie studios and Broadway theaters drew ambitious performers from every corner of the nation and the world.

The marker gathers three careers that together span that long arc. A celebrated soprano belongs to the nineteenth-century world of the concert hall, when a singer's fame traveled by tour and by reputation rather than by recording. The two screen actors belong to the era that followed, when film turned regional and stage talent into faces known in every American town.

What ties them to a single New York building is not a shared moment but a shared city. This was the kind of place performers gravitated to — close to the work, close to one another, in a metropolis that had made itself indispensable to anyone who wanted to be seen and heard.

People & events

James Cagney, who lived here in the late 1960s, was one of the defining actors of Hollywood's golden age. As the marker notes, he set the standard for the movie gangster in pictures like The Public Enemy and Angels With Dirty Faces — a compact, electric performer whose tough-guy roles became part of the American imagination.

Among the building's other residents was Margaret Hamilton, an actress who earned a peculiar kind of immortality. Though she worked steadily across stage and screen, she is remembered above all for a single unforgettable villain — a role so vivid that generations of children have known her face without ever knowing her name.

The third figure, soprano Emma Thursby, carries the story back into the nineteenth century, when American concert singers built their reputations on the strength of the voice alone. That three such distinct performers should be remembered at one address is the marker's quiet point: this was a home to people who spent their lives in front of audiences.

Its place in the American story

American entertainment did not appear all at once. It grew from the concert stage into vaudeville, and from vaudeville into film and modern theater — and New York sat at the center of nearly every stage of that growth. A building that sheltered performers across these worlds is a small register of that history.

The screen gangster that Cagney helped define is one of the enduring American character types, as recognizable abroad as at home. It shaped how audiences everywhere imagined the American city — its dangers, its swagger, its hard-won codes. That an art form born in nickelodeons could produce figures of such lasting cultural weight is part of the larger story this address touches.

Markers like this one, placed on ordinary buildings, remind us that cultural history is not made only in studios and theaters. It is also lived in the apartments and neighborhoods where the people who made that culture came home at night.

If you visit

This is a place to slow down and look up. The marker sits on a working New York building, the kind you might walk past a hundred times without a second glance, and its whole purpose is to make you stop and reconsider what an ordinary façade can hold.

Stand across the street for a moment and take in the block as a whole. You are in the part of the country that made itself the capital of American performance, and this address is one small node in that vast network — a single door that opened, at different times, for people whose work reached millions.

If you're building a day around the city's cultural history, let this be a punctuation mark between the grander landmarks. It pairs well with a walk past the theaters and concert halls that gave performers like these their livelihoods, and it rewards the traveler who likes discovering that the famous once lived on quiet streets, just like everyone else.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · James Cagney
  • · Margaret Hamilton
  • · Emma Thursby

Themes & tags

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