The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Just as the bohemians were attracting hordes of outsiders to the Village, the city made it easier for them to get there. From 1914 to 1918 the city and the privately operated IRT collaborated on extending Seventh Avenue through the Village, with a new west side subway line (today’s 1, 2, and 3 trains) beneath it. Seventh Avenue had stopped at the spot where West Eleventh Street crosses Greenwich Avenue. Now it would plow down through the Village at an angle to meet up with the newly widened Varick Street below, making one continuous, though doglegged, thoroughfare from below Canal Street up to Central Park. The city condemned hundreds of homes and other buildings along the ten-block diagonal through the Village, evicted the occupants, and began demolishing buildings. Some weren’t completely torn down, merely cut back to make room; houses and commercial buildings with wrong-looking angles still abut the avenue today. Oddly wedge-shaped buildings along the route, like the one that houses the Village Vanguard, were built later on the triangular lots created by the new road’s slanting path. To lay the new subway line the IRT dug an immense trench, forty feet wide, that locals nicknamed the Cut. For a few years it effectively isolated the Hudson side of the Village, making life miserable. As soon as it opened in 1918, the new subway’s Christopher Street station disgorged crowds of visitors, while the new Seventh Avenue corridor boomed day and night with a glut of through traffic, which worsened a decade later when the Holland Tunnel opened. Lined with gas stations, tire shops, and garages, Seventh Avenue South looked more like a downbeat commercial strip somewhere out in the boondocks than a part of ye olde Greenwich Village. Sheridan Square around the Christopher Street stop bloomed with new tourist traps. Locals complained bitterly—not for the last time and not without cause—that the changes killed the Greenwich Village they’d known and loved. But they did get one benefit from it. The Cut prompted them to petition the city’s new Zoning Commission for protection from further incursions. As a result, the city zoned the heart of the old Village for residential use only, an early example of historic preservation.

  Beginning in the mid-1920s the city would also extend Sixth Avenue, while the IND built a new subway line (the A, C, and E) under it, even as the Sixth Avenue El continued to rumble above until 1938. The work brought five more years of destruction and dislocation to the Village, with more buildings demolished, more odd-shaped lots left over, and a few small streets, including Minetta Place, obliterated. Slicing through the heart of the neighborhood, Sixth and Seventh Avenues and their attendant subway lines definitively ended the old Village’s long era of relative isolation and calm by 1930. They remain the two busiest, least lovable, and most un-Village thoroughfares in the heart of the neighborhood. They help explain why, when the city planner Robert Moses proposed further slicing up the neighborhood with highways and extensions twenty-odd years later, residents banded together to oppose him.

  By 1917 the selling of the Village to tourists was so rampant that Sinclair Lewis wrote a satire about it, “Hobohemia,” that ran in the Saturday Evening Post. He adapted it into a full-length play that premiered at the Greenwich Village Theatre on Sheridan Square in 1919. It’s the story of a Mr. Brown, a Bruno-Babbitt who decides the only problem with bohemia is that the bohemians don’t know how to make a profit from it. In Greenwich Village he meets Mrs. Saffron, a parody of Mabel Dodge, and a famous artist who talks only about “Sex, with a capital S and four exclamation points after the word.” He goes to see some inscrutable plays by the Hobohemian Players, discovers that free verse “was exactly like advertising, except that usually it was not so well done,” and invents a Russian author, Zuprushin, whose novel Dementia all the pretentious Villagers he meets claim to have read. (As we’ll see, a later Villager would put this ruse into actual practice.) As if proving a point, the first of the Greenwich Village Follies followed Hobohemia into the theater in 1919. A revue parodying every by now familiar stereotype and cliché of Village life, it was a smash hit and moved to Broadway. Subsequent editions played on Broadway through the 1920s, their connection to any Village behavior increasingly tenuous. For instance, Cole Porter wrote songs for Greenwich Village Follies of 1924 while living in a palazzo in Venice.

  VILLAGE ITALIANS, MOST OF THEM RENTERS IN TENEMENTS AND IN old single-family homes converted to hold multiple small apartments, now far outnumbered the neighborhood’s other groups. As early as 1914 local property owners, middle-class families, and neighborhood merchants joined forces to form the Greenwich Village Rebuilding Corporation and the Greenwich Village Improvement Society. By improvement they meant both stemming the rising tide of bohemian shenanigans and redressing the overwhelming demographic dominance of the Italians. Collaborating with landlords and real estate developers, they launched a program to “re-colonize” the neighborhood with white, middle-class home owners and renters. Today we’d call it gentrification.

  In 1915 the New York Times reported on the Rebuilding Corporation’s buying old houses in the neighborhood to be “properly remodeled and equipped with some of the necessities of modern living comforts.” In some cases remodeling meant as little as a fresh coat of paint and an icebox, after which rents doubled, tripled, quadrupled. Italians were evicted from tenements, bohemians and artists from their studios and carriage houses. Landlords and developers weren’t above using the neighborhood’s arty cachet to lure new, more affluent, art-loving tenants—professionals and office workers who liked the idea of living near artists and bohemians but, in most other respects, maintained their middle-class values and behaviors. By 1917 the Times noted a growing exodus of artists from the neighborhood, driven out by the rising rents the new tenants were able to pay. So many of the newcomers came from the Midwest that even Ladies’ Home Journal could joke that Greenwich Village was becoming “the cob of the cornbelt.”

  Newspapers and magazine cartoonists depicted threadbare, starving artists being kicked out of places such as Washington Square Mews to make room for wealthy new tenants in top hat and ball gown with their chauffeured limos parked nearby. One began to hear the term “golden garret” used to describe such places. By 1922 the Times was reporting that artists were in full flight. “Studio rents have been multiplying chiefly, it is alleged, by the competition of bourgeois people who know nothing of art, but like to wear flowing ties and live in the midst of temptations. New York is being destroyed as an art centre by the usurpation of studios and the dispossession of artists, according to Frederick K. Detwiller, a well-known painter. ‘Young artists are being forced out of the city by the hundreds,’ he said . . . ‘The struggling young fellow is finding it more and more difficult to get a foothold in New York City . . . He can’t pay the studio rents in New York City because of the thousands of people in other walks of life who are taking the studios, either because they are cheaper or because they can be furnished easily or because they want to live in a section that has the reputation of being artistic.”

  By 1927 the news of the Village’s demise as an “art centre” had spread so far and wide that the Christian Science Monitor ran an article with a headline and subheads that read like a death notice:

  GREENWICH VILLAGE TOO COSTLY NOW FOR ARTISTS TO LIVE THERE

  Values Increase So That Only Those Who Can Write Fluently in Check Books Can Afford It

  ONE ROOM AND BATH COST $65

  These reports betray a certain level of journalistic oversimplification and exaggeration. The sociologist Caroline Ware, closer to the ground, reports that while many of the 1910s wave of artists and writers did leave, not all were driven out by the rising rents and the hordes of tourists and wannabes. Some simply became successful enough to move uptown or out of the city altogether, either re-creating their Village youth in other settings—up the Hudson in towns such as Croton and Woodstock, for instance—or putting those days behind them. Others stayed and adjusted to the changes, although they uniformly groused about the new people and waxed nostalgic for the golden age. And although rents did go up all around the Village, second-wave artists and writers of Cowley�
�s generation still found cheap places and settled down to lives of serious creative output. Ware describes a Village that grew more socially complex from the late 1910s through the 1920s. The two basic groups of the 1910s, “locals” and “Villagers,” fragmented into subgroups that included artists and bohemians of the original type, the second-wavers they attracted (including the equivalent of today’s hipsters and fauxhemians), and middle-class professionals (equivalent to today’s yuppies) with little interest or involvement in the neighborhood’s arty reputation. They were drawn to it instead by its old-fashioned charms and its location, conveniently near their places of work but still set off to one side from the hustle and bustle of the rest of Manhattan.

  William Sloane Coffin—whose son would later be the ultra-liberal pastor of Riverside Church—made no secret of his intent to resettle the Village with this last group, advertising to white, middle-class Protestant families who would take back the old “Yankee Ward” from the Italians and bohemians. In 1920 his Hearth and Home Corporation evicted the mostly Italian tenants from the parallel stretches of Georgian row houses on MacDougal and Sullivan Streets between Houston and Bleecker, renovating them as deluxe single-family homes and combining all the backyards between the houses into a single, grandly landscaped garden completely hidden from street view. The idea was that the children of the white middle-class families to whom Coffin sold the remodeled homes could play in the garden, not out on the streets with the dirty Italian kids from the surrounding “slum.” Other interior gardens, like Bleecker Gardens, dotted the Village. Today the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens development is an exclusive enclave that’s on the National Register of Historic Places. The middle class can’t afford it anymore; the town houses sell for $10 million and more now, and residents have included Bob Dylan, Anna Wintour, and Richard Gere. A pizza parlor on Bleecker Street has a fenced-in rear patio that abuts the secret, tree-shaded garden and offers a restricted glimpse.

  Manhattan would go on a building spree through the 1920s and into the early 1930s culminating in the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, the world’s two tallest skyscrapers for some time. But the boom’s biggest impact was in the housing market. Apartment complexes rose all over Manhattan, adding as many as one hundred thousand units a year toward the end of the 1920s. It was in this decade that apartment living, previously relegated to the lower orders and the artists and bohemians among them, became acceptable to the middle and upper classes. Because of increasingly out-of-date city building codes, taller buildings for a while had to be constructed and marketed as “apartment hotels,” with no kitchens or cooking allowed in the apartments. To this day, there are otherwise palatial apartments in older Manhattan buildings with strangely tiny kitchenettes squeezed in later when the codes changed.

  Even in Greenwich Village, new apartment buildings like the one that ousted Cather and Lewis, some as tall as sixteen stories, sprouted. Lower Fifth Avenue was transformed into a “canyon” of tall apartment buildings. One of the most handsome went up at 1 Fifth Avenue, beside Washington Mews and right behind the town houses at the north edge of Washington Square. Known simply as One Fifth by locals, the soaring tower, an odd but happy mélange of deco and medieval touches, offered spectacular views of the Village and remains a poshly hip address to this day. Mabel Dodge’s house came down for an apartment tower, as did the building across the street that held Harry Kemp’s theater. Fine mansions the city’s elite had built along the avenue in the 1800s were unceremoniously razed.

  10

  The Next Wave

  ON A COLD NIGHT IN JANUARY 1917 SIX VILLAGERS SNEAKED UP to the top of the Washington Square Arch after noticing that the door at the base was unlocked. They included John Sloan and Marcel Duchamp, a trio of actors, and the ringleader, Gertrude Drick, a vivacious young blonde recently arrived from Texas. Failing as a musician, poet, and painter, she settled for being one of the Village’s colorful hipsters. Before this night she was best known for handing out a black-edged calling card with “Woe” printed on it so she could say, “Woe is me”—a fairly large step down on the social rebellion scale from Ada Clare’s “Miss Ada Clare and Son.” They got a little campfire going in a pot, strung Chinese lanterns and balloons from the parapet, ate a picnic of sandwiches and wine, and then, as the others fired off cap pistols, Drick read the Republic of Greenwich Village’s declaration of independence from the rest of the United States. It consisted of a single word repeated over and over: “Whereas . . . Whereas . . . Whereas . . .”

  It’s hard to picture the earnest radicals of 1913 issuing such a blank declaration, perfect Dada gesture though it was. Nor would they have urged the withdrawal of the Village from the rest of the country. Their ideal had not been to remove Greenwich Village from the rest of America but to transform the rest of America into Greenwich Village. Drick and her pranksters were now declaring that experiment over, a failure. On the eve of America’s entering the horrific Great War in Europe, with Russia plummeting into chaos and the anarchists at home making bombs, Drick and her crew seemed to be saying that Villagers just wanted to picnic and party. It was one thing for Duchamp to be part of this little scene. His whole life and art were about cool disengagement and intellectual distance. But for Sloan the socialist to be there suggests that a new mood was overtaking the Village.

  “There were two sorts of people here: those who had lived in the Village before 1917 and those who had just arrived from France or college,” Malcolm Cowley recalled. He’d left Harvard in 1917 to drive munitions trucks for the French army. He writes that he and the other young Americans serving around him—who included another Harvard man and future Villager, E. E. Cummings—had volunteered in someone else’s war purely for the adventure of it and felt a “monumental indifference” to the cause for which they fought, a “curious attitude of non-participation, of being friendly visitors who, though they might be killed at any moment, still had no share in what was taking place.” Carrying this experience of being uprooted and disconnected into the 1920s, they became the Lost Generation, a term Gertrude Stein applied to them after hearing a French garage owner yell it at one of his young mechanics. More worldly than the golden-age cohort, less idealistic and optimistic, in a sense they were expatriates wherever they went, whether that was Paris or New York.

  After college and the war, most of us drifted to Manhattan, to the crooked streets south of Fourteenth, where you could rent a furnished hall-bedroom for two or three dollars weekly or the top floor of a rickety house for thirty dollars a month. We came to the Village without any intention of being Villagers. We came because living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already (and written letters full of enchantment), because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could be published . . . [We] belonged to the proletariat of the arts and we lived in Greenwich Village where everyone else was poor.

  Of the pre- and post-1917 Villagers Cowley writes, “I came to think of them as ‘they’ and ‘we.’ . . . The truth is that ‘we,’ the newcomers to the Village, were not bohemians . . . ‘They’ had been rebels: they wanted to change the world, be leaders in the fight for justice and art, help to create a society in which individuals could express themselves. ‘We’ were convinced at the time that society could never be changed by an effort of the will . . . We were content to build our modest happiness in the wreck of ‘their’ lost illusions, a cottage in the ruins of a palace . . . We might act like pagans, we might live for the moment, but we tried not to be self-conscious about it.”

  Just as the counterculture of the 1960s would be dumbed down for mass consumption in the 1970s as polyester bell-bottoms, “soft rock,” and Plato’s Retreat, Cowley believed the ideas and ideals of the 1910s seeped out of the Village in the 1920s, leaving only gestures. Female equality, he argued, came to mean only the freedom to smoke (doubling the market for the tobacco companies) and bob your hair; free love was reduced to pure promiscuity, paganism meant hedonism, living for the moment was inter
preted as license to get as drunk as you want as often as you can. The Village “was dying of success. It was dying because it became so popular that too many people insisted on living there.”