The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Cafe Society did so well that Josephson opened an uptown version in 1940. Then the Red Scare of the postwar years did him in, as it did many left-leaning people in the entertainment business. When his brother, a stalwart CPUSA member, refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, conservatives in the press, predominantly Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, turned on Josephson and his clubs. Business plummeted and he closed the clubs in 1950. But the racially liberal policy he’d pioneered was taken up by other jazz venues in and around the Village—the Vanguard was one of the first—and the basement of 1 Sheridan Square would continue to play a significant role in Village culture.

  THE MAN WHO HAD SUCCEEDED JIMMY WALKER AS MAYOR OF NEW York was another immigrant’s son born in the Village, Fiorello La Guardia. He was as fitting a mayor for New York’s Depression and war years as Walker had been for the Roaring Twenties. They were opposites in just about every respect, and La Guardia would exert himself heroically to undo the neglect and corruption that had been standard operating procedure in the Walker years. As La Guardia’s three terms rolled on, even Walker ended up working for him and admiring him as “the greatest mayor New York ever had.” But for all the good he did he left a couple of legacies that had a questionable influence on nightlife in the Village and the city in general.

  La Guardia’s father, Achille, was a cornet player from Foggia who first saw America touring with the celebrated opera diva Adelina Patti in 1878. La Guardia’s mother, from Trieste, was Jewish. They moved to the United States in 1880, renting an apartment in a town house at 7 Varick Place (which no longer exists) in the Italian South Village, where Fiorello was born in 1882. Unlike Walker, La Guardia didn’t grow up in the Village. When he was three his father joined the army as a musician and band leader, and until 1898 the family lived on bases in South Dakota, Arizona, and other points west. Fiorello grew up in dusty cow towns where not many kids had names like his, and he did a lot of fighting with boys who gave him a hard time about organ grinders and their monkeys. As mayor he would ban organ grinders from the streets of New York. He was also commonly seen wearing a cowboy hat and a western string tie.

  In 1898 the La Guardias left the United States for Trieste, and at eighteen Fiorello went to work for the American consulate in Budapest. He was fluent in five languages, including Yiddish, a skill that would do him well in New York City. He returned to America in 1906 and, after some moving around, he was back living in the Village, working as an interpreter at Ellis Island while putting himself through law school. He joined the Village’s Madison Republican Club and was elected to Congress in 1916. When America entered the Great War, Congressman La Guardia enlisted in the army air corps and was sent to Foggia, his father’s hometown, where he trained with Italian pilots, flew some missions, and had a Flying Cross pinned to his chest by Italy’s King Emmanuel III—whom La Guardia, never one to stand on ceremony, reportedly called Manny.

  As mayor from 1934 to 1945 he was the hardest-working man in the city, a tireless micromanager who in every way was the antidote to Walker’s lackadaisical stewardship. He rarely rested and grumbled about his staff’s vacations and sick days. When he got antsy behind his desk he’d ride around town in a sidecar with the motorcycle cops. He chased any fire truck that crossed his path, sometimes plunging headlong into burning buildings to lend a hand. When he saw a line moving too slowly at a city welfare office he fired the supervisor on the spot, promoted the next in charge, and promised to fire him too if the line didn’t move a lot quicker. He removed armies of the Tammany clock watchers and shovel leaners from their city jobs and ended graft on city contracts. Between the Walker-era scandals and La Guardia’s housecleaning, Tammany’s long period as an Irish feed trough ended, though Tammany continued on through the 1950s, notably in Greenwich Village.

  One of his more dubious legacies, though he shares the blame with a lot of others, was the Mafia’s stranglehold on the city. By the end of Prohibition they were experienced racketeers. Corruption and ineptitude hampered law enforcement efforts against them on every level, from the beat cop and borough president to the FBI and the federal courthouse where, for example, the New York appellate judge Martin Manton, nicknamed Preying Manton, made a habit of overturning mobsters’ convictions until he was jailed for taking bribes in 1939. Despite some showy headline victories, the general weakness of the good guys allowed the mob to expand into virtually every corner of New York City life during La Guardia’s tenure. They provided muscle for both unions and union busters, perverting huge sectors of organized labor. Through protection rackets they shook down defenseless proprietors from mom-and-pop stores up to whole industries including the garment trade, trucking and hauling, the waterfront, the fish markets, and construction. They moved into slots, took over the numbers rackets they’d previously eschewed as “the nigger pool,” and developed the constant corollary to gambling, loan sharking. They also got into prostitution, running an estimated three hundred whorehouses employing two thousand girls by 1936.

  And they made New York City the hub of a global narcotics network. When legislation in the 1920s ended the legal production of heroin in the United States, the evil genius Arnold Rothstein adapted his international bootlegging operations to develop an overseas network that supplied heroin to New York’s jonesing users. When Rothstein was rubbed out in 1928, his former associates Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter took over and expanded the business. They made New York America’s importing and distribution center for heroin from Marseilles—the infamous “French connection.” Lansky and the rest continued the business even after the New York State special prosecutor Thomas Dewey put Luciano, who’d risen to first among equals of the Five Families’ bosses, behind bars on a thirty-to-fifty-year sentence in 1936. (He’d be paroled after serving only ten.) Because New York, as the port of entry, had the nation’s cheapest and most abundant heroin, it attracted junkies from around the country. By the end of La Guardia’s tenure half of all the junkies in the country would be in New York City. Heroin use would be a scourge in the Village for years to come.

  The mob also retained a deep and wide involvement in New York bars, nightclubs, restaurants, burlesque theaters, and other entertainment venues. State and city efforts to drive the mob out of these businesses ranged from the serious to petty harassment. As soon as Prohibition ended, the New York State legislature passed a raft of new laws about the sale and consumption of intoxicating spirits and created the State Liquor Authority (SLA) to enforce them. Along with wine shops and liquor stores any bar, club, restaurant, or hotel serving liquor now had to be licensed by the SLA, and any establishment violating any of the many pertinent laws risked heavy fines or even closure. This had a curious impact on the city’s gay- and lesbian-friendly establishments. Although homosexuals were not specifically cited anywhere in SLA regulations, police interpreted the rules against running a “disorderly” establishment to mean that “even the presence of homosexuals . . . in a bar made that place disorderly and subject to closure,” David Carter notes in his book Stonewall. “Making it illegal for bars to serve homosexuals created a situation that could only attract organized crime.” As licensed bar owners grew watchful of and hostile toward any sign of homosexual behavior on their premises, the Mafia stepped into the vacuum and ran many of the city’s illegal gay and lesbian bars and clubs, selling “watered-down drinks at inflated prices, often made with ill-gotten liquor from truck hijackings,” according to the journalist Lucian K. Truscott IV. To get around the SLA, the mob ran many establishments as “private bottle clubs” or after-hours places that were in effect latter-day gay speakeasies, ostensibly open to members only. It wasn’t a question of mobsters being tolerant of homosexuals. Most mobsters despised them but were happy to exploit them, additionally using the bars and clubs as centers for gay prostitution and pornography rings, dope peddling, money laundering, and extortion rackets targeting wealthy closeted gays. In their lurid ex
posé U.S.A. Confidential from 1952, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer claimed, “All fairy night clubs and gathering places are illegal, and operate only through pay-offs to the authorities. They are organized into a national circuit, controlled by the Mafia which also finds unique opportunity to sell dope in such dives.” This tradition of gay and lesbian clubs with mob backers would lead directly to the 1969 Stonewall riots, the Bunker Hill of the gay liberation movement.

  La Guardia meanwhile made a great symbolic show of cleaning up Forty-second Street and Times Square, which mob money was turning into a tawdry zone of burlesque theaters, strip joints, gambling dens, whorehouses, and clubs that featured drag performances or were known to cater to gay or lesbian clientele. Just as he had personally tossed the mob’s slot machines into the harbor while newsreel cameras whirred, he padlocked some of these joints with his own hands for the cameras. And just as the mob simply trucked their slots to other cities with less hyperactive mayors, the gangsters relocated their clubs to other neighborhoods. The drag clubs and gay and lesbian spots tended, naturally, to head for Greenwich Village or what’s now the East Village.

  The Howdy Club, a cabaret bar with both lesbian and drag performers, relocated to West Third Street near Mercer Street. The Howdy was known for its lesbian staff and drag king performers and even fielded its own all-woman football team. In 1936 the New York Post called it “The Village at its strangest—and not for the squeamish.” In 1938 three gunmen in the process of robbing the club got into a firefight with a police officer. He died from a bullet to the head. One of the robbers struck a young female patron, Norma De Marco, on the head with his pistol as she went to the patrolman’s aid. The next night Norma committed suicide by leaping out of a twelfth-story apartment window. It’s likely that she killed herself from extreme distress; the press coverage of the Howdy Club robbery had named Norma, effectively outing her.

  Closer to MacDougal Street on West Third was Tony Pastor’s Downtown, which, according to the drag performer and hustler Minette, was also a hangout for both lesbians and female impersonators. In his chapbook memoir Recollections of a Part-Time Lady, Minette recalls:

  The lezzies used to mix with the drag queens. The fairies and the lezzies didn’t mix, but the queens did because we all used to hustle at Tony Pastor’s on West 3rd Street. The johns would come in looking for something kinky or to try to convert a lezzie . . . So after a few drinks, the lezzies would turn them over to us and the john would end up with a queen. The queens looked so much prettier anyway, ’cause we tried.

  Both clubs were raided on morals charges in 1944. According to Variety, the Howdy was padlocked for “presenting a show in which a male dancer, Leon La Verdi, gave a performance that ‘exhibited feminine characteristics which would appeal to any male homosexual’ present.” Pastor’s was found guilty of “permitting Lesbians to loiter on the premises and similar charges.” The following year the jazz guitarist Eddie Condon reopened the Howdy as a jazz club, retaining the old name. It was a popular spot through the 1960s. Pastor’s also survived, apparently with mob backers.

  In 1941 La Guardia introduced new cabaret laws that had little effect on the mob but made life miserable for everyone else in the business. The new laws required nightclub owners and all employees, from performers down to the hat check girl and the busboys, to get fingerprinted and carry picture ID cards. If you had any police record you couldn’t have a card, which meant you couldn’t work. Enforcement by the NYPD was haphazard and arbitrary, and charges of corruption and bias abounded. Mobsters easily got around it but it could be disastrous for performers. Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker would have their cards yanked for drug violations; Lenny Bruce would lose his because of an obscenity conviction; the exotic dancer Sally Rand, refused a card in 1947 because the cops thought her fan dance too risqué, would take the NYPD to court over it and win.

  From La Guardia’s time on, the mob would be an accepted presence in the Italian Village, an integral part of the social web, which functioned as a source of jobs and loans, a charitable organization, and a private security force that kept the blocks clean of anyone who looked like they “didn’t belong.” One of the most powerful and colorful of all mob dons, Vincent “Chin” Gigante, was born to poor Sicilian immigrants in the Village in 1928. He got his nickname Chin as a boy; it came from the way his mother pronounced Vincenzo, leaning out a window at suppertime and calling down to the street, “Chin-chayn-zo!” On his orders, wiseguys never said his name in public. They just pointed to their chins or made a C with thumb and forefinger. He dropped out of school at sixteen to begin his life of crime as a petty hoodlum on Village streets. By the 1950s he was the capo of a Village crew loyal to Vito Genovese. After Genovese died in federal prison in 1969, Chin eventually rose to be the boss of the Genovese family. He built it into the Rolls-Royce of Mafia families, with extensive and very lucrative operations in narcotics, loan sharking, extortion, trucking and shipping, construction, nightclubs and bars, the Fulton Fish Market, and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

  Through the 1970s and ’80s Chin was a local landmark on the block of Sullivan Street between Bleecker and West Third Streets. Every morning he would visit his mother in her fourth-floor walkup on the east side of the street, then in the late afternoon or evening he’d cross to the Triangle Civic Improvement Association, a dumpy storefront with soaped-up windows at 208 Sullivan. It was his private “social club.” He’d spend the evening in there playing pinochle, running the Genovese family business in whispered conversations. By then he’d developed the crazy act for which he came to be known as the Oddfather and the Daffy Don. To stay out of jail he pretended to be mentally incompetent. In public he always appeared in a ratty bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers, unshaven and unkempt, looking dazed, muttering. He teetered across Sullivan Street in tiny steps, with a couple of the boys at his elbows pretending to help him along. Sometimes he’d stop to urinate on the sidewalk. The FBI knew that a mental defective couldn’t be running an empire as successful as the Genovese family’s, but it took the Bureau decades to get the goods on Gigante. Agents tried to bug the Triangle, photographed the comings and goings, tapped phone lines, and even bugged the rearview mirrors of cars parked on Sullivan Street, hoping to snatch Chin’s muttered conversations as he shambled past. Periodically over the years he would check into one psychiatric facility or another to shore up the ruse. It worked until his arrest in 1990. After years of legal maneuvering he was finally convicted of racketeering in 1997 and died in a federal penitentiary in 2005. The Triangle is now Sullivan Street Tea & Spice Company.

  Photo Section 2

  Henrietta Rodman. (Library of Congress)

  Neith Boyce. (Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston. Library of Congress)

  Mabel Dodge Luhan in a 1934 photograph by Carl Van Vechten. (Library of Congress)

  John Reed. (Library of Congress)

  Polly’s Restaurant. (New York Times)

  Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugen Boissevain at 75 1/2 Bedford Street. (Library of Congress)

  The Provincetown Playhouse today. (Photograph by Christine Walker)

  Sadakichi Hartmann, the “King of Bohemia.” (Library of Congress)

  Baroness Elsa and friend. (Library of Congress)

  Romany Marie. (Photograph by Genevieve Naylor. Corbis Images)

  The Pirate’s Den, one of the themed speakeasies around Sheridan Square in the 1920s. (Corbis Images)

  One of Mayor Jimmy Walker’s frequent photo ops. Here he poses with Mr. Televox, a Western Electric “robot,” in 1929. (Corbis Images)

  Maxwell Bodenheim in 1954, shortly before he was shot to death. (Corbis Images)

  The West Side waterfront as it looked through much of the twentieth century, crowded with piers and “sheds.” (Corbis Images)

  Woody Guthrie, 1943. (Photograph by Al Aumuller. Library of Congress)

  Alfred Leslie in front of one of his paintings at the Whitney Museum, 1959. (Courtesy of Alfred Leslie)r />
  Frank O’Hara (turning his head) at the Cedar Tavern on a typically crowded night, 1956. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  W. H. Auden at work, 1946. (Photograph by Jerry Cooke. Corbis Images)

  15

  Swag Was Our Welfare

  WORLD WAR II ENDED THE GREAT DEPRESSION; AS A JOBS AND economic stimulus program it dwarfed FDR’s New Deal. Several sectors of New York City’s economy, licit and illicit, thrived. By midwar New York was at its “boomtown boomiest,” The New Yorker crowed. There were jobs for anyone who wanted them, on the bustling waterfront, where the Brooklyn Navy Yard alone employed seventy-five thousand, in factories (New York City was still a major manufacturing center), and in offices. Women poured into jobs either newly created by the wartime boom or left vacant by men now in uniform. Toward the end of the war Rosie the Riveter held a third of all manufacturing jobs, more than double prewar levels. With money in their pockets for the first time in a decade, New Yorkers looked for ways to spend it. Between locals and the crowds of soldiers and sailors in town on weekend passes, the city’s clubs, movie houses, and restaurants soared again. Broadway theaters were reborn; in the 1943–44 season alone they staged forty-one comedies, thirty dramas, and twenty-five musicals. On the Town and Oklahoma! both debuted during the war, and both outlived it, inaugurating the golden age of the Broadway musical. Historians credit the wartime boom with expanding diversion-starved audiences for art museums, the symphony, the ballet, and modern dance as well. The Village, crowded with clubs, eateries, and cultural workers, shared the windfall.