The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Washington Square Village was completed that year. A pair of monolithic modern apartment blocks standing on stilts over manicured lawns, it was promptly nicknamed Tishman’s Tenements. In the Voice, Eli Wilentz of the Eighth Street Bookshop called it “a prettily painted chicken coop enlarged to monstrous size.” A few years later Tishman would run into financial difficulties and sell the complex to NYU.

  Jacobs’s increasing visibility as an advocate of preserving cities from the planners and developers brought her to the attention of both Mumford and William H. Whyte Jr., author of The Organization Man and an editor at Fortune. Whyte had her write an anti-redevelopment piece for Fortune, “Downtown Is for People,” that outraged his fellow editors and drew bags of mail. In 1958 she took a leave of absence from Architectural Forum to start work on her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which Random House published in 1961. “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding,” she begins, then she lays out her core ideas about cities as living organisms that do best when least meddled with by the “experts.” Urban planners and architects denounced her as an uncredentialed dilettante, a romantic, a myopic housewife whose entire understanding of urban life was based on her experiences in the utterly atypical hothouse of Greenwich Village. The book went on to be the bible of the anti–urban renewal and historic preservation movements anyway.

  While Jacobs and other Villagers were busy fighting off Moses’s large-scale public works plans, they failed to oppose the quieter, piecemeal incursions of private real estate developers, who through the 1950s were demolishing older buildings all over the Village for new high-rises. The old Brevoort on Fifth Avenue between Eighth and Ninth Streets was knocked down in 1954 to be replaced by the briskly moderne Brevoort apartment complex. The so-called Twain House next door at 21 Fifth Avenue on the southeast corner of Ninth Street (just across Ninth from where Mabel Dodge’s Evenings had been) came down at the same time. Built in 1840 by James Renwick, whose son designed Grace Church on Broadway, it had actually housed two great writers—Renwick’s friend Washington Irving predated Twain there by almost fifty years. Twain had been in and out of Manhattan since Clapp had published “Jim Smiley,” but his longest period of residence was from 1904 to 1908, when he rented the town house and installed a deluxe pool table in the master bedroom, moving his bed to the study. He and his men friends played so much pool his daughter Clara put up a sign by the door, NO BILLIARDS AFTER 10 P.M. The white-haired, white-suited, cigar-chewing don of American satire “gave lectures, attended luncheons, ambled around Greenwich Village, received so many visitors he had to hire a secretary to turn them away.” Then he left New York for Connecticut, where he died. In 1925 the Greenwich Village Historical Society put a bronze plaque on the wall commemorating Irving and Twain. That same year the house was subdivided into apartments. The notice in 1954 that the Twain House was to be razed along with the Brevoort prompted a few halfhearted schemes to save it, perhaps by moving it and converting it into a museum. But on the whole Villagers, distracted by the fight to save Washington Square just two blocks away, failed to rally. The Historic Society’s plaque is now stuck, ingloriously and incongruously, to the massive white flank of the Brevoort apartment building.

  Nearby, the Lafayette Hotel also came down, replaced by another apartment building. Dawn Powell watched the demolition from her duplex across the street. Contemplating the destruction of the Café Julien at the end of The Wicked Pavilion, published in 1954, one of her characters wonders, “Where would they go to hide from their real selves when the Julien vanished?” In 1958 Powell and Gousha, splendid old landmarks in their own way, were uprooted as well. They had to leave their duplex when the building went condominium and they couldn’t afford to buy in—he’d just been forcibly retired, a dipsomaniacal ghost, and Powell’s income from writing had always been meager. Broke, old, and sickly they became gypsies, camping out in seedy residential hotels or with friends. He died in 1962, the year her last novel, The Golden Spur, was published to mediocre sales and reviews. She passed her last years in a small apartment on Christopher Street and died in 1965. Because she died broke, she was buried in an unmarked grave in New York City’s potter’s field on Hart (originally Hart’s) Island, where the city has been laying its unidentified and indigent dead since 1869.

  All over the Village of the 1950s blocks and half-blocks of old housing or commercial buildings came down and new apartment buildings went up. In 1956 the Tenth Street Studio, one of the more significant buildings in the neighborhood if not one of the most attractive, was demolished. It was replaced by a large, studiously bland brick apartment building. NYU knocked down the old boardinghouses on the south side of Washington Square where so many bohemians had lived. By 1960 the destruction of Village landmarks was so noticeable that a young Villager named Jerry Herman—who’d go on to write Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles—included a song about it in his satirical musical revue called Parade. Parade started out at the Showplace, a club at 146 West Fourth Street (the Pepper Pot building), then moved to the Players Theatre on MacDougal Street. The five-member cast included Charles Nelson Reilly and Dody Goodman, who sang “Save the Village,” a mock-serious lament that included the lines:

  Cease, oh cease the senseless demolition!

  Save, oh save our landmarks from this pillage!

  Won’t you sign your name to our petition?

  Won’t you sign your name and save the Village?

  By then preservation-minded Villagers were fighting a rearguard action to get at least the heart of the old neighborhood designated a historic preservation zone, which happened in 1969.

  ANOTHER BIG ISSUE THE VOICE TOOK ON EARLY WAS HELPING TO unseat Carmine DeSapio. It was an epic battle that pitted the old Italian and Irish Village against the new, hip generation, and old-school machine politics against the liberal reformers. In the end it brought DeSapio low and raised up a new star, Ed Koch.

  DeSapio was born in the Italian Village in 1908 to Sicilian immigrants. As a teen he ran errands for a Tammany wigwam called the Huron Club on Van Dam Street, delivering coal and Christmas turkeys to poor families who would vote Democrat when called on. By the late 1930s he’d formed his own wigwam, the Tamawa Club (a name he made up, thinking it sounded sort of Indian), which met in a rented hall on the second floor at 88 Seventh Avenue South, just north of the avenue’s complicated three-way intersection with Bleecker and Barrow Streets. Working-class Villagers climbed the stairs several nights a week to seek Tamawa’s help with jobs or landlords in return for their votes. So did lawyers, because the old-fashioned Tammany patronage trough remained the way to get appointments and judgeships in the city’s corrupt court system.

  By the 1950s DeSapio wore a number of chief’s bonnets. He was the head of Tamawa and one of two elected Democratic leaders for the assembly district that included Greenwich Village (each district had a male and a female leader), and he was the Democratic chairman for all the assembly districts of Manhattan and the grand sachem of what was left of Tammany, as well as the chair of the New York delegation to the Democratic National Committee. In overwhelmingly Democratic New York, being the party chief for Manhattan gave DeSapio tremendous clout and made him something of a kingmaker. He’d helped get Robert Wagner elected mayor in 1953 and Averell Harriman elected governor the following year. In a long article about him in 1955 Time dubbed him “A New Kind of Tiger” and a “Kitchen-Table Medici.” He cut a grave and imposing figure, a tall man with wavy black hair neatly coifed, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, bespoke silk suits, nails manicured and polished, gold cuff links flashing. In the neighborhood they called him the Bishop for his air of gravitas, but to outsiders he looked more like the Godfather. DeSapio, of course, denied any ties with organized crime, even though the Mafia’s infiltration of Tammany was old news and mobster Frank Costello claimed that he knew DeSapio “very well.”

  In the 1956 presidential elections two Democrats vied to be the one to go up against inc
umbent Dwight Eisenhower. DeSapio, naturally, backed Governor Harriman, which meant that most of the Irish and Italian Village and most neighborhood businesses would too. But more liberal, reformist Villagers, including Dan Wolf at the Voice, backed the egghead Adlai Stevenson, who’d already lost once to Eisenhower in 1952. No one backed Stevenson more vociferously than Ed Koch, a thirty-two-year-old struggling lawyer who had just moved to the Village that year. He shared an apartment with a friend at 81 Bedford Street—the same building where George White had been dosing people with LSD only a year earlier. Born to Jewish Polish immigrants, Koch had grown up in the Bronx, in Newark, and finally on the heavily Jewish Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. As a kid he was, like Jimmy Walker, known as a motormouth, but he completely lacked Jimmy’s bon vivant charm and was known to other kids as a loner, a geek, and an egghead. He served in the infantry during the war, entering Europe not long after D-day. He’d come to know the Village while studying law at NYU and had moved there from his parents’ apartment. Tall, gangly, balding, with a face and a voice only a mother could love, he was and would remain a bachelor, with a male roommate, living in Greenwich Village, who showed greater interest in cooking and movies than in women. As he came to prominence in the city, most New Yorkers would assume this all meant he was gay. He denied it once on record, then stopped answering the question. All over the Village in 1956 he could be encountered handing out literature and soapboxing in his strident voice for his man Stevenson. He and Dan Wolf bonded. Stevenson won the nomination and lost the election. Outside of the Village, most Americans still liked Ike.

  Wolf, Jane Jacobs, and other reformers then set their sights on unseating DeSapio as district leader, the linchpin of his empire; without it he couldn’t be the party leader for Manhattan. They started an anti-Carmine group, the Village Independent Democrats. In his 1984 memoir Mayor, Koch wrote: “DeSapio was the boss of bosses, a backroom man, a cutter of deals. He was exactly the kind of politician who was unacceptable to my generation.” But in fact, as the VID was forming, Koch went to where the power was and tried to ingratiate himself at Tamawa. He didn’t fit in there. He waited a couple of years while the reformers’ numbers and power grew before throwing his lot in with them. Wolf meanwhile was writing editorials calling for an end to DeSapio’s reign. Carmine was unused to such criticism in his own district. The Voice alleged that he retaliated by pressuring neighborhood businesses not to advertise in the paper. It made the front page of the Times. Then, when a Voice staffer put a VID poster in the window of her second-floor apartment on Christopher Street, a gang of Tamawa thugs showed up to threaten her and her landlady. It made big news and inspired Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

  Marky Iannello was just a child growing up in the South Village as all this was going on, but he remembered it well because his mother, Helen Iannello, was a key player—at some risk to her standing among their Italian neighbors. In February 1954, when Marky was five months old, his mother moved them into a third-floor apartment in the wide six-story building at the corner of Thompson and West Third Streets. He was still living in that same apartment more than fifty years later. His mother was not taking them into unknown territory in 1954. She’d been born in the building next door in 1922. His grandmother was the super of both buildings when he was growing up.

  “My grandmother used to sweep and mop both buildings every day, and sweep and mop the sidewalk, every day,” he said, chuckling with wonder. “And take out the trash. I look at the super now and I go, ‘You fuckin’ jadrool, how about cleaning the hallway?’ ” “Jadrool” comes from cetriolo, Italian for cucumber, and means a lazy bum.

  Like most Italians in the Village, Marky grew up surrounded by extended family. He had aunts, uncles, and cousins in both buildings. Kids organized themselves in a hierarchy of zones. “We had a gang of all the kids who were on my floor. Then we had a gang of all the kids from my building. We’d fight all the other buildings’ kids on the block. Then all the kids from my block would fight the kids from the next block. This was like a thousand kids fighting a thousand kids.” As a child, he didn’t stray far from his block. “I had to be nine years old before I crossed Bleecker Street,” one block from his home. “And you never crossed Sixth Avenue. You got the shit beat out of you. You didn’t go ‘on the other side,’ that’s what they said.”

  There were still Italian pushcart men on the street when he was growing up. Ragmen and cardboard collectors and a watermelon man crying “Watermelone!” “Watermelon was big because it was cheap.” The iceman still came around. He sold blocks of ice to the grocery stores and news vendors, who’d buy watermelons from the watermelon man and display them for sale on the ice. And he shaved ice “in an old crank bucket” to make lemon ice. Was it good? “It was crack,” Marky grinned.

  People did very little shopping outside of the neighborhood, especially for food. Grocery stores were everywhere. Marky remembered one next door, another three or four buildings down, another one five buildings down from that. Across the street was a fourth and next to that was a candy store. “Candy store” is vintage Newyorkese for what today would usually be called a deli or a bodega, that is, a mom-and-pop shop that probably sold a miscellany of sodas, candy, newspapers and magazines, cigarettes and cigars, other daily necessities. In Marky’s South Village candy stores were vital to kids’ lives because they sold “spaldeens”—the street kids’ pronunciation of Spalding. A spaldeen was a pink rubber ball, two halves glued together along the equator, with air pumped into it, kind of a naked tennis ball. Kids played stick ball, wall ball, and stoop ball with them. Candy stores stocked them by the box. The hardness and bounce of each ball depended on how much air was pumped inside. Neighborhood kids made a science of squeezing them to pick just the right one. “You wanted a ball that was hard, but not so hard that it would break easy. So when the guy in the candy store across Sixth Avenue had the good balls, you go there until he got balls that were bad. He opened the next box, they weren’t as good. Then somebody would say, ‘Go to the one down Thompson Street. He’s got the good spaldeens.’ In ten days they’d all be gone.”

  Boys played another game with deadly earnest: skelzy, known to kids in other parts of the city as skellsies or skully. They chalked a pattern of thirteen numbered boxes on a sidewalk or parking lot, like a more complicated hopscotch box, then flicked bottle caps around to all thirteen boxes following intricate and arcane rules. The girls played hopscotch. On the sidewalk near Marky’s building the faintest ghost of a hopscotch box painted decades earlier could still be made out in the 2010s.

  All the kids walked to school in the neighborhood. Marky attended nursery school at Greenwich House, and the Children’s Aid Society on Sullivan Street offered after-school and summer programs. “Fabulous setup. It was the real deal. They really cared about getting kids off the street, giving them a place to come, structure. You could learn how to play pool or you could learn woodworking, basketball. There was a little swimming pool, a little fountain. We played a lot of stickball.”

  Marky remembered the streets around his home thick with beatniks, folkies, and massive hordes of tourists. But the social separations that sociologist Ware had observed in the 1920s still largely applied. Clubgoers, folksingers, and beatniks shared the neighborhood with Italian families, often shared the same building, but they lived in different worlds.

  “It was a heavy-duty Italian neighborhood. They knew their boundaries. It was painfully obvious. If you were a beatnik you were accepted by your people, but walking down the street you had to watch your Ps and Qs. I don’t give a shit who the fuck you are.”

  It was also very solidly DeSapio territory. Helen Iannello was one of the few who bucked the tradition. After joining the fight against Moses, she served as president of the Village Independent Democrats, who worked against Carmine. Marky remembered that she “took a lot of grief from a lot of people in this neighborhood. They never really said anything to her, but they made her know just by
. . .” He let the sentence trail off but made an eloquent, wordlessly Italian snubbing face.

  In 1961 the VID candidate took the district leadership from DeSapio. In 1963 and again in 1965 Ed Koch, who by then was solidly with the VID, blocked Carmine’s bids to get it back. A Voice headline cheered, “Last Hurrah for Tamawa! Village Is Reform Country!” It was Koch’s start up the political ladder. Tammany as an entity faded into history, though the Tammany “clubhouse”–style of patronage and payoffs continued to be practiced by the city’s Democratic machine. As for Carmine, he would be convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges in a scandal involving one of Mayor John Lindsay’s commissioners in 1969 and serve two years in federal prison. He died a forgotten man in St. Vincent’s in 2004.

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  Off-Off-Broadway