Greenwich Village: Usually just called the Village, never just called Greenwich (that’s a suburb in Connecticut), is different than the rest of Manhattan. In many ways. But to someone completely new to the city, the first noticeable difference has got to be the neighborhood’s geographical layout.
The other neighbors, for the most part, dutifully follow a standard grid system (26th Street north to 27th Street, 28th Street… 10th Avenue goes east to 9th Avenue, 8th Avenue…) Dip below 14th Street all the way west to the Hudson River though, you’ll find 8th Avenue jutting its way downtown in a curved line like an unhinged skier, miraculously turning into Hudson Street, which is intersected from North to South by Perry Street then Charles Street then West 10th Street— phew the grid again.
Just kidding. South of West 10th Street is Christopher Street.
You’re still with me, right?
Welcome to the Village’s rebellion to the grid system. Here, dizzying streets break off at random and meander in whichever way they choose. Frustrating to the navigator, but also, it’s crossed my mind, a manifestation of the Village itself. The closest thing to an embodiment of the defiant disposition that Greenwich Village became known for. Creativity in the chaos. Fundamentally unique. There’s no clear path, yet somehow it all flows together. And the confusion of what exactly is going on here is placated by the very specific, undeniable, ubiquitous charm… It’s okay to be lost here.
Or maybe that’s just me trying to sound like one of the great bohemian figures who established the Village as said paradise.
What gives you the write?
The truth? It’s scary to write about the Village. Because let’s talk about some of those “bohemian” figures.
Allen Ginsberg, Eugene O’Neill, Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jackson Pollock, Patti Smith, Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker, Norman Mailer, Nina Simone, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Jane Jacobs, Richie Havens, Dorothy Day, Frank O'Hara, Eric Andersen, Edward Albee, Mark Twain.
For a .289 sq mi chunk of city, there a lot of people with a lot of opinions on it. Writing about Greenwich Village is like writing an elegy for someone who isn’t dead and who you didn’t know well while alive. A voice utters: What gives you permission?
So why I am. Simply put, a persistent infatuation. With all those people listed above. With the lives they lived. Have you ever been nostalgic for a time and place you didn’t exist in? My mom, raised in the Bronx, would tell me all she and her friends wanted to do on the weekends was venture down the West Village.
Let me be blunt/frank: I don’t live there. For starters (and enders I guess), I can’t afford it. To find my apartment, jump across the East River to Brooklyn.
But you’ll also just as likely find me hopping off the 2 train at West 14th and walking down (or left, right, um sorta sideways… er, we’ve been over this. The streets are weird.) I’m not sure what it makes me, to be one of those people who became enchanted with the version of Greenwich Village as a mecca of creatives, brushing elbows and clinking glasses of cheap wine as they unwittingly carved out the radical enclave that would define the neighborhood. I do know I’m not the only one who got hooked on this seemingly fictitious place.
I also know that any singular concept of what Greenwich Village is today is far less congruent than it’s been in the past. Google it, you’ll find headlines like, “Greenwich Village: Once Offbeat, Now Upscale” and “What Happened to the West Village?”
It’s true. I get it. It’s changed. Cafes and bookshops have gone, drinks and apartments are expensive. Artists who live there now have already made it— a home in the neighborhood is their prize, not their foundation.
Still, taking those strolls through the nonsensical streets, you feel it. I feel it. Ghosts, spirits, mystical forces… whatever you want to call it. Thanks to organizations like the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has protected the neighborhood from rezoning and has “successfully advocated for the landmark designation of more than 1,250 buildings,” it maintains its stature physically. As more high-rises spring up north and south, the townhouses and brownstones lining the streets of the Village remain the same.
Touring a movie set doesn’t make the movie real
Duh. Just because Bob Dylan’s 1961 apartment on 161 W 4th Street looks the same, doesn’t mean if I put my ear to the door I’ll hear him strewing together songs for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (for which the album cover was taken just around the corner.)
In his book on the history of Greenwich Village, John Strausbaugh writes,
“The culture engine may return to the Village in some new form someday; the death of the arty-bohemian Village has been declared prematurely many times in the past. Indeed every generation who misspent their youth there declared it over by the time they’d grown out of it.”
Given my curiosity with the what was, is, will be, I have to think that the cylinders in that engine are still moving. And if you find a compulsion to devour a particular place in every way a place can be devoured, well then writing about it is the only option.
So I’m revisiting and rediscovering the characters and places that turned Greenwich Village from a neighborhood into an icon.
I’m exploring how it got to where it is today— the major changes as well as the preservation.
I’m paying attention to what is going on in the neighborhood right now; What the sense of community is and where it’s fostered.
I’m looking at what future changes abound, how to get involved in making them happen, or how to speak out against them if they seem detrimental.
And you care because…
Maybe you don’t. Or maybe you’re interested in the same things as me. In which case, I’d love for you to follow along.
In the August 13th, 1958 issue of the now-defunct Village Voice, a survey was done on where the “hipniks” slept. It reads:
“Years ago the Bohemian Village was a compact network of streets running west from MacDougal. Today it is a vast, spread-out playground for the cool. But… is it home? That was what we wanted to know. Where do the young people brew their instant coffee, brush their teeth (everyone in America brushes his teeth, even the bohemians, our surveyors discovered), and have friends over to midnight lunch?”
A few weeks ago, I stopped to look at the bulletin outside The Bitter End— the landmark establishment on Bleecker Street between Thompson and Laguardia. The week’s event calendar posted on a bright yellow piece of paper included a New York Songwriters Collective, an Acoustic Open Mic, and a Singer/Songwriter Session. A flyer for a Brooklyn based band called Strange Weather advertised their upcoming show. There was a psychedelic poster for Billy Hector. Also pinned up with white thumbtacks, a plain sheet of white paper with small black font. At the top it read, “We All Played The Bitter End.” Below, a long list— four columns— names like John Denver, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, George Carlin, Bob Dylan, Bo Diddley, Etta James, Kris Kristofferson… it goes on.
The Village is a place with bones made for energizing and engaging a community. It’s a place that stays with you even when you move away. If you read an article about a particular time or spot and scroll down, you’ll often find reminiscing comments by people who now live elsewhere on summers they spent or studios they lived in. Maybe you’re a current resident who has lived to see the changes in real-time; maybe you’ve only been a few years.
Or perhaps you don’t live in New York at all, but you once read an article or saw a movie. Or your mom told you about weekends venturing downtown from her home in the Bronx to walk along MacDougal Street and feel alive. And that made you feel alive too.
There’s so much that’s happened, that’s happening, that’s going to happen.