Greenwich Village, New York
January 30th 2009 22:12
New York, they say, is a series of villages, each with its own distinctive character. This is what makes it so diverse and endlessly fascinating. But of all the villages in the Big Apple, none is more famous and interesting than Greenwich Village.
The American Indians called the patch land which lies between 14th Street, Houston Street, Broadway and the Hudson River Sapokanikan, or tobacco field. In the 17th century, the Dutch arrived and the farmers settled at Sapokanikan named it Noortwyck. In 1664 the British invaded, ousted the Dutch and established their city of New York nearby. Noortwyck became the site of the city cemetery. Still the former Dutch hamlet continued to develop until it officially became the village of Grin’wich in 1713. In 1822 a yellow fever epidemic in the city brought a new wave of settlers to Greenwich Village. It grew. At the same time New York was advancing to meet it and within a decade had absorbed it – the burial ground along with the narrow, oddly angled streets whose names remembered early villagers. The old burial ground became Washington Military Parade Ground and by the 1830s the surrounding streets were some of New York’s most desirable addresses, lined with respectable terraced housing. A few years later the parade ground was developed as a public park and to mark the anniversary of George Washington’s death the landmark arch was built. Soon Washington Square became the heart and centre of the village.
In 1831 New York University was established at the edge of Washington Square. It was the brainchild of Albert Gallatin, secretary of the Treasury under President Thomas Jefferson. His aim was to found “in this immense and fast-growing city …a system of rational and practical education fitting for all and graciously open to all”. The new university attracted scholars and intellectuals, many of them from outside the upper classes who had traditionally filled the universities and furthermore free of their social. Around them gathered the artists, the actors, the musicians, writers and the avant garde set who were to forge Greenwich Village’s fame.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Greenwich Village was an enclave of culture. In 1914, Gertrude Whitney opened the Whitney studio Club, where emerging artists could exhibit their works at 8 West 8th Street. In 1931 it became the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1936 abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman set up an art school in West 9th Street and taught there until 1958. In 1964, when the Whitney moved to its present location, 8 West 8th Street became home to the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, founded by artist Mercedes Matter.
The performing arts thrived. Isadora Duncan, the matriarch of modern dance, lived and worked from the Village. Iconic New York Theatres opened, like the Cherry Lane and the Astor Place. Music flourished. Jazz took root here in its early days and by the 1950s Greenwich Village was New York’s centre of underground jazz. With the 1960s came folk music and the truly great names of the genre all seem to have got their start in Greenwich Village. The Mamas and the Papas met here. Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez and Tom Paxton found fame here. Bob Dylan wrote and debuted most of his first, timeless greats in Greenwich Village. Nina Simone, Barbra Streisand, Simon and Garfunkel, The Velvet Underground and the legendary Jimi Hendrix were all talents “born” in the Village. Then, of course, there were the Village People. Music clubs proliferated – the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, Café Wha, the Bitter End and the Lion’s Den.
Many writers, too, made their homes in Greenwich Village, including the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Dylan Thomas lived here and collapsed while on a bender at the Whitehorse Tavern in 1953. Works of literature were set in the village, most notably those of poet Allen Ginsburg and novelists William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Village bookstores and publications reflected the diverse and (for those times) tolerant character of the community. The Oscar Wilde bookshop, established in Greenwich Village in 1967 is the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the world. The news weekly, the Village Voice, was the counterculture mouthpiece, the watchdog and critic of stale, stuffy old Middle America.
From the beginning, Greenwich Village had been a haven for a Bohemian set who disregarded conventional values and mores. One such was the French painter Marcel Duchamp struck a revolutionary blow by launching balloons from the Washington Square Arch and declaring Greenwich Village an independent state. In the 1950s a new and different kind of revolutionary, on the run from mainstream society and its oppressive conventions, sought refuge in the tolerant streets of Greenwich Village. These were students, writers, artists, musicians, idealists and free thinkers who would soon come to be known as the Beat Generation, then the Beats, then Beatniks. They prepared the ground and sowed the seeds of the great cultural and social revolution which was to follow in the next decade – the hippie movement. And following that, the village became the epi-centre of Gay Liberation.
This then was my quest when I headed down to Greenwich Village on that grey day last October. I was looking for that 300 year old village with a hodge-podge of streets and Washington Square as its green heart. I was searching for that cultural enclave where Gertrude Whitney had made a space for American art and where Isadora Duncan had danced as no-one had before. I was looking for those streets, where Bob Dylan had walked, that club where Jimi Hendrix had played, those places and those characters from the beat generation that I had found in the Kerouac novels I’d read a lifetime ago and a world away. And did I find it?
Greenwich Village streets are still old village streets, anomolies in Modern New York’s grid of numbered roads they are narrow, mismatched and named for village fathers – Mercer, Bleecker and Leroy. Nor have the skyscrapers of Midtown and Downtown Manhattan colonized the landscape. Restricted development has safeguarded the mid-rise apartments, criss-crossed with iron fire-escapes, the terraced housing and the one-family walk-ups. However behind the façades, many vast condominiums have swallowed up whole blocks. For Greenwich Village is now more the domain of celebrities and millionaires who have made it, like actress Uma Thurman and Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Magazine, than unknown artists and rising stars.
Historic Washington Square Park is still the centre and heart of the neighborhood. Students still lounge on its lawns. Ideas are still thrashed out on its benches. But a new age has seen the rise of new leisure pastimes and new playgrounds, like “the Cage”, the basketball courts above the sixth Avenue subway station where the New York streetball competition takes place.
The village is still a cultural enclave. Theatre and music are thriving. The Astor Place Theatre lives on, now as the home of the Blue Man Group. The Village Vanguard and The Blue Note still feature the big names of jazz. At Café Wha, The Bitter End and The Lion’s Den new legends are born. And now Greenwich Village has its own orchestra. The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture still remains, on that hallowed ground on West 8th Street. Galleries and exhibition spaces abound. The Oscar Wilde bookstore is still trading and around it the Gay community has blossomed. The Village Voice is still strong, still putting the alternative view, still keeping watch on the system, although it speaks now from pages padded with ads for call girls and phone sex.
The golden ages of bohemians and hippies have passed and their disembodied costumes hang in a host of Vintage fashion shops in Bleecker Street. They are picked up for startling sums by a new generation of non-conformists - neo-beats, born again hippies and Hendrix look-alikes. They come out in force for the annual Village Halloween Parade where the spectrum of the village’s diversity is displayed through the streets in a mile long file.
So although, old villagers would claim that much as been lost, much has been saved, at least for the outsider, (the tourist, in fact) like me. The village is still emphatically a village. The streets are vibrant. The people are colourful and if not revolutionary they are at least non-conformist. Billboards and posters show that things are happening here – creative, artistic things. There’s an air about the place that suggests that anything is possible. And to me it looked like a great place to live and work.
Greenwich Village
The American Indians called the patch land which lies between 14th Street, Houston Street, Broadway and the Hudson River Sapokanikan, or tobacco field. In the 17th century, the Dutch arrived and the farmers settled at Sapokanikan named it Noortwyck. In 1664 the British invaded, ousted the Dutch and established their city of New York nearby. Noortwyck became the site of the city cemetery. Still the former Dutch hamlet continued to develop until it officially became the village of Grin’wich in 1713. In 1822 a yellow fever epidemic in the city brought a new wave of settlers to Greenwich Village. It grew. At the same time New York was advancing to meet it and within a decade had absorbed it – the burial ground along with the narrow, oddly angled streets whose names remembered early villagers. The old burial ground became Washington Military Parade Ground and by the 1830s the surrounding streets were some of New York’s most desirable addresses, lined with respectable terraced housing. A few years later the parade ground was developed as a public park and to mark the anniversary of George Washington’s death the landmark arch was built. Soon Washington Square became the heart and centre of the village.
Washington Square Park
In 1831 New York University was established at the edge of Washington Square. It was the brainchild of Albert Gallatin, secretary of the Treasury under President Thomas Jefferson. His aim was to found “in this immense and fast-growing city …a system of rational and practical education fitting for all and graciously open to all”. The new university attracted scholars and intellectuals, many of them from outside the upper classes who had traditionally filled the universities and furthermore free of their social. Around them gathered the artists, the actors, the musicians, writers and the avant garde set who were to forge Greenwich Village’s fame.
Cafe Wha
By the beginning of the 20th century, Greenwich Village was an enclave of culture. In 1914, Gertrude Whitney opened the Whitney studio Club, where emerging artists could exhibit their works at 8 West 8th Street. In 1931 it became the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1936 abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman set up an art school in West 9th Street and taught there until 1958. In 1964, when the Whitney moved to its present location, 8 West 8th Street became home to the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, founded by artist Mercedes Matter.
Outside Cafe Wha
The performing arts thrived. Isadora Duncan, the matriarch of modern dance, lived and worked from the Village. Iconic New York Theatres opened, like the Cherry Lane and the Astor Place. Music flourished. Jazz took root here in its early days and by the 1950s Greenwich Village was New York’s centre of underground jazz. With the 1960s came folk music and the truly great names of the genre all seem to have got their start in Greenwich Village. The Mamas and the Papas met here. Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez and Tom Paxton found fame here. Bob Dylan wrote and debuted most of his first, timeless greats in Greenwich Village. Nina Simone, Barbra Streisand, Simon and Garfunkel, The Velvet Underground and the legendary Jimi Hendrix were all talents “born” in the Village. Then, of course, there were the Village People. Music clubs proliferated – the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, Café Wha, the Bitter End and the Lion’s Den.
The NYU Bookshop
Many writers, too, made their homes in Greenwich Village, including the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Dylan Thomas lived here and collapsed while on a bender at the Whitehorse Tavern in 1953. Works of literature were set in the village, most notably those of poet Allen Ginsburg and novelists William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Village bookstores and publications reflected the diverse and (for those times) tolerant character of the community. The Oscar Wilde bookshop, established in Greenwich Village in 1967 is the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the world. The news weekly, the Village Voice, was the counterculture mouthpiece, the watchdog and critic of stale, stuffy old Middle America.
Greenwich Village Club
From the beginning, Greenwich Village had been a haven for a Bohemian set who disregarded conventional values and mores. One such was the French painter Marcel Duchamp struck a revolutionary blow by launching balloons from the Washington Square Arch and declaring Greenwich Village an independent state. In the 1950s a new and different kind of revolutionary, on the run from mainstream society and its oppressive conventions, sought refuge in the tolerant streets of Greenwich Village. These were students, writers, artists, musicians, idealists and free thinkers who would soon come to be known as the Beat Generation, then the Beats, then Beatniks. They prepared the ground and sowed the seeds of the great cultural and social revolution which was to follow in the next decade – the hippie movement. And following that, the village became the epi-centre of Gay Liberation.
The streets of Greenwich Village
This then was my quest when I headed down to Greenwich Village on that grey day last October. I was looking for that 300 year old village with a hodge-podge of streets and Washington Square as its green heart. I was searching for that cultural enclave where Gertrude Whitney had made a space for American art and where Isadora Duncan had danced as no-one had before. I was looking for those streets, where Bob Dylan had walked, that club where Jimi Hendrix had played, those places and those characters from the beat generation that I had found in the Kerouac novels I’d read a lifetime ago and a world away. And did I find it?
Bleecker Street
Greenwich Village streets are still old village streets, anomolies in Modern New York’s grid of numbered roads they are narrow, mismatched and named for village fathers – Mercer, Bleecker and Leroy. Nor have the skyscrapers of Midtown and Downtown Manhattan colonized the landscape. Restricted development has safeguarded the mid-rise apartments, criss-crossed with iron fire-escapes, the terraced housing and the one-family walk-ups. However behind the façades, many vast condominiums have swallowed up whole blocks. For Greenwich Village is now more the domain of celebrities and millionaires who have made it, like actress Uma Thurman and Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Magazine, than unknown artists and rising stars.
A Greenwich Village appartment building
Historic Washington Square Park is still the centre and heart of the neighborhood. Students still lounge on its lawns. Ideas are still thrashed out on its benches. But a new age has seen the rise of new leisure pastimes and new playgrounds, like “the Cage”, the basketball courts above the sixth Avenue subway station where the New York streetball competition takes place.
The village is still a cultural enclave. Theatre and music are thriving. The Astor Place Theatre lives on, now as the home of the Blue Man Group. The Village Vanguard and The Blue Note still feature the big names of jazz. At Café Wha, The Bitter End and The Lion’s Den new legends are born. And now Greenwich Village has its own orchestra. The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture still remains, on that hallowed ground on West 8th Street. Galleries and exhibition spaces abound. The Oscar Wilde bookstore is still trading and around it the Gay community has blossomed. The Village Voice is still strong, still putting the alternative view, still keeping watch on the system, although it speaks now from pages padded with ads for call girls and phone sex.
Vintage in the Village
The golden ages of bohemians and hippies have passed and their disembodied costumes hang in a host of Vintage fashion shops in Bleecker Street. They are picked up for startling sums by a new generation of non-conformists - neo-beats, born again hippies and Hendrix look-alikes. They come out in force for the annual Village Halloween Parade where the spectrum of the village’s diversity is displayed through the streets in a mile long file.
So although, old villagers would claim that much as been lost, much has been saved, at least for the outsider, (the tourist, in fact) like me. The village is still emphatically a village. The streets are vibrant. The people are colourful and if not revolutionary they are at least non-conformist. Billboards and posters show that things are happening here – creative, artistic things. There’s an air about the place that suggests that anything is possible. And to me it looked like a great place to live and work.
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