The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  When she was thirteen she met nineteen-year-old Allan Arbus, an aspiring actor who worked for Russeks Furs. Despite her parents’ desire that she marry someone closer to her social standing, the two were wed when Diane turned eighteen. After the war they became a fashion photography team, first for Russeks ads and then for the big fashion magazines. They never much liked it, and by 1956, bored and depressed, she quit the business. He kept at it while she went to study photography with Lisette Model at the New School. “Three sessions and Diane was a photographer,” Allan later said. Model, who’d taken her own freakish portraits over the years, encouraged Arbus to seek out her subjects without qualms and to shoot them without arty pretense. In time it became her signature—foursquare portraits of people standing or sitting in the center of the image, staring directly and openly into the lens. The Arbuses moved to the Village, with Allan running the photography studio, at 71 Washington Place, next door to where Delmore Schwartz and his brother had rented their little attic in the late 1930s. The model and actress Ali MacGraw lived upstairs from them. In 1959 they separated and Diane moved into a former stable in a courtyard at 131 1/2 Charles Street, taking their daughters, Doon and Amy, with her. They grew up as Village girls; Doon acted in a couple of Caffe Cino productions and would become a journalist. Amy became a photographer.

  Diane began to prowl all over New York and New Jersey looking for her unusual subjects. She hung around Washington Square Park in the mid-1960s and observed how its different users held on to their territories, “young hippie junkies” in one area, “amazingly tough, hardcore lesbians” in another, the winos in the middle. She haunted Coney Island, Hubert’s Dime Museum in Times Square. Shy and petite, she used her unthreatening presence as a way to ingratiate herself with her subjects. She was searching for “the gap between intention and effect,” she later explained, trying to ease her subjects to a place where they revealed the difference “between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.”

  While she was developing that work she supplemented her income doing portraits of celebrities, including such Village figures as Auden and Marianne Moore. She took a fantastically Freudian photo of Mailer wearing a natty three-piece suit, sitting in a stuffed chair with one leg thrown over the arm to show off his crotch, the very embodiment of cockiness. “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” he grumbled on seeing it.

  In the 1967 “New Documents” show, MoMA exhibited a big selection of her work along with two other edgy photographers, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. It was seen as the opposite of Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition in the 1950s. Where that had tried to show the inherent beauty and nobility of all humanity, “New Documents” seemed to imply that we’re ugly, goofy, lonely oddballs. It made Arbus a star, though one critic singled her out as “the Wizard of Odds.”

  After ten years apart she and Allan got an amicable divorce in 1969 so he could remarry. She even threw a small reception for the newlyweds. Her bouts of depression grew increasingly deep and long, exacerbated by some physical deterioration from the hepatitis she’d contracted in 1966. She spent long days just sitting in Washington Square Park, unable to lift her camera, watching the stoned hippie kids panhandle, getting to know some of the tough street kids from the Bronx and New Jersey who came to hang out and sell dope in the Village. She moved herself and the girls from the Charles Street stable to a duplex on East Tenth Street. She was still working, more in demand than ever after the “New Documents” show, but sliding deeper into an unrelieved melancholia. She moved into the new Westbeth in January 1970, renting a ninth-floor duplex with excellent views of the Hudson. She began to teach a master class for young photographers in an empty apartment there.

  In 1971 Westbeth developed a gruesome reputation as a place where arty people went to die. Residents nicknamed it Deathbeth and Westdeath. A woman was raped there that spring; the new Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective’s first production that year would be called Rape-In. A woman who didn’t live there walked in off the street, got up onto the roof, and jumped, smashing into the courtyard. Her mangled corpse lay there almost all day under a sheet before authorities removed it. Later, a Westbeth resident went up to the roof and jumped as well. Some residents with kids who’d only just moved in moved right back out. Some people on the list dropped off. In repurposing the complex, the architect Richard Meier hadn’t done much to brighten up its glum industrial interiors. It remains an infamously confusing rats’ maze of long, narrow hallways, looking as much like a prison or mental hospital as an artists’ community. To add to the bleakness, the hallway to Arbus’s apartment had been painted black. In 1971 the streets around Westbeth could get quite lonely and grim after dark. It probably wasn’t the best environment for a chronic depressive. Arbus’s friends began to detect signs early that summer that she might be wrapping up her life. On July 27 her telephone rang unanswered. The next day a friend and sometime lover let himself in. He found her in the tub, her wrists slit, her body already starting to decompose. In the open journal on her desk her entry for July 26 was “The last supper.” She left no other explaining note. Just another Westbeth suicide.

  In 1971 Allan Arbus was in Los Angeles, finally pursuing the acting career he’d always wanted. He’s best known for his work in the TV series M.A.S.H. but he got his start in two brilliant cult films, Putney Swope (1969), a satire about race relations on Madison Avenue in which his character is named Mr. Bad News, and the psychedelically weird Greaser’s Palace (1972), in which he plays a zoot-suited Jesus who drops into a surrealist Wild West. Other characters include the eponymous Seaweedhead Greaser, Lamy Homo, the bearded prairie drag queen Spitunia, and a villain with possibly the most preposterous name in the history of filmmaking, Bingo Gas Station Motel Cheeseburger With A Side Of Aircraft Noise And You’ll Be Gary Indiana.

  Both films were written and directed by Robert Downey Sr., a Villager. Born Robert Elias in 1935, he was fifteen when he dropped out of the ninth grade and used his stepfather’s surname Downey to enlist in the army. During his time in uniform he managed to get himself thrown in the brig three times, once while stationed in Alaska, for getting drunk with a buddy at their radar scopes and faking a Soviet missile attack. By 1960 he was in the Village writing Off-Off Broadway plays. When he read a Voice column by Jonas Mekas in which Mekas declared that anybody could be a filmmaker, he rented a camera and started making low-budget underground films. He hung out with Mekas and other filmmakers at the Charles Theater on Avenue B, where one night a week anyone could screen his or her work. From the start he combined avant-garde technique and do-it-yourself impudence with a wild sense of humor, suggesting more than a few hours spent at the Caffe Cino and Judson. In the 1964 Babo 73 he cast Taylor Mead as an addled president of the United States, with scenes shot guerrilla-style during a tour of the White House. The 1966 Chafed Elbows combines film and still photos to tell the ludicrous tale of Walter Dinsmore, a young man who wanders aimlessly from the New School to the Hotel Dixie like a Candide adrift in the Pop art world. In one scene, a man on the street paints him with the initials AW, declares him a work of art, and escorts him at gunpoint to the Washington Square Gallery, where “you’ll be sold right away, because you’re very pretentious.” In another he records a gibberish pop song, “Hey Hey Hey,” flip side to “Yeah Yeah Yeah.” Tom O’Horgan did the music.

  Putney Swope was his first commercial release. He followed it with Pound, adapted from a play of his that he later said was “done Off-off-off-off Broadway at a movie house at midnight.” It’s about a bunch of stray dogs waiting to be adopted or put down, played by actors. It’s remembered today for the acting debut of Downey’s five-year-old son Robert Downey Jr., born in the Village. A reporter for the magazine Show who spent time on the set during the filming noted a lot of pot smoking; Downey Jr. has said that his problems with drugs go back to his childhood, when his father gave him his first puff on a joint
. He plays a puppy in Pound. His first recorded line of dialogue, addressed to the bald actor playing a Mexican hairless, is “Have any hair on your balls?” Pound was rated X for its foul language, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced its “gross crudities played simply for irreverent and tasteless humor in a style that is more asinine than canine.” It premiered on a double bill with Fellini’s Satyricon and then vanished. Meanwhile Downey was directing plays for Joe Papp’s Public Theater; when he directed David Rabe’s antiwar play Sticks and Bones for a planned CBS broadcast, the sponsors backed out at the last minute. After Greaser’s Palace, Downey went on to a fitful, iconoclastic Hollywood career. In the 2000s Mekas’s Anthology Film Archives worked with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation to restore, screen, and archive some of Downey’s earliest underground films, which hadn’t been seen for decades.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE VILLAGE, ANOTHER SORT OF ARTS CENTER got up and running around the same time as Westbeth. It didn’t last as long, however.

  The eight-story, mansard-roofed Broadway Central Hotel, known as the Grand Central when it opened in 1870, hunkered at the northern end of the Pfaff’s block, on the west side of Broadway between Bleecker and West Third Streets. In its heyday it was renowned as one of the largest and most luxurious hotels in the city. While high society moved uptown and the area slid downmarket, the Broadway Central stood through the decades, genteelly moldering and crumbling. In the 1960s street hustlers both straight and gay took their johns there. By 1970 it was a hulking eyesore that had fallen into severe dilapidation and, renamed the University Hotel, was run by the city in partnership with the owners as housing for around three hundred welfare recipients. (At the time, the city partnered with owners of many crumbling old buildings to convert them into “welfare hotels,” a highly controversial idea.) The hotel’s residents complained of rats, leaking pipes, crumbling walls, gaps in the floors, and exposed wiring. It was also filled with drug addicts, drunks, hookers, and thieves, according to the longtime state attorney general Louis Lefkowitz, who called it a “squalid den of vice and iniquity . . . an open and notorious public nuisance and a den of thieves.” In one six-month period he counted one murder, three rapes, forty-nine burglaries, and assorted muggings and drug busts on the premises.

  In 1966 Art D’Lugoff had come up with an ambitious plan for the back of the old building, the Mercer Street side, where the Winter Garden had been. He envisioned a multiuse performance center, “a kind of downtown Lincoln Center,” as the Times later put it. Never in the chips himself, he talked a man named Seymour “Sy” Kaback into putting up the money to lease and convert the space. Kaback ran an air-conditioning business but had a taste for showbiz; after installing the a/c in the Village Gate he had become a silent partner and financial backer to D’Lugoff. By the time the Mercer Arts Center was fully operational in 1971 D’Lugoff had moved on to other projects and Kaback was the sole owner and proprietor, with an artsy board of directors that included Viveca Lindfors and Rip Torn.

  When it had its official opening late in 1971, the Times called the Mercer “the closest thing yet to a theatrical supermarket.” Into its two-level, thirty-five-thousand-square-foot space Kaback had stuffed two large Off-Broadway theaters, the Hansberry and the O’Casey, the smaller Shaw Arena, a cabaret called the Oscar Wilde Room, another cabaret, rehearsal and workshop spaces, a film screening room, an experimental video lab called the Kitchen (in the hotel’s former kitchen), a bar restaurant, and a hip boutique called Zoo. All of it was, of course, air-conditioned. Its theaters hosted successful productions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, The Proposition, and Macbeth, starring Rip Torn and Geraldine Page.

  To subsidize the theaters the Mercer opened its doors to rock bands. It was a major incubator of downtown’s proto-punk glam and glitter rock scene. Although inspired by British glam stars like Bowie and Roxy Music, New York’s version was, naturally, harder, funkier, druggier. The Mercer’s various spaces hosted acts such as the Magic Tramps, Suicide, Teenage Lust, Ruby and the Rednecks, Tuff Darts, Wayne (later Jayne) County’s Queen Elizabeth, and, best known today, the New York Dolls. The Dolls were five rockers from various points around the city who hung out in the Village. Musically they were the Rolling Stones’ bratty, cheeky little brothers, a loud, raunchy, and barely held together sound that was punk before punk. Their name was inspired by a doll repair shop on the Upper East Side called the New York Doll Hospital. Their trashy transvestite look—clunky heels, messily poofed hair, pounds of cheap jewelry, and clownish makeup—was inspired by the outrageous street queens in the far west Village. The Dolls’ first public performance was at another notorious welfare hotel, the Endicott, on the Upper West Side, at the end of 1971. One of their first paying gigs was in a western-themed gay bar in Brooklyn Heights, which like Greenwich Village was not then the genteel bedroom community it is today. Along with the Magic Tramps, the Dolls were in effect a Mercer house band.

  Coming on the heels of the hippie 1960s, glam’s raunchy street-slut aesthetic took some getting used to. “The first night I went there I was really shocked,” Bob Gruen recalls. “I saw some men in makeup and ran out the door. Second time I noticed all the girls in miniskirts, and that was more like what I wanted to see. It was a really eclectic scene. The bands were wild and young and different.” In the Kitchen he was introduced to the brand-new, smaller video cameras that artists were just then beginning to experiment with. He soon shot now classic videos of the Dolls. Zoo sold glam fashions from England, plastic miniskirts and platform boots, “things that had never been seen here. So it was really an influential space, with music and art and fashion all mixed together.”

  The grand Mercer experiment was sadly short-lived. It all came tumbling down, literally, on Friday, August 3, 1973. At around three in the afternoon the building’s walls and ceilings began to make odd popping and crackling sounds. Cats and dogs in the building became skittish. Then residents in the front and a few bands and actors rehearsing in the back felt the walls and floors begin to shake. Loose sections of plaster fell from ceilings as wooden beams cracked. The whole building groaned and swayed. Residents, many of them elderly, some in wheelchairs or on crutches, fled screaming out the front, rockers and actors out the back. Cops and firemen gathered on Broadway, along with a crowd of gawkers. At around five o’clock the top floors of the hotel crashed down onto the lower levels, shooting loose bricks and clouds of dust out over Broadway. Then the building’s facade fell in a thunderous roar, hurling a massive pile of rubble onto the street under a gigantic, dirty cloud.

  Luckily, the building’s creaking and groaning had given hours of warning before the collapse, allowing almost everyone to escape; four residents died and a handful of others received minor injuries. In the ensuing city investigations the hotel’s owners were accused of having ignored signs of structural stress, as well as having removed load-bearing supports in the basement. Vibrations from the BMT subway line under Broadway probably precipitated the final crash. The back part of the building, where the arts center was, came out relatively undamaged, and there was talk for a while of reopening it. But in the end NYU bought the property and cleared it for the big dormitory that stands there now. One survivor of the disaster, the Kitchen, relocated to Chelsea, where it became a flagship of avant-garde performance art.

  As a band the New York Dolls didn’t outlive the Mercer by much. Outside the hothouse of downtown New York City their look and sound were, as they titled their second LP, Too Much Too Soon. In London, where they disgusted the straights but were hugely influential on the coming generation of punks, their original drummer died of drugs and alcohol. The group continued to shed members and tour with not much success until finally collapsing themselves in 1976. In the late 1980s the singer David Johansen found commercial success when he transformed himself into Buster Poindexter and had a big hit with his cover of the soca song “Hot Hot Hot.”

  Photo Se
ction 4

  Tish, 2012. The two photos behind his head and left shoulder are of Tish as a performer. (Photograph by Christine Walker)

  Barney Rosset. (Photograph by Arne Svenson)

  The Stonewall Inn, September 1969. (Diana Davies photographs, Manuscript and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

  The first Gay Pride march up Sixth Avenue, June 1970. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  Marsha P. Johnson leading a STAR demonstration, 1970. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  Westbeth. (Photograph by Christine Walker)

  Jimi Hendrix during the construction of his West Eighth Street recording studio, Electric Lady, in June 1970. He died that September. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  Dustin Hoffman saves a painting from his home at 16 West Eleventh Street after the explosion next door, 1970. (Getty Images)

  John Wojtowicz on the real Dog Day Afternoon, August 22, 1972. (New York Times)

  The Village People’s outfits were inspired by gay club fashions. (Robert Heide & John Gilman Dime-Store Dream Parade Collection)

  Quentin Crisp, the British monologist who often performed in the Village, strolls out onto a pier in 1978. A shed crumbles in the background. (Corbis Images)

  Looking like a visitor from the past, on West Street in 2012. (Photograph by Christine Walker)

  David Amram at Cornelia Street Cafe in 2012. (Photograph by SashWeight)