The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Complaining about newcomers and change is a long tradition in the Village. But there was no denying that the Village of 2011 was a very different place from the one Iannello and Rotolo knew in their youths. The Village’s long period as a bohemian enclave, a magnet for misfits, and an engine of culture had ended, maybe for good. Much of it was now an affluent bedroom, shopping, and dining zone; NYU seemed intent on absorbing the rest into an ever-growing campus. In the mid-1990s New York City had embarked on a remarkable program of reinventing itself and carried the Village along with it.

  Ed Koch’s low standing in the Village hadn’t stopped him from being reelected for a third term, from 1986 through 1989, by a stunning 75 percent of the voters. He was a national celebrity. There was much talk of the White House being his next move. But from the start, his last term was a minefield of political scandals. Meanwhile, Wall Street crashed in 1987, and the city, along with the rest of the nation, fell into a recession.

  In 1990 his successor Mayor David Dinkins inherited a city slipping back to 1970s levels of depressing dysfunction. When Rudolph Giuliani took office four years later he moved quickly to buff up the city’s badly tarnished image, understood as a necessary first step to rebooting Koch’s failed redevelopment program. He cracked down on crime across the board, swept the homeless and panhandlers out of Manhattan, cleaned up the graffiti and the rat-infested parks. Under Giuliani the long-planned transformation of Times Square from scummy sin pit to tourist-friendly family amusement center, anchored by Disney no less, was finally realized. Times Square is once again the dazzlingly lit crossroads of the world, thick with entertainments and ringed with new hotels. The city’s makeover spread from there, urged forward by both Giuliani and his successor, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

  A whole new Manhattan had emerged by 2011, clean, safe, brightly lit, family friendly, and packed with new hotels and amenities. The tourists had flocked back in record-breaking numbers—almost fifty million a year now, the city estimates. The new Manhattan also attracted a flood of new white-collar residents. The children of the professionals who had followed their corporate employers out to the suburbs in the city’s darker times poured back in, buying up new luxury condominiums as quickly as they could be built. In the 2000s a feeding frenzy for domestic real estate, riding the crest of a nationwide housing bubble, sent prices soaring. Even the shock of 9/11 did little to slow the pace. In 2005 the average sale price of an apartment in Manhattan went above $1 million. That year, the average Manhattan renter was paying $2,500 a month. The crash of 2008 brought a momentary pause, but by 2012 prices were well up again, with the average renter in Manhattan paying $3,418 a month.

  As sale and rental prices skyrocketed elsewhere on the island, Manhattan developers and realty agents were increasingly able to lure affluent buyers to the relative bargains in the traditionally downmarket and déclassé areas below Fourteenth Street. The old cultural divide Max Gordon wrote about, separating the tony uptown from the bohemian downtown, was obliterated. Downtown has now been uptowned. Tenement buildings on the Lower East Side were converted to luxury condos. The East Village and Alphabet City, previously considered funky ghettos and a no-man’s-land to anyone who could afford to avoid them, were suddenly hot. Real estate there is now pricier than on the Upper East Side, Manhattan’s traditional zone of wealth for generations.

  The historic landmarking of much of Greenwich Village has relegated new construction primarily to its formerly industrial fringes. West Street, for instance, has sprouted several new glass-and-steel luxury towers. But preserving the quaint, old-fashioned charm of the heart of the Village only makes the real estate there that much more dear. In 2012 one-room studios in the Village sold for half a million to a million dollars; town houses and condominiums went for ten, fifteen, twenty million. Rents on one-bedrooms were now as high as five, six, eight thousand dollars a month.

  Not surprisingly, such skyrocketing prices drove resident bohemians and artists out of the Village, and out of downtown Manhattan generally. Few hopeful youngsters have come to replace them. New York’s bohemian and art scenes are now fanned out across Brooklyn. (Escalating rents have been chasing them there as well.) Except for Westbeth’s tenants and others in rent-controlled apartments, the only creative-sector people who can afford to live below Fourteenth Street now are already successful movie stars, celebrities, fashion giants like Calvin Klein, and such artists as Julian Schnabel, whose Venetian-fantasy Palazzo Chupi on West Eleventh Street near Washington Street riled neighbors as it reared up over the rest of its block in 2007. Schnabel built an eleven-story addition on top of an old stable and garage and painted it a jarring Pepto-Bismol pink. Richard Gere bought one of the five condos in it for $12 million. As the pink exterior weathered to a softer rose, Villagers debated whether Chupi was an ugly intrusion or a fittingly audacious and eccentric addition to the neighborhood.

  The journalist Kate Walter, who lives in Westbeth, says she has found it “really dispiriting” that “this whole neighborhood has become full of straight people, lots of people with kids. When the gay bookstore A Different Light became a maternity shop, that for me was one of the most significant changes. And when the Oscar Wilde Bookshop closed, that for me was heartbreaking. You still sometimes see gay European tourists on Christopher Street with the old guidebooks looking for Oscar Wilde and it isn’t there. I feel like I’m in the last holdout for Greenwich Village bohemia, and I’m surrounded by all these wealthy people.”

  Who cares, her Westbeth neighbor Bob Gruen argues, if people are not making art in downtown Manhattan anymore? “They’re pricing people out of Manhattan, which is a shame,” he concedes. “The Village used to be a real mecca. There are people who complain about that, ‘The Village isn’t what it used to be.’ Nothing’s like it used to be. Nothing will ever be the way it used to be. Things always change. It’s too bad it changed in a way that young people can’t really come into the Village. I can’t imagine being able to come into the Village now on the budget I had. Even Westbeth is ten times what we paid forty years ago. But it’s forty years, you know? People say there’s nothing going on in the Village, but there doesn’t have to be. There’s a lot going on in Brooklyn. So what that it’s not on the Lower East Side anymore? It didn’t disappear. There are still young people and young bands.”

  All around Westbeth the Village is shiny and new. The city dismantled the crumbling waterfront, knocking down the elevated West Side Highway and the sheds on the piers, prepping for the development of today’s Hudson River Park. “For a while in the ’80s it was crack dealers out there, and it was kind of a no-man’s-land,” Bob Gruen recalls. “After the AIDS crisis killed off the gay scene it was really kind of deserted.” That period was just a transitional phase. The whole West Side waterfront is now a leafy park, with bike lanes and joggers and young singles walking their dogs and young mothers pushing strollers the size of Volkswagens. They look across a Hudson flecked with sailboats and kayaks at similar parks lining the Jersey side. The occasional transvestite still strolls West Street after dark but she seems a visitor from another time.

  The meatpacking district’s era as a sexual playground had scarcely ended when an upscale all-night bistro, Florent, opened on Gansevoort Street in 1985. In the 1990s and 2000s the area was completely transformed. Its cobbled streets are now lined with upscale restaurants, new hotels, an Apple store, pricey boutiques. Since Sex and the City featured the area—Samantha was said to live there—it has attracted large flocks of young Samanthas and Carries with their dates. The High Line that runs through the area, an elevated railway where freight trains once shunted to and through the West Side’s industrial buildings (a short section still pierces the flank of Westbeth), is now a park where tourists stroll among small trees, flowering shrubs, and native grasses. The wide intersection where Gansevoort, Little West Twelfth Street, and Ninth Avenue meet is now a pedestrian mall, Gansevoort Plaza. Gruen remembers when “even the butchers wouldn’t go up there. It wa
s too dangerous. Now at three in the morning there’s literally hundreds or thousands of people staggering around . . . And all the windows open and all the glasses tinkling and all the people laughing and all the music blending.” He says it reminds him of Bourbon Street.

  In 1990 John Waters bought a one-bedroom apartment in a prewar doorman building in the Village. Since then he has divided his year between Baltimore, the Village, Provincetown in the summer, and being on the road. “I walk around the meatpacking district today, one of my least favorite neighborhoods now, and I see these people eating in these fancy restaurants,” he says. “I think, ‘If you knew what went on here.’ The Toilet is a fancy restaurant. I’ve seen people eating there.”

  Affluent new residents have attracted upscale shops and restaurants all around the Village, driving out Rotolo’s mom-and-pop shops. On and near the western blocks of Bleecker Street, once the heart of the gay Village, landlords doubled and tripled the rents on the old shops to get them out and make way for new, tonier tenants—Marc Jacobs, Jimmy Choo, Ralph Lauren, and, maybe the most ironic of all, Brooks Brothers. Villagers took to calling it Madison Avenue South, and a bright yellow postcard began to appear around the area, declaring “More Jane Jacobs, Less Marc Jacobs.” Magnolia Bakery, which opened at the corner of Bleecker and West Eleventh Streets in 1996, was also featured in Sex and the City. Tour guides bring the show’s fans there.

  Seated nearby at the White Horse in 2011, Dermot McEvoy railed against “that fucking cupcake place” and the gentrification of the neighborhood generally. “I had a haircut yesterday, my barber Jim over on Perry Street, been in the Village for years. He was cutting this guy’s hair and he goes, ‘In five years there won’t be a grocery store to buy a salami sandwich.’ ‘Well you don’t need grocery stores,’ the guy in the chair says. ‘We eat out every night.’ That’s nice, fuck you. I can’t stand people like that . . . All these people are WASPs. They are all white, they all have money, and they have no imagination. There is no culture here now.” He would move out of the Village to Jersey City in 2012.

  Over the past quarter century NYU has been on a remarkable program of reinvention itself, metastasizing from a modest commuter school to the largest private university in the country, with forty thousand students, nine out of ten of them now from outside the city. It has been buying and building all over the Village and East Village, its new structures often displaying, the New York Times has commented, “an unfortunate knack for commissioning some of the worst work from big-name architects.” The destruction and artificial reproduction of the Poe House was just one of several public relations gaffes that have earned the school many bitterly combative enemies in the Village, even among its own students and faculty. In 2010 the usually pro-development New York magazine dubbed NYU “The School That Ate New York.” For neighborhood preservationists, the magazine noted, fighting to keep the school from turning the Village into one giant campus has been the twenty-first-century echo of the historic battle to keep Robert Moses from paving it all over.

  A SHARP RENT HIKE FORCED ART D’LUGOFF TO CLOSE THE VILLAGE Gate in 1993. At his death in 2009, aged eighty-five, he was still planning a comeback. A hip new music club, Le Poisson Rouge, took over some of the space. Across the street, Kenny’s Castaways, the site of the former Slide, closed in 2012.

  Ed Koch died on February 1, 2013. He was eighty-eight and, despite failing health in the last few years, feisty, argumentative, and politically engaged to the end.

  Robert Delford Brown continued to hold grand openings at the Crack-Up until 1997, when he sold the building and left the city. After some moving around he settled in Wilmington, North Carolina, on the banks of the Cape Fear River, in 2007. In 2009 his body was found in the river. He’d been planning an event in which he’d float a raft made of flip-flops downstream and evidently he slipped in and drowned. The Crack-Up is now offices. No goofy signs hang from it. It blends in perfectly with its surroundings and gives no hint of its arty past.

  In the late 1990s Randy Wicker was back in the news with a new cause. Shortly after the cloning of the sheep Dolly was announced in 1997 Wicker, then fifty-nine, started proselytizing for human cloning rights. As an older gay man he wanted to reproduce—have not just a child but a sort of identical twin, only younger. He founded a group he called Clone Rights United Front, printed up literature, made posters and buttons with sayings like “Clone Jesus.” “I actually hired ten homeless people and had a demonstration in Sheridan Square.” Local news covered it, which got him in Time and on many national news broadcasts, and he played along good-naturedly in a segment of The Daily Show shot at and around his Hudson Street shop in 2001. He closed the shop in 2003.

  St. Vincent’s Hospital closed in 2010. As the AIDS epidemic receded, so did much of the Catholic charity–run hospital’s funding. In 2012 neighborhood groups were hotly contesting a developer’s plan to replace the main hospital building with yet another luxury housing complex, while the old NMU hall would become an emergency care facility; the nearby triangle where Seventh Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, and West Twelfth Street converge would become an AIDS memorial park.

  Reflecting on all the changes, Paul Foster recalls that when he was at NYU law school he walked by the Provincetown Playhouse every day. “All this historicity, all this inbreeding of talent, I don’t know where else in the world you would have found that. Civilization has its zeitgeist. There is a ghost of the time. But it doesn’t stay where it’s not welcome. Ancient Athens, there was a geist there. The geist was surely in that part of the world, then it jumped away. It went to Italy for the Renaissance, it went to Elizabethan England, it went to Paris and Berlin. It’s the combination of the right energies from the right people getting together at the right time. And I don’t know of a single example of when it’s come back again. When the geist moves, it never comes back to its old neighborhood.”

  Lucian Truscott left the Village decades ago, to go to Los Angeles and be a screenwriter, then to the rural South. He keeps up with McEvoy and his other Lion’s Head friends via e-mail now.

  “I guess every generation goes through this same sort of geezer stage, when there are fewer and fewer people around who remember the good old, or bad old, days,” he says. “It’s the natural order of things. I remember one Saturday years and years ago, back in the late ’80s, after I had moved out of New York. I was back for a couple of days staying with a friend in the Village, and I was walking down one of those nice little streets over there west of Seventh Avenue, and I saw this young woman walking down the street toward me. She was in her early twenties, and dressed real cool, and she was gorgeous, and she was going somewhere important to do something important, almost bent forward with the energy of youth and great expectations. It came to me that she was exactly like the young women I lusted after when I was her age. We were all gorgeous and dressed real cool and headed someplace fast to see someone important or do something important, filled with great expectations that would come true, damn it, or we would die tryin’. All of a sudden I realized that we had been replaced. That the little studio apartments all around me were no longer filled with my friends and acquaintances but hers. The street was hers now. The energy was hers. The important people she was going to see were her important people, not mine, and the important things she was going to do were different than our important things. The only things that remained pretty much the same were the street and her gorgeousness and great expectations.”

  Acknowledgments

  A LOT OF PEOPLE HELPED IN MYRIAD WAYS TO MAKE THIS BOOK happen. I am indebted to them all.

  First, thanks to everyone who agreed to be interviewed for this book. They shared not only their stories, but their ideas, contacts, guidance, and encouragement. Some are people I have known for years, but many were new acquaintances when they graciously agreed to talk with me. Sadly, a few have passed on since.

  Thanks to Sashweight, Arne Svenson, Daniel Drasin, Al Leslie, John Gilman, Jim Linderman, and Christine Walke
r for providing photographs, production stills, and other illustration material. And to Christine as well for her invaluable help in photo research.

  A number of other people shared their wisdom and knowledge, loaned me reading material, suggested topics to explore and people to contact, read draft segments, published excerpts, transcribed interviews, accompanied me on some of my endless walks around the Village, and much more. Thanks to each and every one of you: Lincoln Anderson at the Villager; Jan Benzel at the New York Times; Brian Berger; Andrew Berman and the staff at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation; Lauri Bortz; William Bryk; Chris Calhoun; Irwin Chusid; Celia Farber; Joan Fleur; Michael Gentile; Christopher George and Claartje van Dijk at the International Center of Photography; Giorgio Gomelsky; Nora Griffin; Andrew Jacobson; Joe E. Jeffreys at NYU; Tanisha Jones at the New York Public Library; Lisa Kearns; Jim Knipfel; Laura Lindgren; Laurie Liss; Don McLeod; Sina Najafi at Cabinet; Clayton Patterson; Diane Ramo; Rasha Refaie; Daniel Riccuito at the Chiseler; Todd Robbins; Jeffrey Roth at the New York Times; David Schroeder at NYU’s Jazz Studies department; Michael Sgouros at the Players Theatre; Kenneth Swezey; Scott Veale at the New York Times; and Matt Weiland.

  Many thanks, of course, to Dan Halpern, publisher of Ecco, and to my magnificent and wise editors Hilary Redmon and Shanna Milkey, and to Libby Edelson and everyone else at Ecco and HarperCollins. Thanks to Donald Kennison for his excellent copyediting.