Downtown

by Pete Hamill

  On weekend nights, Eighth Street was a sensual festival of unlimited possibility. The sixties lay ahead, but until about 1964, Eighth Street was that era’s first draft. Drinking was the fuel of its existence, and many of the strollers were heading to bars scattered through the Village: Jack Delaney’s on Sheridan Square, or Louis’ Tavern (where you might spot James Dean among the other actors and poets), the Cedars, of course, or the place a few blocks uptown called the Stirrup, where Billie Holiday ruled the jukebox. The smoky, boozy destinations included the Kettle of Fish, the San Remo, the White Horse, and Chumley’s; or the Riviera at Seventh Avenue and West Fourth Street, where a lot of the old seagoing communists from the National Maritime Union stood at the bar with poets and cops.

  The binding music of our village was jazz, which was played at the Café Bohemia on Barrow Street and the Village Gate and the Village Vanguard (where I saw Art Tatum for the only time) and many other joints, some operated by Mob guys. Charlie Parker was dead, but you saw “Bird Lives” scribbled on the men’s room walls of all these places and in the subway stations and on the walls of parking lots. I saw John Coltrane play with Miles Davis in one of those places, and Charlie Mingus in many of them. Coltrane was in the era of his prolonged solos, and one night, the legend went, Miles finally said, in his growl of a voice, “John, you gotta end them goddamn endless solos.” And Coltrane explained, “Miles, I don’t know, Miles, I get so deep into the solos, I don’t know how to get out of them, man . . .” To which Miles replied, “John, just take your mouth away from the motherfuckin’ horn.”

  Mingus was playing the Gate one night (the owner Art D’lugoff told me) when a group of black middle-class folks at the brink of the stage kept talking through his solo. Mingus lifted his bass fiddle, walked off the stage and into the men’s room, and finished the solo in its tiled solitude. These were serious musicians. To them tom was a verb, and they were not going to tom for anyone.

  Big-time rock and roll had not yet happened; the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were still learning their craft in Hamburg or Liverpool or London. But there were things happening, many things happening. Some were political and social: the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, along with the emergence of the civil rights movement. Both were about the new, about the gathering power of the young. Some were musical. In 1961, Bob Dylan started to play Village gigs, still a folkie, breaking out at Gerde’s Folk City. He stayed for a while at the Hotel Earle on Waverly Place, just off the northwest corner of Washington Square, a hotel erected in part in 1902 that had degenerated into a semi-fleabag. Many musicians stayed there. But so did others. Every time some reporter or rewriteman from my newspaper was tossed out by an obviously intelligent wife, he ended up, at least for a while, at the Hotel Earle. For Dylan, residence at the Earle must have been a seminar in the consequences of loss.

  My guide through part of this world was Al Aronowitz, a brilliant colleague from the New York Post. He had written much about the Beats, and knew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. He took Dylan to meet Ginsberg in 1964. The Beats (particularly Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti) had heavily influenced Dylan’s earliest work, the freedom of its language and imagery, the vision of other ways to lead American lives. Around the same time, Aronowitz introduced the Beatles to Dylan, an encounter that in turn influenced all rock and roll. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band played, in its way, the music of Eighth Street.

  But there were antecedents to much of the ferment. With Aronowitz in 1961, I went to a crowded party at the apartment of LeRoi Jones and his wife, Hettie, to celebrate the publication of a magazine called Yugen. In memory, the party was on the top floor and spilled into the hallways, with much drinking and much reefer. Jones was a sweet man that night, and we talked about a poem he had written about Krazy Kat, the amazing comic strip by George Herriman. Miles was playing on the phonograph, alternating with blues singers. Jones turned to speak with Jack Kerouac, who seemed shy and oddly sullen, and I heard him say, “Cheer up, frère Jacques.” Kerouac smiled and sipped from a bottle of Budweiser. Soon, LeRoi Jones was gone from the Village, and gone from Hettie, and had returned to Harlem, where he became Amiri Baraka and embraced black nationalism; in 1964, we all went to see his fierce play Dutchman at the Cherry Lane. He would end up in Newark as a polemicist and a spokesman for black rage, which, alas, often contained a nasty strain of anti-Semitism. Something was indeed happening.

  Or, to be more precise, many things were happening. Some were literary. There were bookstores here, including an outlet of the old Marboro chain near Sixth Avenue. In the 1950s, one of the clerks was Jasper Johns, who would become one of the great American painters in the 1960s. On Cornelia Street there was the Phoenix, with great collections of poetry and European literature. But the Eighth Street Bookshop at the southeast corner of MacDougal Street was one of the ornaments of the Village—and of Manhattan. Writers, poets, and readers came there from all over the city. Norman Mailer was a regular. We met while covering the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight in Chicago in 1961 and are still friends. One winter evening I saw James Baldwin reading Goethe’s Faust in solitude against a wall of books, his large eyes squinting. We’d met at that same prizefight in Chicago, but to interrupt him would have been to break a spell, and I moved to the history section. Another time, I saw Auden leaving with a bag of books, and Ginsberg joking with Eli Wilentz, who owned the store with his brother Ted. In that glorious store, I found my way to the rest of the Beats and to those writers who seemed to be their allies. Barney Rosset of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review (another regular) was an immense force in liberating publishing from the old restrictions, fighting legally to bring out his edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence and the major works of Henry Miller. We were all reading Miller and his friend Lawrence Durrell, along with William Burroughs and John Rechy and Alexander Trocchi. Some of the work was extraordinary; much of it was narcissistic rubbish; but all of it was part of its New York era in a way that writing has never been since they all faded away. Within a few years, the hippies had replaced the Beats, creating a culture of bohemianism without art, where the sacred texts were all contained in rock and roll. Psychedelic drugs replaced wine and vodka and bourbon. These children of television didn’t read much, and overvalued the few books they did read. Their poet was Dylan, who was very good indeed, but they absorbed his lyrics with no knowledge of Dylan Thomas, whose name Bobby Zimmerman had adopted as his own. In 1965, the Eighth Street Bookshop moved across the street to number 17, where it remained an institution until one day in the 1980s, when the owners cleared out the stock and locked the doors for good.

  At the same time that the Beats were having their moment, the urgencies and power of Off-Broadway were pulling us to the theater. The conventional Broadway theater was taking few chances in those years, placing itself in the service of what the Prohibition saloon keeper Texas Guinan once called “big butter and egg men.” Broadway was for shows; the new, imperfect, sometimes amateurish downtown venues specialized in true theater. In the early 1950s, there was a downtown revival of the great Irish playwrights, Sean O’Casey and John Millington Synge among them, with several of the Clancy Brothers playing important acting roles (and on Monday nights reviving traditional Irish music in a war against the concocted Irish tunes of Tin Pan Alley). Suddenly, in tiny theaters below Fourteenth Street, in storefronts, in the archipelago of Off-Broadway, the names Samuel Beckett and Antonin Artaud and Eugène Ionesco were in the air, along with the first works of Harold Pinter. The Village Voice, founded by Norman Mailer, Edwin Fancher, and Dan Wolf, and published for a while after 1955 upstairs from Sutter’s Bakery on Greenwich Avenue, was central to what was suddenly happening all around us. The Voice drama critic was Jerry Tallmer, a gifted writer and an intelligent man of passionate tastes who was able to express enthusiasm without sounding like a publicist. Like any good journalist, he saw what was new in the event he was watching, and for many of us, he became the essential gui
de. Some of the work that Tallmer embraced left me indifferent or doubting my own intelligence. I wasn’t alone in thinking that novelty just wasn’t enough. But often we went back to the work that had most moved us. I saw The Iceman Cometh (starring Jason Robards Jr.) three times at Circle in the Square and mourned when the theater was torn down in 1972 for another ugly apartment house. The Threepenny Opera played for seven years at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street, pulling me in four times. In the Village, theater was part of the psychic geography.

  Movies were part of the Village too. On Eighth Street there were the Art (now part of NYU) and the Eighth Street theaters, both small, both featuring movies that could not be seen in the gaudy palaces of Times Square. If you missed the Kurosawa at the Thalia, you learned to wait for its arrival at the Eighth Street or the Art. There we saw Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa, Truffaut and Godard and Jacques Tati, all of them somehow meshing with the books we were reading and the theater we were seeing and the music we were hearing. There was a sense in the air itself that the world was brand-new, and it wasn’t only because we were young and therefore new too. The election of Kennedy had released a sense of optimistic possibility that seldom came from politics; there truly was a feeling that the torch had passed to a new generation. The right-wing orthodoxies of Joe McCarthy had been defeated; so too, we thought, had the pressure to conform to some standardized notion of what it meant to call yourself an American. The civil rights movement was gathering power and clarity, as the Freedom Rides kept moving into the South and we began, more and more, to hear the name Martin Luther King. It seemed possible, as Camus once said, that you could love your country and justice too.

  In the Village, as in the larger city and the country beyond, it was a time of much excellence. Or the ambition to be excellent. The word hip was used in those days to mean “knowing,” not to describe what was fashionable. We wanted the writing and the music and the art to be hip and new, to jolt us into new ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking, but at the same time to be more than simple novelty. Some of those naive desires actually survived the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the day the sixties actually began. Looking back now, many of the novels and poems of the time don’t hold up. But the music does, and so do those movies we saw in the darkness of the Eighth Street and the Art. Two out of three, as the cliché goes, ain’t bad.

  But even in the music, there were few happy endings. At some point around 1968, Jimi Hendrix, a young man from Seattle, was in the first flush of his stardom, with a fat new recording contract. This must have been around the same time that I saw him perform in Tompkins Square Park. He decided to build his own studio in the basement of the Eighth Street Theater. This space had once been a kind of yee-haw joint called the Village Barn, where New Jersey kids took girls after the senior prom. The studio’s construction ran into many delays. The ceiling, for example, had to be three layers thick to insulate the movie house from the sound of rock and roll. Hendrix and his architects also discovered the existence of the Minetta Brook flowing toward Washington Square below the old foundations of the theater. In August 1969, Hendrix played at the immense festival at Woodstock, where he caused a sensation with his deconstructed version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On August 27, 1970, the day after the official opening of his Electric Lady Studios, he left for England. Hendrix played an erratic set at the Isle of Wight festival, then went on to Denmark and Germany, where fans booed his slovenly, semistupefied performances. Back in London, he died on September 18, 1970, after choking on his own vomit because of an overdose of sleeping pills. He was twenty-seven and never got to make an album in the studio he had built.

  The Electric Lady Studios was still there when last I strolled Eighth Street. The number on the entrance is 52, and in the window beside it there are large photographs of Jimi Hendrix from the final years of his life. He is dressed in a kind of white Elvis glitter suit. He looks like a man in his fifties.

  The movie house is gone, of course, boarded over and shabby, as is much of this block of Eighth Street. The decline was at once swift and gradual. A Gray’s Papaya hot dog restaurant opened on the corner of Sixth Avenue, crowded with young men in shades who ate very little, and the street slowly became part of the retail end of the drug trade. Dealers made their way from Washington Square as part of a nightly route, peddling pot, heroin, acid, meth, and eventually crack. On the stoops across the street from the Eighth Street Theater, stoned kids clustered at midnight with warring boom boxes, and people who had been residents for years began to move away (in 1990 my brother Tom and his wife, Nin, who had lived two doors from Electric Lady Studios since the early 1970s, were part of the exodus). The police seemed incapable of bringing any sort of order to the street. For a long time, the movie house itself drew crowds to midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and afterward the young attendees would retreat noisily to the cellar clubs that opened and closed on the block with exhausting regularity. Shoe stores opened along the north side of the block, one of them taking over the last home of the Eighth Street Bookshop.

  Across the decades since the early 1960s, I’ve lived on Bank Street, and Waverly Place, and upstairs from O. Henry’s steak house at the corner of West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. I’ve paid rent on Patchin Place (where the ghosts of E. E. Cummings, John Reed, and Anaïs Nin drifted around the courtyard), on Horatio Street, on Church Street near Chambers, and have lived for two extended stays in the Chelsea Hotel on Twenty-third Street. The Chelsea was an outpost of the Village, full of painters, writers, jazz musicians, and rockers, and I’d often take walks to Madison Square, to see where Stanford White’s magnificent Garden once stood, or the Metropolitan Life Building, where my mother worked for a decade, or the glorious Flatiron Building, that tall ocean liner steaming due north without moving an inch.

  Almost always, I was working for newspapers or magazines based in Manhattan. But often my true destination was a marvelous saloon called the Lion’s Head, at 59 Christopher Street. On the corner was the latest office of the Village Voice, and the Seventh Avenue subway brought newspapermen uptown from the Post and downtown from the Times and the Herald-Tribune. But it was not just a newspaperman’s bar. There were stockbrokers in the crowd, and off-duty cops and firemen, and ballplayers, and old communists, and folksingers, seamen, priests, and nuns. Musicians came in late; so did bartenders from other Village joints. Some husbands showed up with their wives, but it was also a place of consolation for those whose wives had departed for good. There was much drinking, much singing, an occasional fistfight (usually with someone strange to the bar), much laughter. I loved talking to Joel Oppenheimer, about baseball and politics and the art of typesetting (to which he had been apprenticed years before becoming a poet). My friends included the novelist David Markson; each of the Clancy Brothers; the newspapermen Larry Merchant, Vic Ziegel, Dennis Duggan, and Joe Flaherty; a tough little veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade named Curly Mende; the actor Val Avery; a political junkie (and fine writer) named Doug Ireland; a stockbroker and ex-marine named Tom Quinn; and the novelist and essayist Edward Hoagland. In its special way, the Head was true to the historic Village ethos in that all sins were forgiven except cruelty.

  More and more, Vietnam was part of the texture of the talk in the Head, but if the tone of the discourse was sometimes angry, it was never hysterical. Usually the poets were talking about money while the stockbrokers talked about art. But all over the country, including the Village outside the door, the sixties were getting more frantic. In the Lion’s Head we were all a little too old for flower power or the Weathermen. None of us went to Woodstock. Only a few did drugs, and with even fewer exceptions, none in a serious way. Our drugs were all liquid. In short, the Head (as we called it) was part of the sixties and yet outside its main currents. It was more rooted in older notions of bohemia than in what was being called the counterculture. But even bohemia was changing. By 1968, that most terrible year, the year of the Tet offensive, th
e murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the chaos of the Democratic Convention in Mayor Daley’s Chicago, all the old Village assumptions were ebbing away and most artistic rebellions seemed minor. Who cared about art when young men were dying? The most important poet in that America was, of course, Bob Dylan, and for a long time the Head had no jukebox.

  There was a curious tendency to neutrality among many citizens of the older Village. Yes, they would vote against the war. Yes, they might send a few dollars to those campaigning against it. But many had nostalgia for the Village that was disappearing in the sound and fury of the era. They wanted to go back to a time when they could argue about poets or painters or the stars of the Theater of the Absurd. They saw signs on the separate roads: Jack Kerouac reduced to blubbering irrelevance only ten years after the publication of On the Road while his friend Allen Ginsberg enlisted with the guitar armies and chanted at most major demonstrations, including the Chicago convention. Who had chosen the correct road? There were no true answers in the coffee houses of MacDougal Street or the Eighth Street Bookshop or the Lion’s Head. There were opinions, and harsh judgments, but no answers. And the war was only one issue; every other assumption of American life was under challenge. Or so it seemed. Race, class, work, education, gender: All were being shaken by the italicized demands for change. When the Stonewall riots erupted on June 27, 1969, a few doors from the Head, and went on for three days, the regulars from the Head watched, offered verbal encouragement, but took no part in the demonstrations that gave birth to the Gay Liberation movement. There were too many journalists among us, trained to the codes of detachment, and too many who had donned the armor of irony. Timothy Leary, from Harvard, was urging the young to turn on, tune in, and drop out. In a different way, some of the older drinking class was doing the same thing. Many would think back on their choices later with a kind of regret.