I collected every issue from the Village Voice's final year
(without knowing it was the final year)
In a newsletter last week, I used clips from old editions of the Village Voice using its online archive to pretend that I lived in Greenwich Village in the 1960s or 70s.
But actually, in 2017 I did read and collect every issue of the Village Voice (which, unknowingly to me, was its last year as a print publication.)
It was part of my Wednesday morning routine, to grab the new issues from the red newsrack on the corner. And I really looked forward to it. I’m not sure why I kept them all— I think part of the appeal was that so many of the covers felt like artwork to me.
So it was a bit of a bummer when I read that the Voice would cease publishing the print editions in the summer of 2017. (It stopped creating new content altogether the following year.)
I maybe shouldn’t be admitting the following, since this is a digital newsletter. But I consider myself an old soul of sorts and have an affinity for print and physical copies of reading material. I remember picking up the last issue — of course with Bob Dylan on the cover — and reading the slightly amusing incongruous headline on the first page: “You’re Probably Reading This On an Electronic Device.” I was not.
The first issue of the Village Voice, with all 12 of its DIY style pages, was put out on October 26, 1955. It’s commonly called the country’s first alternative paper. It gave voices to new writers in new kinds of ways.
So what exactly is my point here?
Uh… well, I guess I’m not exactly sure.
Maybe because Greenwich Village feels so heavily rooted in place, it can be easy to forget the things which spawned from that place and lasted in physicality for decades. Or the permanent changes those things had on the landscape of a whole industry. Though the Village Voice had changes and controversies along the way, more than 60 years after its inception, and in my tech-heavy generation, it brought me a lot of joy to grab each week’s new issue.