The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  From Europe came the new psychology, Freud’s shocking and for many Americans obscene theories of psychoanalysis. He published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901, and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. The first International Psychoanalytical Congress was held in 1908. Freud, with Jung, made his only visit to America the following year, arriving in New York Harbor and heading straight to Clark University in Massachusetts to give a series of lectures. In New York he visited Coney Island but not, apparently, Greenwich Village, where nevertheless his ideas got an early and enthusiastic reception. Although most Americans thought his theories on sexual repression perverse, Villagers would add Freud to free love and employed his ideas in their license for sexual promiscuity.

  Nowhere in America was the new embraced with quite the ardor it was in Greenwich Village by the 1910s. All the movements, trends, and ideas coalesced there. But even as the Village hit its stride as the bohemian capital of America in the early twentieth century, Village artists and bohemians were a tiny minority in the neighborhood. Along with the moneyed WASPs who hung on in the North Village, the bohemian Village coexisted, often not happily, with the Irish West Village, the Italian South Village, and the black Village, all of whom made their own significant contributions to New York culture and history.

  5

  The Bohemians’ Neighbors

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 13, 2011, A BELL at the Shrine Church of St. Anthony of Padua rolls its baritone voice over the rooftops of Sullivan Street, across the river of buses and cabs on Houston Street, and up over the heads of the couples and gangs of tourists strolling toward the many restaurants, bars, and clubs of Greenwich Village. The church, a street-sooted Romanesque pile built by Italian immigrants and consecrated in 1888, dominates the southeast corner of Sullivan and Houston Streets. Since the 1970s this area has been known as Soho, but it used to be called the South Village and it was part of a Little Italy much larger than today’s.

  Inside the church, several variations of the Virgin Mary gaze down from wall pedestals as a High Mass for St. Anthony’s feast day comes to an end. People begin to work their way out of the long pews, and there are many meetings in the aisles. Stout old workingmen, bowlegged in their black trousers with black suspenders over crisp white shirts, shake gnarled hands and lean their white heads together in murmured greetings, grave and serious as cardinals. Their equally sturdy wives in dark print summer dresses, some with St. Anthony medallions pinned on, with white shawls over their white hair, dip their fingers in the holy water and make the sign of the cross as they exit. Some conversations among these older parishioners are in heavily accented English but just as often it’s Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese. (Sullivan Street historically has been home to a small Portuguese community, possibly drawn by St. Anthony’s church. St. Anthony may have died in Padua but he was born in Lisbon.)

  They step outside to a soft, springlike evening. The sun, setting somewhere across the Hudson in Jersey, angles long shadows down onto narrow Sullivan Street, where a crowd of a few hundred has gathered for St. Anthony’s annual procession around the neighborhood. Not so many years ago the crowd would have been much larger, but in the twenty-first century this isn’t the immigrant enclave it once was. A life-size statue of St. Anthony as a sweet-faced young Franciscan, tonsured, cradling the baby Jesus in his left arm, stands under a bower of white roses. Parishioners have pinned donations to his cassock and the hem of Jesus’ frock, long trails of bills with portraits of Ben Franklin and Andrew Jackson hanging on them like vines. Fifty years ago, when the tenements along Sullivan Street were packed with Italian and Portuguese families, all the buildings on the block competed with one another for the honor of giving the year’s largest donation.

  Parish men once carried the statue on their shoulders, but tonight it stands incongruously in the bed of a silver Dodge Ram pickup truck with a CLERGY sign behind the windshield. A small brass band of gray-haired guys in Italian flag-striped caps warms up with a few classic Italian songs and a boisterous rendition of “New York, New York,” at the end of which an older man in the crowd cheers, “Viva Sant’ Anton’!” Priests in white Mass vestments and friars in Franciscan cassocks gather and the procession begins. St. Anthony and Jesus sway slightly in the back of the truck as it rolls through the wide Houston Street intersection, halting traffic, then leads the brass band and some few hundred of the faithful up into Greenwich Village. Tourists in the open-front bars and restaurants jump up to grab snapshots with their cell phones. Women on the fringes of the procession hand them little St. Anthony medallions and holy cards. One older woman with a look of studious piety on her face and half a dozen rosaries hung over her breast distributes a card promising release from Purgatory and “the remittance of your sins” to anyone who completes three years of daily prayers in “Devotion to the drops of blood lost by our Lord Jesus Christ on his way to Calvary.”

  The procession turns onto Bleecker Street, where it passes more quizzical looks outside the rock and jazz clubs, turns again onto Thompson Street, and a few minutes later recrosses Houston Street and returns to the church. The crowd disperses, wandering up and down a Sullivan Street now in full twilight. The whole event has felt a bit compulsory and desultory, a fragmentary remnant of the rollicking celebrations, part festival and part carnival, that once took over Sullivan Street in the second week of June. Those were different times and that was a different Sullivan Street.

  ALTHOUGH THE VILLAGE’S BOHEMIANS, ARTISTS, AND WRITERS would make it world famous, they always represented a small and transient minority of its residents. Much larger WASP, Irish, Italian, and, in the nineteenth century, black communities shared the neighborhood with them. “Shared” might not be the right word, since the arty Villagers and their neighbors usually had little contact with one another beyond each gawking at and grumbling about the other. On the whole, the Ninth Warders cursed the bohemians as unwanted outsiders who attracted even more unwanted visitors, dragging the neighborhood down as they pushed the rents up. The Empire Warders maintained their distance.

  Today, Manhattan’s Little Italy is a few blocks of tourist restaurants and shops surrounded by Chinatown. But a century ago it stretched from the Lower East Side west past Broadway, and from Canal Street up into Greenwich Village. Between 1880 and World War I waves of Italian immigrants increased the city’s Italian population from fewer than twenty thousand to more than half a million. In Manhattan, this flood of immigrants mostly found themselves jammed into tenements on the Lower East Side and in East Harlem, which was known as Italian Harlem long before it was called Spanish Harlem. In the Village, they settled for the most part in the south and east sections of the neighborhood. New six- and seven-story tenements went up along Houston Street and on Thompson and Sullivan Streets to its north and south. By the 1910s immigrant Italians and first-generation Italian Americans were the dominant social group in the Village. The South Village would continue to be considered part of Little Italy through much of the twentieth century.

  The first Irish in the Village came during the booming growth phase in the 1820s, when they most likely worked as domestics and in construction of the new suburb. In 1829 the predominantly Irish Catholic parish St. Joseph was founded, comprising all of Greenwich Village. The Church of St. Joseph, on Sixth Avenue between Waverly Place and Washington Place, was completed in 1834. (Singing the hymns at the dedication Mass was the company of the new Italian Opera House down at Church and Leonard Streets, founded by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart librettist and friend to Casanova, who had immigrated to America in 1805.) The Irish Village was thus already an established community when the tsunami of famine Irish came in the 1840s and ’50s, and by the end of the century they dominated the Hudson side of the neighborhood. New Catholic churches and schools rose to serve the growing community—St. Veronica’s on Christopher Street, St. Bernard’s (now called Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Bernard’s) on the south side of Fourteenth. M
iddle-class “lace curtain” Irish owned saloons, stables, blacksmith shops, feed stores. They also owned the brownstones where they raised their families, sending their boys to be educated by the Jesuits and keeping a very close watch on their girls. Mayor Jimmy Walker grew up in such a home.

  Working-class Irish families, headed by men who worked as longshoremen, janitors, mechanics, and teamsters, filled the new tenements that sprang up along that side of the neighborhood starting in the 1880s. The waterfront, from Canal Street up through Chelsea, became an almost entirely Irish stronghold of work, power, and wealth. Ninety-five percent of the longshoremen working this stretch of piers were Irish, as were the stevedores, their foremen, the leadership of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the politicos “who made their fortunes from leasing, contracting, and licensing fees relating to the piers,” and the gangsters who feasted on the whole system. Even after other immigrant groups, especially Italians, gained control of much harbor business in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, the Irish defended the West Side waterfront as a birthright. It was a tough, dark, dirty zone, made more dangerous by the largely Irish gangs of thugs the likes of the Hudson Dusters and the Gophers. There were many streets on the Irish West Side from the Village up through Hell’s Kitchen where the beat cops, many of them Irish and very tough themselves, walked only in numbers, as a single officer was as likely to be mugged and robbed of his coat as any citizen. Not for nothing did mass brawls come to be known as donnybrooks and police vans as paddy wagons.

  Through most of the 1800s there was also a large black community in the Village, concentrated on the streets to the south and west of Washington Square Park, the area first farmed by those “half-free” Africans in Dutch times. It came to be known as Little Africa, or less kindly as Coontown. By 1827 all black New Yorkers were legally free, yet a de facto state of half-freedom persisted. Slavery was abolished in gradual stages in the state of New York. At first, all blacks enslaved before July 4, 1799, remained in bondage, though now called “indentured servants.” Children born to them from that date on would remain the property of their mothers’ owners until the age of twenty-eight for males, twenty-five for females. For black New Yorkers it was an agonizing, maddeningly slow process. The long lag time was intended both to soften the blow for slave owners and to prevent a sudden glut of freed blacks competing with white workers for jobs. Some owners began to free (the old English legal term was “manumit”) their slaves voluntarily; others sold off their slaves to new owners in the South. In 1817 the state legislature simplified things by stating that on July 4, 1827, all remaining slaves in New York would be manumitted.

  During the decades of gradual manumission, many freed slaves left their former owners’ homes down in the city and trickled out Broadway, settling in what was still sparsely populated countryside. By Manumission Day, July 4, 1827, more than ten thousand free blacks lived in Manhattan, and Greenwich Village was home to the largest population of them. Few of them owned property but rented from white landlords. They were concentrated in the area around the Minetta Brook where those first black farms had been, encompassing a few blocks of Bleecker, Thompson, and Sullivan Streets; Minetta Street; Minetta Lane; and the now vanished Minetta Place—collectively known as “the Minettas.”

  Little Africa also drew free blacks and “mulattoes” who’d come to New York from the West Indies. Often better educated and with more skills than the city’s freed slaves, some of them thrived, within the limits imposed on them. One started America’s first black professional theater company in Greenwich Village in 1821. William Henry Brown had retired as a steamship steward in the West Indies when he moved to Manhattan in the 1810s. He bought a house in the city, on Thomas Street, where he held salons and teas on Sunday afternoons. Evidently his white neighbors complained, and in 1821 he moved out to a two-story house at the corner of Bleecker and Mercer Streets. He continued to hold teas and sell ice cream in the garden there, and he converted the second floor into a theater, the African Grove, with an all-black company. Brown would move the company to a few other sites in the city during its short life. Its first full-length production was Richard III. The company’s principal actor, James Hewlett, was a tailor who is thought to have studied English Shakespeareans as he sat in the segregated Negro balcony at the Park Theatre, the city’s premiere venue (on the block of Park Row below City Hall that today is dominated by J&R Music World).

  As other productions followed—Othello, some farces and pantomimes, and most controversially Brown’s own The Drama of King Shotaway, about a slave rebellion in the Indies—whites began to join blacks in the audience. They didn’t sit in respectful silence. Black actors performing Shakespeare represented to them an amusing novelty. A newspaper from 1822 reports that “the audience was generally of a riotous character, and amused themselves by throwing crackers on the stage, and cracking their jokes with the actors.” The seating policy at the African Grove, amazingly, instituted reverse segregation: whites were relegated to the back rows because, as a handbill stated, they didn’t know “how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color.” While having rowdy hooligans in the audience was nothing new in New York theaters of the day—in the variety theaters on the Bowery it was common for audiences to interrupt performances, shout down actors, even jump on stage to join the action—one night in 1822 they got so out of hand the police shut the theater down. When the company attempted to perform again a few nights later the members were arrested. Brown gave up and closed the Grove for good in 1823. Another of the company’s star actors, Ira Aldridge, moved to England, where he became renowned for his Othello, as well as his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Shylock, the latter roles sometimes performed in whiteface makeup.

  Black New Yorkers may have celebrated July 4, 1827, with a Manumission Day parade, but their freedom came with restrictions. Although all white males earned the right to vote in New York State in 1821 (previously granted only to landowners), a crushing poll tax was imposed on freed black males, which only one in two hundred could afford. Women regardless of race would not get the vote for another century. White workers organized to bar blacks from jobs. Antagonisms between unions and black workers, who were often used as strikebreakers, continued into the twentieth century. Black New Yorkers who could find jobs did so almost exclusively as servants in white households, basically the same work they’d done as slaves. Nine out of ten employed black women and seven out of ten employed males did domestic work.

  Housing was a chronic problem for black New Yorkers. Landlords routinely forced them into the most ramshackle homes and charged them more for the pleasure. “The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants,” the reformer Jacob Riis observed in his landmark book How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. “Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, stay out.” He took grim photographs in Little Africa of its “vile rookeries,” leaning, dilapidated wooden shacks, dark and dank, breeding grounds for tuberculosis, whooping cough, typhoid, and other infectious diseases.

  Little Africa was also, to read the white writers of the time, a breeding ground of every crime, vice, and depravity known to man. Guidebook writers recycled depictions of the Minettas as a no-white-man’s-land where murder was a daily event and even the cops feared to tread. Even the sympathetic writers Riis and Stephen Crane described Little Africa in lurid language. In his 1896 article on Little Africa, young journalist Crane describes Minetta Lane as “a small and becobbled valley between hills of dingy brick,” a vale of shadows with the Sixth Avenue horse cars jingling by at one end and “the darkness of MacDougal Street” at the other. Minetta Lane and Minetta Street, he notes, were “two of the most enthusiastically murderous thoroughfares” in the city. “The inhabitants for the most part were negroes and they represented the very worst elements of their race. The razor habit clung to them with the tenacity of an epidemic and every night th
e uneven cobbles felt blood . . . It was a street set apart, a refuse for criminals.” Crane reports tales of legendary local killers with names like Bloodthirsty, Black Cat, and No-Toes Charley. He climbs “a flight of grimy stairs that is pasted on the outside of an old and tottering frame house” to visit with Mammy Ross, an old woman who regales him with stories of famous fights and quarrels. He descends to a tiny basement “restaurant”—a stove, a small table, two chairs, and a dusty sign offering “Oysters in every style”—to meet old Pop Babcock. “At this time Pop had three customers in his place, one asleep on the bench, one asleep on the two chairs, and one asleep on the floor behind the stove.” Pop also tells him tales of the lane’s violence. Those days are mostly now past, Crane reports, between the police cracking down and the Italians moving in, gradually pushing the blacks out. He ends the piece on a lighter note that could have come straight from a contemporary minstrel show: “Minetta Lane is a place of poverty and sin, but these influences cannot destroy the broad smile of the negro, a vain and simple child but happy.”

  The crackdown Crane mentions was the work of the new reform police commissioner who took over in 1895, Teddy Roosevelt. In his two years on the job Roosevelt tried to clean up the graft and corruption that were everyday business on the force. Riis guided him around the city’s hot spots on midnight tours to sneak up on cops loafing and shirking. When Roosevelt replaced the captain of the Sixth Precinct and had his new man bear down on the Minettas, life in Little Africa quickly got safer and quieter.