The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Bill Haywood—or part of him—joined Reed there a few years later. Convicted and imprisoned under the Sedition Act, he escaped to Moscow while out on appeal in 1921. He served as an adviser to the Bolsheviks until his death in 1928. His body was cremated, with half the ashes buried near Reed and the other half sent home. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, on the other hand, went on to a very long career as a political radical. She helped found the ACLU in 1920 and became prominent in the CPUSA in the 1930s, which led to her being ousted from the ACLU’s board. During World War II she ran for Congress as a Communist but also supported Roosevelt in his prosecution of the war. In the mid-1950s she served two years in jail for her Communist activities, then emerged and became the party’s national chairman, a position she held until she died in 1964 during a visit to Moscow. She was given a state funeral in Red Square.

  Louise Bryant continued to write from Moscow after Reed’s death. Her sunny views on the progress of the Bolshevik state, despite atrocities like the relocation and resultant deaths of millions of farm peasants, would prompt Emma Goldman, who was deported to Russia in 1919 and left it in dismay in 1921, to remark, “I do wish sometimes I were as shallow as a Louise Bryant; everything would be so simple.” Goldman’s own book on the Soviet state was titled My Disillusionment in Russia. She still believed in revolution but as an anarchist never abandoned the conviction that, as she once wrote, “all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.” Except for a three-month speaking tour in 1934 she was never allowed back in the United States and died in heartbroken exile in 1940. By 1924 Louise had left Russia as well. She married a diplomat, William Christian Bullitt Jr., and settled in Paris. He divorced her over an alleged lesbian affair with the artist Gwen Le Gallienne. Louise died in Paris in 1936.

  Lincoln Steffens visited Russia in 1919 and again in 1921 and came back to utter the famously misguided line, “I have seen the future, and it works.” By the time he died in 1936 he’d changed his mind about that.

  OTHER FORCES BEGAN CHANGING THE VILLAGE FROM WITHIN ALMOST from the moment the golden age started. One harbinger of the future, Guido Bruno, came to the Village around the same time Mabel Dodge did. He was a Czech émigré whose real name was Curt Josef Kisch, and he didn’t really live in the Village, he just commuted there every day from Yonkers. It was said that he’d previously been a war correspondent in Turkey and a newspaperman in Chicago. An eccentrically flashy dresser known for his haughty manner, his glittering rings, and emerald-green fedoras, he came to be known as the “Barnum of Bohemia” and the “Czar of Charlatanism.” He published a series of pamphlets and chapbook magazines—Bruno’s Bohemia, Bruno’s Greenwich Village, Bruno’s Weekly—that he sold for a nickel or a dime and filled with his own feuilletons about life around the Village, book reviews, occasional poems or stories by others, and a fair amount of self-promotion. At one point he claimed to have thirty-two thousand subscribers throughout the United States and Europe but, given the source and the fact that no one was auditing his figures, there’s plenty of room for doubt.

  Bruno’s true art, Harry Kemp sneered, was “the Art of Spectacularism.” In 1915 he took the second floor in a ramshackle, forlorn-looking wood frame house at the corner of Washington Square South and Thompson Street. The gravedigger for the old potter’s field once lived there, after which it was said to have been a stagecoach depot, roadhouse, saloon, and inn. More importantly for Bruno, it faced the spot where the Fifth Avenue Coach line’s double-decker buses dropped passengers from uptown before turning around and driving back through Washington Square. (The Square wasn’t blocked off to vehicular traffic until the 1950s.) Facing this entry point for tourists and curiosity seekers, Bruno slapped up signs that announced GREENWICH VILLAGE and BRUNO’S GARRET, creating an eyesore that rankled neighbors. Inside he created what he called a “First Aid Station for Struggling Genius,” which the historian Allen Churchill derides as “the layman’s dream of the artist’s life. Gaudy, dirty, crammed with easels bearing half-finished works of Impressionist art, the Garret was populated with artists’-model types of girls and hot-eyed young men who declared themselves poets, writers, and painters.”

  In staging poetry readings, tacking art to the walls, and peddling his pamphlets to tourists, Bruno helped to popularize many clichés that would soon come to be affiliated with the Village. He was of course a living cliché himself; he was even mentioned in a song on Broadway, with music by Jerome Kern and words by, of all people, P. G. Wodehouse (who stayed at the Hotel Earle in the Village during his long visits to America). In the 1910s Wodehouse was one of the writers who teamed up with Kern to renovate the Broadway musical, reducing it from giant, lavish spectacles to jewelbox shows with coherent stories and believable characters. Their 1918 Oh, Lady! Lady! featured the song “Greenwich Village,” with the lines:

  Quite ordinary people who come and live down here

  Get changed to perfect nuts within a year!

  They learn to eat spaghetti (That’s hard enough you know!)

  They leave off socks and wear greek smocks

  And study Guido Bruno.

  But Bruno had a canny impresario’s eye for talent. Along with the poseurs and amateurs he displayed as though in a bohemian dime museum, the young poet Hart Crane declaimed his work at the Garret. (He was seventeen and had just fled his upper-middle-class family in Cleveland, where his father had invented Life Savers candy.) So did the journalist and indefatigable bounder Frank Harris, then the editor of Pearson’s Magazine, soon to be the author of the scandalous memoir My Life and Loves. So did Sadakichi Hartmann, whom Bruno declared “the King of the Bohemians.” This must have come as a surprise to the rest of the Villagers, few of whom had much to do with the flamboyantly eccentric Hartmann. Yet Hartmann certainly had the exotic pedigree and literary credentials of a bohemian. He was born in Japan in 1867 to a Japanese mother and a German father, who disinherited the rebellious adolescent and sent him to live with an uncle in Philadelphia in 1882. As a young man traveling around the United States and Europe he made the acquaintances of Liszt, Swinburne, the aging Walt Whitman (who fried him some eggs), Mallarmé, Stieglitz, Steichen, and others. At twenty-three he wrote “a dramatic poem in three acts,” Christ, which was banned and burned in Boston as blasphemous obscenity. He also presented early incarnations of the psychedelic light show in the 1890s and “perfume concerts” in the the next decade, in which he used a machine to pump evocative scents into the concert hall. As an art critic he was an early and perceptive modernist.

  Meanwhile he developed a bombastic, obstreperous, and often drunken public persona with a penchant for getting kicked out of museums and concert halls. Once, when he was having his bust sculpted by an artist whose studio was on Washington Square South, he fell out with her, took the bust, and carried it over to the Grill Room at the Brevoort. He sat it on a table, ordered two meals, and ate them both while having a lively discussion with the bust. On his way out he pointed to the bust and told the staff, “That gentleman over there will pay.” Tall and thin as a stick, with a Eurasian mask of a face some people found mysteriously attractive and others frightening, he got to be known as one of the very worst spongers in the Village, a man who was absolutely convinced of his own genius and that the world owed him a living. Bruno recognized in him a fellow exhibitionist and crowned him king of a Village scene that wanted little to do with either of them. Hartmann soon left New York anyway; he went to Hollywood, where he generated many more tales of drunken misbehavior while proper acknowledgment of his talents continued to elude him until his death in 1944.

  In May 1915 Bruno staged a big one-woman show of elegant, Beardsleyesque drawings by Clara Tice. Clara was born upstate in Elmira in 1888, after which her family soon moved to New York, where her father became superintendent of the Village’s Children’s Aid Society. She studied at the Art Students League and helped organize the 1910 Independent Artists show. In March 1915 her career took off, thanks t
o Anthony Comstock. Seventy years old, retired as head of his suppression society, and less than a year short of expiring, Comstock had seen some delicate nudes by Tice on the walls at Polly’s and sent his agents to confiscate them. In the ensuing uproar, Vanity Fair came to Tice’s defense and boldly reproduced some of her offending works in its pages. When Bruno hastily tacked a large selection of Tice’s work to his walls, the crowds and the press dutifully packed the Garret to see what all the fuss was about. Tice, like many other artists targeted by Comstock, called him her best press agent. She soon met Duchamp and through him became part of the New York Dada circle. She went on to a successful career as a book illustrator and died in Queens, at eighty-five, in 1973. Bruno also published a slim volume of illustrated lesbian verse by Djuna Barnes, freshly arrived in the Village and living down the block from the Garret. When The Book of Repulsive Women, which the author later disavowed, became a word-of-mouth hit he upped the price from fifteen cents to fifty and pocketed the difference.

  Maybe the most surprising figure drawn to Bruno’s Garret was Charles Edison, the wealthy teenage son of inventor Thomas Alva. Charles was enjoying a brief bohemian fling before settling down to a life of business and politics that would see him take over his father’s empire and serve as governor of New Jersey. He wrote vers libre for Bruno’s Weekly under the nom de plume Tom Sleeper (“A black crow flapped his wings in a dead tree. / At that moment I was born.”). In 1915 he funded the Little Thimble Theater, a hundred-seat jewelbox at 10 Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from the Brevoort. Bruno served as the manager. Along with music recitals and free shows for young audiences, the theater staged credible productions of plays by Strindberg, Shaw, Gogol, and Chekhov. Tice designed some of the sets. When Charles’s father dragged him back to New Jersey, Harry Kemp took over the theater as a venue for his own verse dramas.

  Bruno lost the Garret in November 1916 and eventually faded away, but he left his mark on a Village that many felt was rapidly being turned into one big Bruno’s Garret—“a side-show for tourists, a peep-show for vulgarians, a commercial exhibit of tawdry Bohemianism,” as Floyd Dell later put it. By 1915 many other Villagers, including Dell, were marketing and commercializing the Village, playing up both its quaintness and its pagan abandon for the tourist trade. Malcolm Cowley attributed it to most Villagers’ innate bourgeois instincts. “Having fled from Dubuque and Denver to escape the stultifying effects of a civilization ruled by business, many of the Villagers . . . entered business for themselves,” he writes in Exile’s Return. “They would open tea shops, antique shops, book shops, yes, and bridge parlors, dance halls, night clubs and real-estate offices.” Village women opened tearooms all over the place, with brightly painted decor, whimsical names, and Left Bank themes. The sculptor Edith Unger wrote the legend “ELOH TIBBAR EHT NWOD” over the door to the Mad Hatter, a basement space on West Fourth Street where a “giant stone fireplace and wooden benches added to the atmosphere.” If you were lucky you might see Unger’s friends Marcel Duchamp or the Gish sisters there. It was joined by the Purple Pup, the Mouse Trap, the Pig ’n’ Whistle, the Crumperie (run by a Miss Crump), the inevitable La Boheme, Vagabondia, the Trilby Waffle Shop, Pollywogge, the Black Parrot, the Jumble Shop, the Vermillion Hound, Aladdin Attic, and others. The tearooms were very popular meeting places for Villagers, who loved to linger over their tea and cakes, talking Freud and feminism. Increasingly, as guidebooks touted tearooms as places for close encounters, the gawkers crowded the locals out.

  Some Villagers took to marketing themselves as tourist attractions. One of the most popular and longest-running of the Village’s characters was “Romany” Marie Marchand, who opened the first of her Gypsy-themed taverns in 1914 and closed her last in the 1940s. As the years rolled on and the tourists rolled in, Villagers smiled to see Marchand’s Gypsy outfits grow more elaborate and hear her eastern European accent get more juicy and pronounced. Although she was born in Romania, she was not Romany but Jewish. She immigrated to the Lower East Side as a teenager in 1901 and did piecework in garment industry sweatshops. Legend had it she learned English attending and ushering at Emma Goldman lectures. After her family moved up to the Bronx, their downtown friends—including Goldman and Berkman, Sadakichi Hartmann, and the historian Will Durant—came up for dinners and heated discussions. With a hundred and fifty dollars chipped in by these friends she opened her first Romany Marie Tavern in the Village, up three flights of rickety stairs on Washington Street. In 1915 she moved it to Christopher Street, where it stayed until 1923. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an etching of this spot by John Sloan. Buckminster Fuller, in his mid-twenties, fresh out of the navy, met Romany Marie there in 1919 and they became lifelong friends. From Washington Street she changed locations nine more times over the decades, her one genuine Gypsy characteristic. Whatever the address, pretty much every Villager, wannabe, and tourist made it to Romany Marie’s. She was a surrogate Jewish mother, feeding them soup and chorba (stew), listening to their troubles, letting them loiter endlessly over the Turkish coffee, and telling their fortunes from the grounds. Like Pfaff, she reserved the best tables for her favorite writers, artists, intellectuals, feeding them on the cuff when they were broke. She petted her arty friends and could be cool to outsiders in ways some of them—including Max Gordon, who founded the Village Vanguard—found snobby.

  In the mid-1920s she took over the second floor of the old house on Washington Square where Bruno’s Garret had been. After two years there NYU administrators evicted her and the ice cream parlor on the ground floor and tore the house down; the school’s Vanderbilt Hall is there now. After that she moved in 1927 to Minetta Street, where Fuller designed the interior as an early showplace for his futuristic Dymaxion ideas. It was a disaster. Fuller’s aluminum chairs with canvas seats and backs collapsed under her patrons, and his bright lights bouncing off all the shiny industrial surfaces blinded them. Fuller was still a struggling unknown then. A friend put him up in the Village and Romany Marie fed him. In return he drove her around in his three-wheeled Dymaxion car. Edgard and Louise Varèse were Romany Marie regulars throughout her reign. So were Isamu Noguchi, the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the folksinger Beryl (later Burl) Ives, William Saroyan, the roly-poly artist Joseph Stella, and Clifford Odets, whom she later remembered as “just a kid hanging around to get a few words from Harry Kemp.” Brancusi and the Russian mystic Gurdjieff came by when they were in New York. Through the 1950s, after losing her eleventh place, Romany Marie remained a fixture at other people’s cafés and restaurants in the Village until her death in 1961.

  Other enterprising Villagers opened bohemian-themed novelty and bric-a-brac shops, pushing “the gamut from gypsy beads, batik lampshades, and tin vanity cases” to “pre-dripped candles socketed in old beer bottles—a ubiquitous Greenwich Village item.” By 1917 boutiques sprouted up to sell the visiting weekend bohemian the proper attire: artist’s smocks, of course, peasant blouses, sandals and moccasins, slouch hats that sat nicely on bobbed hair, and berets. By then every restaurant, café, and bistro in the Village had adopted a bohemian decor, with those drippy candles in bottles, rickety wooden chairs and tables, peasanty throw rugs, and cobwebs in the corners. The bar Julius’ would still be famous for its cobwebs into the 1960s, hanging ominously in the corners like threatening storm clouds. The Pepper Pot at 146 West Fourth Street near Sixth Avenue offered a bistro in the basement, a dance floor above, game and chess rooms above that (where chess fanatic Duchamp might also be found), and a novelty shop next door. (June Miller, Henry’s second wife, would waitress there in the mid-1920s, by which time it had converted to a speakeasy.)

  Crews from the city’s still young film industry began to show up in the Village around 1916, hiring appropriately exotic-looking Villagers as extras to appear in comedies and farces about bohemian life, shot on location in the neighborhood’s cafés and restaurants. The plot usually revolved around a good girl from uptown who runs away to Greenwich Village wher
e her morals are tested. In the Ziegfeld Frolic on the rooftop of the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-second Street, Fanny Brice introduced a racy new song on the same theme in 1920, “Rose of Washington Square.” Rose comes from the Bronx to the Village to be an art model, and the song suggests this entails more than posing. “I’ve got no future,” Rose sings, “but oh what a past.”

  Guidebooks and tourist maps proliferated, all promising to lead the user to the real, the hidden, the hot spots. It was in this era that the first historical plaques began to appear on the walls where famous writers and artists once lived.

  Nothing promoted to outsiders the idea that Greenwich Village was a fleshy Gomorrah so well as the “Greenwich Village balls,” which were not actually held in the Village but over at Webster Hall on East Eleventh Street and Third Avenue. Built in the 1880s and expanded in the 1890s, Webster was one of the many rental halls around the city sited mostly in poor and working-class neighborhoods, where residents who were crammed into tenements needed spaces for wedding receptions, dances, political rallies, and other large functions. The halls were rarely fancy; as early as 1888 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had characterized the Webster as “a big, bare, dingy place.” By 1913 it was quite familiar to leftists. The Progressive Labor Party had been founded at a meeting there, and Samuel Gompers had rallied striking brewery workers there, both in the 1880s. Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth held a masquerade in Webster in 1906, which was broken up by the police. Margaret Sanger had paraded those Lawrence children before the press there in 1912.

  The first of the Greenwich Village balls were thrown as fund-raisers for The Masses and the Liberal Club in 1913. “Are You a Radical?” The Masses’ ad for its first event asked. “Whether or Not, Come to the Greenwich Village Carnival Old Home Celebration Costume Dance.” Admission was one dollar in costume, two dollars without, guaranteeing a lot of oddball and often impromptu outfits of the bedsheet-as-toga sort. The party, which rolled on all night with much dancing and drinking and necking, was a great success. Floyd Dell named the Liberal Club’s fund-raisers “pagan routs,” a name “potent in its appeal to the fevered imaginations of the bourgeoisie,” he later wrote. Poster illustrations featured leaping fauns and nude models draped over the shoulders of husky, beret-capped artists. Revelers dressed as nymphs and satyrs and other pagan outfits and much tipsy, risqué merriment ensued. The Quill, a small literary and Village-gossip magazine, held its own “Dance of the Feathered Flock,” the ad for which contained the silly verse “A flighty old bird is the pelican. / He tries hard to dance, but the helican. / But he can drink, old red-eye, yep, quite welican.” These early balls launched a tradition of Village and pseudo-Village balls at Webster Hall that escalated through the second half of the decade until the Webster was rocking to as many as two a week and came to be known as the Devil’s Playground. They continued right through Prohibition and the Depression, the costumes waxing more fantastical and, for the ladies, revealing. Dell would watch with chagrin as the behavior grew rowdier and even “intolerably disgusting,” and the link to anything like authentic Village culture or causes was lost. Cowley recalled Webster Hall events in the 1920s “attended by terrible uptown people who came to watch Villagers at their revels and buy them drinks in return for being insulted.” In the mid-1920s Dell, who had left the Village and moved up the Hudson in 1919, rather disingenuously lamented that “we had something which it seemed all bourgeois America—sick to death of its machine-made efficiency and scared respectability—wistfully desired to share with us: we had freedom and happiness.” Dell would later move to Washington, D.C., where he died in 1969, age eighty-two.