The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  In 1951 Parker was banned from performing in New York when his cabaret card was revoked for drug violations. He wouldn’t play in the city again until 1953, the year Reisner booked him for an extended engagement on Sundays at a club near Washington Square called the Open Door. By all accounts he was not at the top of his game by this point in his life. He had burned himself just about clean through, physically and emotionally. “The Sunday sessions were full of suspense and drama,” Reisner writes. “Would he show? Was he well? Would he hang around or wander off?” One afternoon late in 1954 Parker was found lying unconscious on Barrow Street. His friend Ahmed Basheer brought him up to his apartment at 4 Barrow Street, where Joans also had a place. Parker crashed with them through that winter, which turned out to be the last few months of his life. Joans later recalled that he, Parker, and Basheer would sleep together in the same bed for warmth because the steam heat was so bad.

  Parker died on March 12, 1955, at the uptown Stanhope Hotel, in the suite of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the renegade Rothschild who was a patron to him, Thelonious Monk, and others. At thirty-four he’d lived fast and died young but did not leave a good-looking corpse—the coroner doubled his age in his estimate. As the word went out, Joans and a few friends from the Village fanned out by subway to scrawl the now familiar message Bird lives! in charcoal or chalk on walls around the city.

  WHEN DAVID AMRAM HIT THE SCENE THAT YEAR, DOWNTOWN JAZZ was in its own golden era and he immediately found places to play in and around the Village. He had taken up trumpet as a kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the 1930s and then in Washington, D.C., during the war. He played his first professional gig while still in junior high, sitting in with an all-black jazz band. He got paid one dollar and a bucket of ice cream. He switched to French horn because it was easier to play with braces. From early on he was mixing jazz and classical music in his playing and composing. In the first half of the 1950s he played orchestral music in the army, then jazz in Paris. When he arrived in New York in 1955 he got a place on East Eighth Street between Avenues B and C. Later he’d move to a tiny cockroach ranch of a sixth-floor walk-up at 114 Christopher Street. He headed straight for the jazz clubs in the Village and was soon playing with Charles Mingus at the Café Bohemia, a spot at 15 Barrow Street that since the late 1940s had been a bar, a restaurant, a lesbian hangout, and was now newly dedicated to progressive jazz; “No rock ’n roll, no vocalists, no big bands, no nuttin’ except small jazz combos,” the owner told the Village Voice. It was one of the coolest clubs in town. Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and other greats played there, all the other jazz musicians in town came to listen, and some landmark albums were recorded live there. “The Bohemia’s audience reminded me of cafés in Europe, where people were serious and intense, and paid attention,” the jazz record producer George Avakian recalled. “They regarded the music as an art form, and even acted a little superior about the fact that they were there and listening to Miles.”

  Amram also started to play at the Five Spot, a bar on Bowery below Cooper Square, which like the Cedar Tavern became a regular watering hole for the painters, the Beats, everyone on the downtown arts scene in the mid-1950s. Alfred Leslie credits the sculptor David Smith and the painter Herman Cherry, whose loft was across the street, with discovering it. Originally it was a family-owned dive where Bowery bums went for their morning “eye-openers.” Then the owners, Joe and Ignatius Termini, allowed some neighboring jazz musicians to play there at night. Smith and Cherry told the other downtown artists, and since the Cedar was often three deep at the bar by then they began to peel off to the Five Spot just a few blocks south and east. It didn’t take the Terminis long to see what they had going and soon they turned the bar into a regular venue for the newest jazz. Most of the downtowners preferred to hear jazz in bars rather than nightclubs; the drinks were much cheaper and the atmosphere looser. “The Five Spot welcomed everybody—artists, moving men, postal workers, winos, office workers, and off-duty firemen—and you could get a huge pitcher of beer for 75 cents,” Amram writes in Offbeat, his second memoir. “The Five Spot is darkly lit, has weird waiters, good music always,” Kerouac wrote of it. “On weekends parties of well-dressed uptowners jam-pack the place, talking continuously—nobody minds.”

  “The outsiders were welcome to join us, even if they didn’t want us to join them,” Amram explained in 2011. “It wasn’t an exclusive club. We were just hanging out.” Any musician who wanted to jam with Amram’s quartet was welcomed; he recalls one night when all eighteen members of the Woody Herman band sat in with his group. Thelonious Monk’s quartet, with John Coltrane on tenor, played their first long-term engagement there. In 1959 Ornette Coleman’s free jazz experimenting at the club would light a firestorm of jazz world controversy. One night Larry Rivers brought his friend Leonard Bernstein to the Five Spot to hear Coleman; Coleman invited Bernstein up to play. The Beats, the New York School poets, and their friends gave readings there, often backed by jazz. Langston Hughes came down from Harlem to read, backed by Charles Mingus; Kenneth Rexroth, the Beats’ West Coast mentor, packed the house when he read to music by the hard bop Pepper Adams Quintet, who also recorded a live album there. In Minor Characters Joyce Johnson, who dated Kerouac for a couple of years, writes, “I remember one night when a middle-aged, sad-faced black woman stood up beside the table where she’d been sitting and sang so beautifully in a cracked, heartbroken voice I was sure I’d heard before.” It was Billie Holiday. In the poem he wrote when she died in 1959, Frank O’Hara recalled hearing her at the club “and I stopped breathing.”

  In July 1957 Esquire ran a lavish photo essay, “New York’s Spreading Upper Bohemia,” a pseudosociological survey of places in the city where artists, musicians, and writers rubbed elbows with their well-heeled, well-connected patrons and collectors—businessmen, ad men, publishers, doctors, lawyers, society matrons. The article dubbed the artists Lower Bohemians and the wealthy patron an Upper Bohemian, who is “culturally hep, but he is not a cultural hepcat.” In one photo, Amram blows his French horn on the Five Spot stage for a casually mixed-race crowd huddled at small tables. Another shows a booth crammed with the artists David Smith, Larry Rivers, and Grace Hartigan and O’Hara and a pair of Upper Bohemians, one a neurosurgeon and the other an economist.

  After his unhappy experience with Thelonious Monk early on, Max Gordon (with Lorraine’s prodding) had warmed to progressive jazz, and many of the greats were playing at the Vanguard by the time Amram arrived. And when Art D’Lugoff opened the Village Gate on Bleecker Street in 1958, it became one of Amram’s favorite places to play. “When you were there you just felt at home, more than where your home usually was,” he recalled. “When I played there with Dizzy Gillespie, after the show was over we didn’t want to leave. We’d sit in the back dressing room reminiscing and telling jokes. Finally about four o’clock in the morning the great big pipe [in the ceiling] started to drip. Dizzy said, ‘That’s the sign, fellas. We gotta split.’ The bass player said, ‘Why, man?’ Dizzy said, ‘Otherwise Art D’Lugoff’s gonna charge us rent.’ ” Dizzy celebrated his sixtieth birthday there in 1977.

  AS THAT ESQUIRE PHOTO OF THE FIVE SPOT AUDIENCE SUGGESTS, Village bohemians’ enthusiastic embrace of progressive jazz can be seen as part of their ongoing efforts to be progressive about racial issues as well. It would be a gross overstatement to say that the bohemian Village was a little free zone of interracial harmony and equality, but black musicians, artists, and writers did feel somewhat more at ease mixing with the hip white people there than with whites elsewhere. The clubs and bars where progressive jazz was played were, as the jazz critic Nat Hentoff put it, “islands of at least acquaintanceship between Negroes and whites.” The more thoughtful white jazz fans were aware that their enjoyment of this music in clubs where they mingled with black musicians and patrons didn’t constitute great victories for racial understanding and equality but maybe small ones.

  Gay black artists and writers found life a littl
e easier among hip Villagers than in mainstream society, including black society. James Baldwin had started coming down to the Village from Harlem to work after-school jobs in the 1930s. By the late ’40s he was living there and working on his novel set partly in the Village, Another Country, about a bisexual black jazzman who squires an emotionally battered white woman around the bohemian milieu. Baldwin met such black bohemians as Richard Wright, the novelist, and the artist Beauford Delaney, who painted several portraits of him. Born in Knoxville, Delaney had come to New York in 1929. He lived in Harlem, where he knew everyone on the Harlem Renaissance scene, but as a gay man he did his socializing in the Village, where he kept a studio. During the anything-goes Prohibition years Harlem’s clubs and speakeasies had rivaled those in the Village for butch and pansy acts. But Harlem’s dominant, churchgoing society remained very conservative on the issue, and what might be tolerated on a nightclub stage was soundly condemned in daily life. Even a star the likes of Langston Hughes kept it on the down low in Harlem. Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader who was also gay, found his way to the Village in the late 1930s as well; he sang tenor in Josh White’s group the Carolinians at Cafe Society and socialized at the White Horse and the Paddock.

  Harry Belafonte came to the Village from Harlem after the war. His mother, Millie, of mixed-race heritage, had come from Jamaica to Harlem’s West Indian section during Prohibition. She joined a sister who was already there and running a successful numbers operation with a white partner, a Tammany Irishman. His father, Harold Bellanfanti, also a mixed-race Jamaican, was a cook on United Fruit Company banana boats. Millie did domestic day labor. Harold Jr. was born in 1927. His childhood was divided between Harlem—where for a while the light-skinned boy hid his black heritage from the white kids around him, going by the nickname Frenchie—and long stays with his mother’s family in Jamaica. He fell in love with theater and got a few acting parts with the American Negro Theatre, where he became lifelong friends with another young actor, Sidney Poitier. Following a stint in the military he used the GI Bill to study acting under Piscator at the New School. On his first day, the only dark face in his class, he introduced himself to the other young nobodies: Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Walter Matthau, Elaine Stritch, Wally Cox, Bea Arthur, and Bernie Schwartz, aka Tony Curtis. Brando was, not surprisingly, the coolest guy in class, but right behind him was his roommate Cox, whose entire career would be spent playing nerds and nebbishes. He and Brando zipped around the Village streets on motorcycles. Brando had a thing for pretty black girls. He and Belafonte double-dated dancers from Katherine Dunham’s company.

  Although acting was Belafonte’s first love, others convinced him that his true forte was singing. At twenty-one he debuted at the Royal Roost, a very popular midtown club, singing pop tunes like “Pennies From Heaven” with a pickup band that included Charlie Parker and Max Roach. He cut a few modestly successful records, toured East Coast clubs, and played an extended engagement at Cafe Society; then his pop career fizzled. In 1950, looking for more stable income, he threw in with two friends to start a tiny hamburger stand they called the Sage on Seventh Avenue near Sheridan Square. A burger joint run by three handsome black men was a novelty even in the Village, and it soon attracted a lot of Village girls, who attracted a lot of guys. This “began to cause some resentment among the Italians who ran most of the other coffeehouses and restaurants in the neighborhood,” Belafonte recalls in his memoir. “We started hearing mutters, and caught some dirty looks.” The trio managed to finesse their way out of paying local mobsters “protection” fees, but their own lack of business skills sank the place anyway. The Sage was right down Seventh Avenue from the Village Vanguard, where Belafonte heard Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Josh White, who inspired him to switch to folk music. He made pilgrimages down to the Lomax collection at the Library of Congress in D.C. and studied up, building a new repertoire. His agent convinced a reluctant Max Gordon to let him debut the new act at the Vanguard—a two-song tryout. He went over well and launched his new folksinging career there with a three-month engagement, followed by a run uptown at the Blue Angel. He soon took advantage of his Caribbean roots by adding calypso and mento songs to his repertoire, releasing the great single “Matilda” in 1953 and the smash hit LP Calypso in 1956.

  LeRoi Jones moved to Manhattan in 1957. He’d grown up in the heart of the black middle class in Newark, attended Howard University, and done a tour in the U.S. Air Force, from which he was discharged on suspicions that he was a commie troublemaker, partly because he was known to read Partisan Review. Now an aspiring writer and intellectual in his early twenties, he took a cold-water walk-up in the East Village. At twenty-eight dollars a month it was as near as he could afford to the Village proper. He haunted the Village coffeehouses—the Rienzi, the Figaro, Pandora’s Box near Louis’ Tavern off Sheridan Square. Applying for a job at the Record Changer he met Hettie Cohen, a Jewish girl from Queens. They were soon dating. “It seemed to me part of the adventure of my new life in the Village,” Jones/Baraka later wrote. “The black man with the white woman, I thought. Some kind of classic bohemian accoutrement.” They moved in together and on her second pregnancy decided to get married. According to Hettie, their Italian neighbors gave them cold stares, catcalls, and jeers when they walked arm an arm in the Village, but “we might have been hurt, or killed—and him more than likely—had we been out of New York City.” Jones carried a length of pipe with him whenever he walked through the South Village, with or without his white woman on his arm. In Baldwin’s Another Country, the black jazzman and his white woman are sitting self-consciously in Washington Square when an Italian youth from the neighborhood goes by. “The boy looked at him with hatred; his glance flicked over Leona as though she were a whore.”

  There was a bar on Minetta Lane in the mid-1950s where black men and white women went to meet—in effect a modern black-and-tan—called Romero’s. Owner Johnny Romero was a handsome West Indian who was said to date only white women himself. He kept the jukebox stacked with calypso records, which Belafonte was then helping to make a big pop music fad. Romero’s “had a smoldering kind of illicit sexual excitement about it,” Dan Wakefield writes. Ron Sukenick records that white Village guys went there as a kind of political statement, a gesture of solidarity with black people, but often found the black men there intimidating. The black playwright Charles Gordone, who waited tables at Romero’s, later set his Pulitzer-winning play No Place to Be Somebody in a fictionalized version of the bar. After a few years Romero abruptly closed the place and moved to Paris. There were rumors that he’d dated the daughter of Carmine DeSapio, the very powerful Village politico, and DeSapio’s mob friends had pressured him to leave. In Paris he opened a hip and very successful boîte, Les Nuages.

  For all the interracial dating, Hettie Jones notes that there were never more than a small handful of actual relationships or stable interracial marriages in the Village at the time. Her own marriage would founder and break up in the mid-1960s, partly over Jones’s many infidelities and partly because, as he became known as the angry black revolutionary and writer of such incendiary plays as Dutchman and The Slave, he eventually became embarrassed to have a white wife.

  Although black men with white women were the more controversial, white bohemian guys of course also dated black women. Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans is about an interracial romance he had in the Village, though he switched the location to San Francisco in the book. Relations between black and white bohemians are also at the center of John Cassavetes’s writing and directing debut, Shadows, which premiered in 1958. The central characters are a struggling black jazz singer, his beatnik brother, and their innocent light-skinned sister who takes up with a white hepcat. He leaves her when he discovers she’s black. Black and white hipsters drink together, dance together, and get in fights with Italian squares together, but the film says that race relations are a lot more difficult than the superficial bonhomie admits.

  Actual events in the V
illage proved it. In the later 1950s Baldwin, by then a famous and successful writer, had an apartment on Horatio Street in the Irish Village, “a high-ceilinged studio that was clean and sparsely furnished—all I remember is a couch and a hi-fi set, bare hardwood floors and tall windows,” Wakefield writes. He also drank at the White Horse and the Paddock, threw famous parties for his friends in his apartment, took them all to a nearby Spanish restaurant, El Faro at Horatio and Greenwich Streets (opened in 1927 and still in operation as of this writing), where he picked up the tab. He found it easier being black and gay in the Village than elsewhere, but not easy. “I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro,” he wrote in Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955. He found out that the Irish Village could be as dangerous a place for a black man as the Italian Village. One night he took a booth in the Paddock with his friend the cinematographer Richard Bagley (On the Bowery) and two white women friends. The way it’s told in the Irish Village to this day, a couple of young drunks, making their way past the booth to the men’s room, made some nasty comment about seeing a black man sitting with a white woman. They either didn’t know or didn’t care that he was gay. Someone in the booth, it’s said, was foolish enough to retort and the two exploded. They brutally beat Baldwin and Bagley. Baldwin left soon after for Paris, where he completed his Village novel Another Country, including a horrific scene based on his experience that night.