That long-haired, queerly dressed young man, with a parcel under his arm, who passed you just then, is an artist, and his home is in the attic of that tall house from which you saw him pass out. It is a cheerless place, indeed, and hardly the home for a devotee of the Muse; but . . . so long as he has the necessaries of life and a lot of jolly good fellows to smoke and drink and chat with him in that lofty dwelling place of his, he is content to take life as he finds it.
If you look up to the second floor, you may see a pretty, but not over fresh looking young woman, gazing down into the street . . . Her dress is a little flashy, and the traces of rouge are rather too strong on her face, but it is not a bad face. You may see her to-night at the Theatre, where she is the favorite. Not much of an actress, really, but very clever at winning over the dramatic critics of the great dailies who are but men, and not proof against feminine arts . . .
In the same house is a fine-looking woman, not young, but not old. Her “husband” has taken lodgings here for her, but he comes to see her only at intervals, and he is not counted in the landlady’s bill . . . Bleecker street never asks madame for her marriage certificate.
As the wealthy moved up and out of the area, bohemians commandeered the carriage houses behind their homes as living and working spaces. The rows of little carriage houses on MacDougal Alley and Washington Mews came to represent the height of boho charm. It was in just such a carriage house that, early in the twentieth century, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would bring together the worlds of great wealth and artistic endeavor. Gertrude was born into extraordinary affluence and prestige, great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. At twenty-one she entered into a dynastic union with the also unspeakably rich Harry Payne Whitney, descendant of Eli Whitney. Shortly after the marriage she began studying sculpture at the Art Students League and then in Paris, where Rodin was her teacher. In 1907 she and Harry started buying pieces of property in the Village. They began with a small studio on MacDougal Alley, where she held exhibitions by contemporary American artists. Next they bought 8 West Eighth Street behind it, knocking down the adjoining wall to make a larger space, the Whitney Studio. In the 1930s this evolved into the first location of the Whitney Museum.
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, FOURTEENTH STREET WAS THE FRONTIER of the built-up city. Above it, especially along Fifth and Second Avenues and around Union Square, was a kind of suburb for well-off New Yorkers in magnificent mansions and capacious brownstones featuring the latest in luxury conveniences: indoor plumbing, central heat, and gas light. After the war the rest of the city caught up and the wealthy fled still farther uptown. The area around Union Square and Fourteenth Street became a bustling zone of shopping, dining, and entertainments (licit and illicit) known as the Rialto. Theaters spread up Broadway; single-family brownstones became boardinghouses with street-level shops and mansions now housed private clubs; Tiffany, Brentano’s, and other large stores moved up to Union Square; and Fourteenth Street was lined with Huber’s Dime Museum, the popular German restaurant Luchow’s, Delmonico’s, F.A.O. Schwarz, the Hippodrome, Steinway Hall, the Academy of Music, Tammany Hall, and Tony Pastor’s variety theater. The area was also well known for its brothels and gambling dens, and it drew hordes of slummers to the northern edge of the Village in search of the seedy underbelly of life. Decent middle-class folk in the Village below Fourteenth Street constantly complained they could barely walk home from work with their morals intact. Over time, the hookers and whorehouses spread down the once elegant Fifth Avenue to meet up with the hookers and whorehouses down around Washington Square Park, making the whole area feel like one giant red-light district, contributing to the Village’s tawdry reputation at the turn of the century and forcing proper folks out.
Actors and all variety of entertainers hung out in Union Square and on Fourteenth Street, along with gamblers, bookies, “sporting youth,” and moneyed, slumming libertines, who made the Rialto not only a happy hunting ground for female prostitutes but “a favorite promenade of fairies,” according to one of them, the pseudonymous Ralph Werther. Werther’s Autobiography of an Androgyne was published by something called the Medico-Legal Journal in 1918, in an edition of one thousand copies available by mail order only to physicians, psychologists, sociologists, and others with a professional interest in the lives and habits of homosexuals. It earned no reviews or public interest. Werther, who also went by Earl Lind, Jennie June, and Pussie, laments, “I have been doomed to be a girl who must pass her earthly existence in a male body.” Born around 1873 to a well-off, well-educated family in a town an hour’s train ride from New York City, he says he dressed as a boy but in all other ways was a girl, and a nymphomaniac as well, with an intense and ceaseless craving to perform oral sex for boys. The other boys sometimes beat and humiliated him, setting a pathetic pattern for his life.
Coming to New York City to attend an unnamed university, he assumed a secret double life. By day he was an obedient, diligent student. At night he slipped off to join the ranks of promenading “fairies,” as effeminate homosexuals had been known for some time. He calculates that in a twelve-year period he engaged in “approximately sixteen hundred intimacies with about eight hundred different companions.” He insisted on being referred to as a female—not a woman, however, but a “baby-girl.” Since wearing female apparel in public was illegal, he wore men’s attire “in a distinctive manner, so as to be more readily recognized by my prey. Therefore unusually large neck bows and white gloves . . . The excessive wearing of gloves and the wearing of a red neck-tie are almost universal with high-class fairies.” Because he, like Whitman before him, “much preferred the rough to the gentleman, and the profane boozing libertine to the morally upright,” he started out slumming in the working-class immigrant areas of Hell’s Kitchen, the Bowery, and Little Italy. He met other transvestites who’d grown up in the slums, who used names that sound oddly like Warhol superstars: Grace Darling, Jersey Lily, Annie Laurie. Poor young males in those neighborhoods had very little access to female companionship except on the rare occasion when they could afford a prostitute, so they sometimes resorted to these impersonators. Like Whitman, too, Werther enjoyed the company of young express-company wagon drivers. He’d meet them at a pool parlor at Thompson and Canal Streets and walk with them over to the Hudson riverfront, where they’d climb into the back of a covered wagon parked for the night. (As we’ll see, using trucks parked along the river for sexual encounters continued through the 1970s.) It was a very dangerous game. Werther was robbed and beaten countless times and more than once gang-raped. He sought the help of physicians, who prescribed useless drugs to “cure” him. Finally at the age of twenty-seven he had himself castrated, and his “craze for fellatio” gradually decreased. He was forty-five when his autobiography was published, a moderately successful businessman, and he said then that his sex life had dwindled to virtual inactivity.
Werther doesn’t mention them but a few establishments in Greenwich Village were well known in the 1890s as spots where fairies plied their trade. The Slide, possibly the first drag bar in the city, was called “the wickedest place in New York” by the conservative New York Press in 1890. It was at 157 Bleecker Street between Sullivan and Thompson Streets, the site of the music club Kenny’s Castaways. At the Slide, male prostitutes with names like Princess Toto and Phoebe Pinafore—“effeminate, degraded and addicted to vices which are inhuman and unnatural,” according to the Press—sashayed around the bar and took their tricks down to the basement to service them. The authorities raided and shut down the Slide in 1892 due to “the unspeakable nature of the orgies practiced there,” but the owners of the subsequent bars in the building preserved much of the interior. The novelist Edmund White, who later set part of his historical novel Hotel de Dream at the Slide, moved to the Village in 1962. “I’d go there all the time in the evening,” he recalls. “It was always empty. It was this huge barn of place, and it had this staircase on the side going up to this very rickety balcony, which was condem
ned, but that’s where the gay prostitutes would sit, up there. The owner once let me go down in the basement and see the little rooms that prostitutes used.”
Nearby on West Third Street was the Golden Rule Pleasure Club. Charles Henry Parkhurst, the Presbyterian minister who in the 1890s was president of the reformist New York Society for the Prevention of Crime, visited the club on one of his fact-finding expeditions into the lower depths of depravity. Charles Gardner, the private detective who served as Parkhurst’s Virgil, recorded the evening in his 1894 book The Doctor and the Devil.
We entered the resort through the basement door, and as we did a “buzzer,” or automatic alarm, gave the proprietors of the house information that we were in the place. The proprietress, a woman known as “Scotch Ann,” greeted us . . .
The basement was fitted up into little rooms, by means of cheap partitions, which ran to the top of the ceiling from the floor. Each room contained a table and a couple of chairs, for the use of customers of the vile den. In each room sat a youth, whose face was painted, eye-brows blackened, and whose airs were those of a young girl. Each person talked in a high falsetto voice, and called the others by women’s names.
Reverend Parkhurst fled in horror. Other Village hangouts for “male degenerates” in the 1890s included the Black Rabbit on Bleecker Street and the Artistic Club on West Thirteenth Street.
And then there was Murray Hall, who died in an apartment on Sixth Avenue just up from the Jefferson Market Courthouse in 1901. Hall was not a sex worker but he did have a sexual secret. For a quarter of a century he’d been a widely known and liked figure in and around the Village. He got out the vote for Tammany Hall on many election days. He ran an employment agency and a bail bond business and, according to a New York Times report on his death, “had a reputation as a ‘man about town,’ a bon vivant, and all-around ‘good fellow.’ ” He could often be found playing poker and smoking cigars with his pals or drinking at the saloons. On one night of pub crawling around the Village he got out of hand and fought with a policeman. He spent a couple of hours in the MacDougal Street station before his politician pals sprung him. When he first showed up on the West Side he had a wife, who left him, complaining that he was always flirting with his female clients. He took a second wife, with whom he also fought about his roving eye. They had an adopted daughter, Minnie.
The kicker was, as the Times headline declared, “Murray Hall Fooled Many Shrewd Men.” He was in fact a woman, as Dr. William C. Gallagher of West Twelfth Street revealed when Hall died. She’d been suffering from breast cancer for several years but didn’t seek medical help for fear of outing herself. Dr. Gallagher first examined her about a year before she died. He and both of Hall’s “wives” had kept her secret while she lived; even Minnie, who was twenty-five, was shocked to hear her father was female. “If he’s a woman he’s the wonder of all the ages, sure’s you live,” one of the Tammany b’hoys said on hearing about it, “for no man could ever suspect it from his habits and actions.” Her real name, according to later reports, was Mary Anderson.
THE STUDENTS AND INTELLECTUALS ATTRACTED TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD by NYU—and, from 1860 on, by the new Cooper Union at Astor Place—continued to add to the Left Bank ambience. So did the French cafés, bistros, and brothels that surrounded the university, such that the area became known as Frenchtown and the Latin Quarter. In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, anyone looking for a taste of bohemia in New York made the pilgrimage to this area, to the Cafe de Paris, Au Chat Noir, the Taverne Alsacienne. West of the park, as Little Africa morphed into Little Italy, some restaurants there also promoted themselves, apparently with similar exaggeration, as prime spots for bohemian sightings.
Tourists would have had better luck up around Sixth Avenue north of Washington Square. Hunkered in the shadows and falling cinders of the Sixth Avenue Elevated from the late 1870s on, Sixth Avenue was one of the Village’s more downmarket thoroughfares, lined with dive bars and rough saloons, slophouses and storefronts—all of which the area’s artists and bohemians found a romantic attraction. The Tenth Street Studio, a brick barn of a building squatting in the middle of the block near Sixth Avenue, opened in 1858. Not a particularly attractive building, nevertheless it was a significant one. The first structure in America built specifically to house artists’ studios, it was a major catalyst for the Village’s growing reputation as an artists’ neighborhood. It was built by a wealthy Village banker and fan of the arts, and designed by Richard Morris Hunt, who also designed the Metropolitan Museum. Twenty-five studios surrounded a large central exhibition hall with gas lighting, sliding doors, and a glass skylight for a ceiling. Some artists lived and worked in their studios, some lived elsewhere. The building wasn’t a philanthropic support-your-local-artists gesture. It was a business venture. Artists rented their spaces, taught students, showed and hoped to sell their paintings and sculptures there, and visitors paid twenty-five cents to see exhibitions in the large space. A few of the premiere and highest-paid artists in New York had studios in the area in its early years, including Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford, and John LaFarge (who painted the large altarpiece in the Church of the Ascension at the Fifth Avenue end of the block). Winslow Homer had a studio there in the 1870s. William Merritt Chase, one of the first American Impressionists, also had a studio there. In 1896 he founded the Chase School, where Edward Hopper studied, which later became the Parsons School of Design, now a division of the New School. Alexander Calder’s sculptor father had a studio in Tenth Street for a brief time in the 1910s. One of its best-known twentieth-century tenants was also one of its most surprising. Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-born artist and mystically inclined writer, moved in around 1911 and most likely wrote The Prophet in his Village apartment. That slim volume of inspirational prose sold a little more than a thousand copies when Knopf first published it in 1923, but its repute grew year by year, and it’s now said to have sold over one hundred million copies in forty-some languages, one of the bestselling books in history.
Tourists in the know might have spotted Village artists going in and out of a wicker gate at 58 1/2 West Tenth Street across the street from the Studio and down a short path to a small house in a courtyard. This was home to the Tile Club. Members ate, drank, gabbed, sketched, and painted here in an atmosphere of informal yet exclusive conviviality. Tile Club members included Homer, Chase, and Stanford White, the architect who designed both the Washington Square Arch at the north side of the park and the Judson Memorial Church complex at the south side. He also designed the second Madison Square Garden at Twenty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue, on the rooftop of which he was shot dead by a jealous husband in 1906. (The New York Life Building has stood on the site since 1928.)
Nearby at what’s now the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and West Eleventh Street stood a venerable tavern called the Grapevine. It was a rambling clapboard house built in the eighteenth century near the Union Road, by which stagecoaches brought visitors from the city out to the country. Originally a home, it became a roadhouse named the Hawthorne, said to be frequented during the Civil War by Union officers and Confederate spies. From the end of the war through the turn of the century it was “known to all the artists, actors, litterateurs, and good fellows generally . . . as one of the pleasantest meeting places of its kind in the metropolis.” Judges and lawyers from the Jefferson Market Courthouse a block south were also regulars, as was Murray Hall. The mix of clientele arguing politics and the news of the day apparently gave rise to the saying “heard it through the grapevine.” In 1912 the New York Times reported that “In its palmy days the Grapevine was famous throughout Greenwich Village and the entire Chelsea section for its mutton pies.” A hot pie and a glass of ale cost ten cents.
For much of its heyday the Grapevine was owned by a man named Alec McClelland. When McClelland started tending bar there in 1870 its origins were already shrouded in legend. He took over the place in 1883. The vine from which it took its name died around then, and p
atrons took pieces of the stump home as souvenirs. Teddy Roosevelt stopped in one night for an inspection during his time as a reforming police commissioner in the city. Effectively a teetotaler, he ordered a Vichy water, complimented McClelland on the place’s cleanliness, and left. No women were served until after 1912, when a back parlor was outfitted for their use. And “no roisterers,” McClelland told the Times. It was “a gentleman’s cafe.” He sold the bar in 1912 and it was torn down three years later to much nostalgic distress in the neighborhood. Today the site is occupied by an imitation bistro called French Roast.
By the turn of the century the Village’s reputation as a place for artists and bohemians was well enough established that O. Henry, who lived around and wrote mostly about Gramercy Park during his New York years, set one of his most widely read stories in Greenwich Village. In “The Last Leaf” he freely borrowed Murger and Puccini tropes about sickly, impoverished bohemians and added a distinctly American twist about the healing power of art.
THE OBSESSION WITH AND TOURISM SURROUNDING BOHEMIA SHOW how bored some Americans were with the strictures of their lives and jobs at the end of the 1800s, and how much they yearned for something different. When the twentieth century arrived this desire surfaced in the cult of the new. The word was on everybody’s lips. Everything in the new century was going to be new. Politicians spoke of a new age, a new millennium, and a new nationalism. Aesthetes believed America was primed for a new renaissance, which would bring with it new art, new literature, new theater. The new woman appeared as a subset of the women’s movement. Where mainstream feminism centered on reforming marriage, “[t]he discussion among New Women,” Christine Stansell writes, “focused rather on how women might live outside traditional domestic roles.” Superficially there was something quite proto-hippie about the so-called new woman. She bobbed her hair for efficiency and threw away her corset. She wore loose, peasanty clothing in very non-Edwardian patterns such as batik and shucked off the high-button boots for sandals or moccasins. As part of her drive to achieve parity with males, the new woman dared to smoke cigarettes in public. But aside from that she was all business. At the turn of the century independent, well-educated single women were exploring freedoms that would have been almost unthinkable a generation earlier. They entered medicine, teaching, law, social work. The new women would drive much of the bohemian renaissance in Greenwich Village in the 1910s.
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