The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  As one of his final acts in office Jimmy Walker left one last, dubious legacy to the Village, breaking ground in 1932 on the New York City House of Detention for Women, built on the site of the old Jefferson Market jail and colloquially known as the House of D. Like Newgate Prison back in the 1790s it was intended as a model of prison reform. Opened in 1934, the twelve-story monolith of brownish brick with art deco flourishes loomed behind the old Jefferson Market Courthouse on Sixth Avenue, looking more like a stylish, if somewhat cheerless, apartment building than a prison. Windows were meshed instead of barred, and the one sign on its exterior merely gave the address, NUMBER TEN GREENWICH AVENUE. There were toilets and hot and cold running water in all four hundred cells and, like Newgate, it was going to focus on rehabilitating its inmates—prostitutes, vagrants, alcoholics, and/or drug addicts—rather than merely punishing them.

  From the start the reality was at variance with the intentions and the facility quickly became infamous as a combination of Bedlam and Bastille. Within a decade it was chronically overcrowded with a volatile mix of inmates: women who couldn’t make bail awaiting trials that were sometimes months off, women already convicted and serving time, alcoholics and addicts, the mentally ill, street gang girls, hookers and other lifelong multiple offenders, and teenagers spending their first nights behind bars. Tougher, more experienced prisoners brutalized and sexually assaulted the weak and inexperienced. So, of course, did the staff. The halls rang with the howls of inmates suffering the agonies of drug or alcohol withdrawal. There were cockroaches and mice in the cells and worms in the food. Village lesbians called it the Country Club and the Snake Pit. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn did time in the House of D, as did Ethel Rosenberg and Warhol shooter Valerie Solanas. In 1957 Dorothy Day spent thirty days there for staying on the street during a civil defense air-raid drill. Her ban-the-bomb supporters picketed outside every day from noon to two; the Times called them “possibly the most peaceful pickets in the city.”

  Despite its bland exterior the House of D made its presence very known in the neighborhood through the daily ritual of inmates yelling out the meshed windows or down from the exercise area on the roof to the boyfriends, girlfriends, dealers, and pimps perpetually loitering on the Greenwich Avenue sidewalk—a Village tradition for almost forty years. The filmmaker John Waters first caught the spectacle in the early 1960s. “It was amazing. No one can ever imagine what that was like. All the hookers would be screaming out the windows, ‘Hey Jimbo!’ And all the pimps would be down on the sidewalk yelling stuff.” Jeremiah Newton, who would later produce a film about his friend Candy Darling, initially encountered the House of D at around the same time. “It was this huge, monolithic building, looking like the building the Morlocks dragged the Time Machine into, and the girls were always yelling down, screaming obscenities and throwing things out the window. It was the biggest building there. I sat on a stoop watching the people walk by. I’d never seen anything quite like it before.” The Village writer Grace Paley lived near the facility in the 1950s and ’60s and walked her kids past it regularly. She wrote that “we would often have to thread our way through whole families calling up—bellowing, screaming up to the third, seventh, tenth floor, to figures, shadows behind bars and screened windows, How you feeling? Here’s Glena. She got big. Mami mami, you like my dress? We gettin’ you out baby. New lawyer come by.”

  All the while, the wonderful old Jefferson Market Courthouse itself soldiered on in the shadows. It was built in the 1870s and modeled on Ludwig II of Bavaria’s fairy-tale castle Neuschwanstein. By the end of World War II it had ceased to be a courthouse and was temporary home to various city agencies before becoming a branch of the New York Public Library.

  12

  The Coney Island of the Soul

  AS THE 1920S ROARED ON, VILLAGERS CONSTANTLY COMPLAINED of being overrun by barbarian hordes of outsiders who’d come for nothing but a drunken debauch. “A den of iniquity, a sink of perversion. In other words, the place to go,” the bank robber Willie Sutton calls it in his second ghostwritten memoir, Where the Money Was. Among his many escapades, Sutton claims he was once taken to a party on MacDougal Street where the hostess opened the door topless, he saw a woman he knew performing oral sex on a man, naked women danced together, and “before long I was corralled by a lady poet who was down to her panties,” which she soon stripped off while reciting Ezra Pound.

  Best representing that image of the Roaring Twenties Village was a writer at least as well known for his drunk and dissolute behavior as for his writing. Maxwell Bodenheim grew up poor and Jewish in small-town Mississippi. He was bright but viciously boorish, physically handsome yet repulsively slovenly, and argumentative to a fault, with a genius for the insult that could end any argument, usually with his being punched in the mouth. He desired more than anything to be taken seriously as a poet, and was for a while, yet he was best known as a writer of sleazy novels, an outrageous pain in the ass, and eventually a scary, shambling drunk. His friend Ben Hecht, in Letters from Bohemia, remembered him as “more disliked, derided, denounced, beaten up, and kicked down more flights of stairs than any poet of whom I have heard or read.”

  As young men he and Hecht were the pranksters of the Chicago Renaissance. According to Allen Churchill, they once filled a hall for a literary debate on the topic “Resolved: That People Who Attend Literary Debates Are Imbeciles.”

  Hecht strode center-stage to announce that he would take the affirmative. Then he stated, “The affirmative rests.” Bodenheim shambled forward, scrutinized his confident opponent, and said, “You win.”

  Bodenheim—Bogie to his long-suffering friends—was twenty-two when he blew into the Village with other Chicago émigrés in 1915 and instantly made a name for himself as a poet of great promise. Reading his facile, gaudy verses now, it’s easy to think that it was the brute force of his sociopathic presence, rather than the poetry, that convinced the best poets in the Village at the time that he was one of them, potentially even the best of them.

  You have a morning-glory face

  Whose edges are sensitive to light

  And curl in beneath the burden of a smile.

  Remembered silence returns to the morning-glory

  And lattices its curves

  With shades of golden reverberations.

  Then the morning-glory’s heart careens to loves

  Whose scent beats on the sky-walls of your soul.

  Tellingly, those not directly in his orbit seem not to have been fooled by the clever romance-novel sham of such verses; neither, apparently, was Bodenheim himself, though he would go on roaring about his genius for decades. Hecht records that after entering 223 poetry contests and failing to win a single one, he took to signing his letters to editors “Maxwell Bodenheim, 224th ranking U.S.A. poet.”

  Bodenheim had a real talent for scandal, easy enough to generate during Greenwich Village’s prolonged drunken orgy in the Prohibition years. His haughty, insulting demeanor and his habit of trying to steal other men’s women right under their noses got him regularly socked on the jaw and thrown out of bars, soirees, and Webster Hall. Through the 1920s he wrote a string of best-selling, sensational potboilers: Replenishing Jessica, about a free-loving bohemian; Georgie May, about a fallen prostitute; and Naked on Roller Skates, about a middle-aged “onetime hobo, circus-pegger, doughboy, sailor, anarchist, con man, all-time sensationalist and wanderer of the world” who leaves a small town with a much younger woman who “wanted to try everything at least once.” Hecht called them “hack work with flashes of tenderness, wit, and truth in them.” When the Society for the Suppression of Vice brought Bodenheim to trial in 1925 on an obscenity charge for Replenishing Jessica, his defense lawyer used a by then familiar tactic of demanding that the prosecutor read the entire text aloud to prove his case. Judge, jury, and the reporters covering the trial dozed as the prosecutor droned on and on, and the unaroused jury voted Bodenheim not guilty. Jimmy Walker agreed with the verdict. “No girl was eve
r seduced by a book,” he quipped.

  For a bohemian poet, celebrity and commercial success could bring on a full-blown personality crisis (as it would to Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac). Bodenheim squandered the money he made from his novels on drink and gambling as though he couldn’t throw it away fast enough. That way he could go back to demanding loans and cadging drinks from everyone around him, like a bohemian poet should. Meanwhile, his reputation in these years as a daring, risqué writer attracted a cloud of what we’d call groupies today, many of them the sort of teenagers from the outer boroughs and the hinterlands who flocked to the Village in the 1920s to throw off the shackles of mainstream morality and abandon themselves to the neighborhood’s nonstop pagan revels. He took his pick. One was Gladys Loeb, eighteen, from the Bronx. In 1928 he ended a brief fling with her, adding that her poetry was doggerel. Her landlady soon found her with her head in the gas oven, barely clinging to life, and to Bodenheim’s portrait. A few weeks later he did the same thing to twenty-two-year-old Virginia Drew, who threw herself into the Hudson and succeeded where Gladys had failed. When police went to question Bodenheim about Drew’s suicide, he’d slipped off to stay with Harry Kemp in Provincetown. Gladys, having recovered from her own suicide attempt, followed him there, trailing her irate father, cops, and reporters. Bodenheim talked his way out of their clutches but not out of the newspapers all over the country, which had a field day with lurid tales about the Greenwich Village Lothario.

  Another of his conquests was Aimee Cortez, widely feted as “the Mayoress of Greenwich Village.” She earned the title by stripping naked at private parties and Webster Hall shindigs and gyrating a wildly erotic dance. According to Churchill, this display sometimes ended with her going off with some lucky male, but other times she’d stop abruptly, with a look of terror and confusion, and run off. In a later era she’d be prescribed a drug for this clearly disturbed behavior, but in the Village of the late 1920s, where “a hideous lust . . . pervaded the air,” as Bodenheim’s My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village put it, she was merely celebrated as a queen of modern-day bacchantes. Not long after Gladys and Virginia made the papers, Aimee was found with her head in her own oven, also clutching Bodenheim’s portrait. She was dead at nineteen.

  Bodenheim was implicated in the sad end of another lover, a teenager from the outer boroughs with the improbable name Dorothy Dear. When she wasn’t with him in his MacDougal Street apartment, he wrote her love letters that she carried in her purse. One afternoon she was aboard a rush-hour subway train heading from Times Square to the Village when it derailed at a faulty switch, killing sixteen passengers, including Dorothy. Bodenheim’s love letters were found scattered around the wreckage.

  By the end of the 1920s Bodenheim was a wreck himself. From the 1930s until his death in 1954 he was a fixture on the streets and in the bars of the Village, by turns annoying and sad making, decaying before his old friends’ eyes into a stinking, toothless ghost, “tottering drunkenly to sleep on flophouse floors, shabby and gaunt as any Bowery bum,” as Hecht put it. Still, Hecht gallantly added, “Bogie hugged his undiminished riches—his poet’s vocabulary and his genius for winning arguments. He won nothing else.” He cranked out more cheap novels, drank the money, and stooped to hawking his poems to tourists in Washington Square for a quarter each. Wiseacres in the bars fed him gin and laughed at his drunken mumblings and rants, which sometimes yielded a famous line, such as “Greenwich Village is the Coney Island of the soul.”

  Despite the frightening deterioration of his physical and mental state, not to mention his hygiene, Bodenheim still attracted a certain type of desperate woman, usually in decline herself. He met the last of them in 1951 when Ruth Fagan bought a poem from him with her last quarter. She was thirty-two, he was a fifty-nine-year-old derelict, and within a couple of weeks they were going around as Mr. and Mrs. Bodenheim, though it’s not clear they ever bothered to make it official. Villagers said only a crazy woman would have taken up with him, and they may have been right. At fourteen “she had set fire to her parents’ home in Detroit, had suffered several nervous breakdowns, and had been confined for several weeks to a mental institution in Brooklyn.” They decayed together for the next couple of years, chronically broke and drunk, descending from cheap rooming houses to flophouses to sleeping in hallways and doorways. She turned tricks when she could, and he beat her when he found out. In 1952 they made a horrific spectacle of themselves at a fancy reunion for surviving members of the original Chicago Renaissance group, where he panhandled the guests while she propositioned them.

  If the Bodenheim of the early 1950s was a frightening or amusing clown to the tourists, and an embarrassment and bother to his old friends, he was something of a martyred saint to the generation of bohemians who came to the Village following World War II. In his headlong descent into the abyss, his lust for the extremes of degradation, his lust for lust itself, he was for them like a dark archangel of negative capability, representing the ultimate rejection of bourgeois virtue and mainstream values, even to the point of total self-destruction. He comes up several times in the published diaries of Judith Malina, cofounder of the Living Theatre, from this period. One night in 1951 she and her husband, Julian Beck, were in the San Remo, the dark and smoky bar at Bleecker and MacDougal Streets that Bodenheim often haunted.

  A ragged drunk approaches our table. In terrible shape. Ash blond hair askew. He lurches forward, his hands resting on the table. Directly to Julian: “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Julian Beck.”

  “My name is Maxwell Bodenheim. I’m an idiotic poet.”

  And he turns and moves off before we can speak.

  Roy Metcalf, who was a young newspaper reporter in the early 1950s, also encountered Bodenheim in the San Remo. “Bodenheim had a great face, an alcohol-ravaged face,” he recalled in the 2010s. “Once a guy from uptown wanted to see Greenwich Village, so we went down to the San Remo. There was Bodenheim. He said, ‘Bring him over, let’s buy him a drink.’ He expected Bodenheim to say something. Bodenheim by that time was so paralyzed by alcohol that all he could do was bray, ‘Aaaaargh.’ ”

  “Do we not idolize Maxwell Bodenheim although we are sometimes loath to talk to him and always ashamed of our condescension to him?” Malina wonders in another diary entry. “What we admire is Bodenheim’s refusal to resist. We fight all the time, resisting temptation. We admire those who don’t. Even if it’s suicidal.”

  In 1953 Ruth Bodenheim took up with a violent, mentally unstable dishwasher named Harold Weinberg. One night in the winter of 1954 the three of them wound up in Weinberg’s flophouse room off the Bowery. Bodenheim roused himself from a drunken stupor to see Ruth and Weinberg having sex. He attacked Weinberg, who pulled out a .22 and shot him through the heart. Then he stabbed Ruth in the chest.

  Today, Bodenheim is remembered more for this tabloid end than for any other achievement. Even his memoir was a dispiriting sham. My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, published posthumously in 1954, was ghostwritten by a hack who, like everyone else in the Village, had bought him drinks to listen to his drunken ramblings.

  EVEN AT THE HEIGHT OF ALL THE DRUNKEN WHOOPEE MAKING AND scandalous shenanigans, the Village still drew serious creative types. Marianne Moore and her mother had moved to 14 St. Luke’s Place in 1918. Born outside St. Louis and raised in Pennsylvania, Moore was a poet’s poet, a writer of intricately inventive verse highly admired by generations of peers from William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot to John Ashbery and Truman Capote. During the Village’s wild and crazy 1920s she was likely to be found at the Hudson Park branch of the public library, where she worked. She’s read now for her minutely observed nature poems such as the undulantly lyrical “The Fish” and “The Pangolin,” in which she entwines poetic metaphors with the descriptive precision of an encyclopedia entry. In 1956 she suddenly vaulted out of poetry circles and into pop culture as the poet laureate of the Brooklyn Dodgers when the Herald-Tribune ran her paean to
the team, “Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese,” on the opening day of the Dodgers-Yankees World Series. Unless you’re an otaku of Dodgers history the poem is indecipherable today, and the Bums lost the series to boot. But for the rest of her life she was known as the sports poet. Branching out, she became a fan and friend of Cassius Clay, and in 1965 she was ringside at a Floyd Patterson bout with her pals George Plimpton, Philip Roth, and the ubiquitous Norman Mailer. By then she was a highly visible and feted character known for her witty banter and her eccentric quasi-colonial outfit, a cape and tricorner hat, her one bohemian indulgence.

  Harvard classmates E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passos settled down in the Village in the early 1920s. Cummings, like Cowley and Dos Passos, had gone to France as a volunteer ambulance driver during the war. While there he befriended another American volunteer, William Slater Brown. When French troops, sick of the war, began to mutiny, censors found expressions of sympathy in some of Brown’s letters and interrogated both men. Cummings stood by his pal and was jailed along with him. After the war Brown and Cummings shared an apartment on West Fourteenth Street for a few years, after which Cummings joined the Lost Generation exodus to Paris in 1921. He returned to the Village in 1923, taking a studio at 4 Patchin Place, the gated mews off West Tenth Street, just across from the Jefferson Market Courthouse and jail. Originally built for the Brevoort’s waiters, Patchin Place became known for the writers who lived there over the years, including John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, and Cummings, who would reside there the rest of his days.

  Dos Passos wandered around Europe and the Middle East after the war before moving to the Village in 1922, taking a small studio in Washington Mews. He and Cummings remained lifelong friends (although Cummings did make fun of the shy Dos Passos’s stammer and lisp). Dos Passos had little time for “the nose in the air attitude that always bored me about Bohemians.” They both leaned toward the left in their 1920s youth and both would become disenchanted in the Stalinist 1930s. Galvanized, like liberals and intellectuals around the world, by the Sacco and Vanzetti trials and appeals that dragged on into 1927. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been swept up in a wide manhunt and charged with murders committed during an armed robbery in 1920. Because they were anarchists their trial was a media sensation. The evidence against them was sketchy and most liberals feared they were being railroaded. In the end they were in fact convicted and executed. Dos Passos went to Boston to cover the case and interview the men for both the New Masses and the Daily Worker. “I even managed to get hauled in myself,” he later wrote. Picketing outside the Boston statehouse at least once during the lengthy trials was considered de rigueur for all bien pensant Villagers, and Dos Passos was rounded up with a group of them one afternoon. “The ride in the paddywagon was made delightful by the fact that I found myself sitting next to Edna St. Vincent Millay. Outside of being a passable poet Edna Millay was one of the most attractive women who ever put pen to paper. The curious glint in her copper-colored hair intoxicated every man who saw her.” Her husband bailed them both out. Dos Passos and Cummings both traveled to the Soviet Union to see the Communist experiment firsthand, Dos Passos in 1928 and Cummings in 1931. The brutal repressions of the Stalin regime turned them away from the left, and they would share the distinction of being stalwart Republicans in liberal Greenwich Village, upsetting many of their cohorts. The relatively apolitical Dawn Powell would stick by them. In the 1950s Dos Passos wrote for the National Review, and both he and Cummings supported McCarthy.