The Village: Past & Present

In the years before WW1, Greenwich Village developed a reputation as a bohemian neighborhood with low rents, picturesque, meandering side streets and tiny alleys, and a tolerance for political radicalism and eccentric and nonconformist behavior. Most residents may have been working class or remnants of the upper class that populated Henry James or Edith Wharton novels, but the neighborhood’s image was built on its experimental theatres and art galleries, and the “little magazines” that were published there. It was a world populated by political radicals, artists, and writers like John Reed, Emma Goldman, Floyd Dell, Eugene O’Neill, and Georgia O’Keefe among others. They were men and women who were, in a variety of ways, trying to subvert the old order that was to collapse with the war.

In the Post WW11 era, Greenwich Village was still a haven for writers, artists, and deviants and cranks of all sorts. In a small film that never made its mark, Joe Gould’s Secret (Ian Holm as star), about a Village character – loquacious panhandler Joe Gould, who extracted money from people by reciting poetry and doing embarrassingly loud comic turns – we see a cozy, warm, human-scaled Village of legendary hangouts like the Village Vanguard and Minetta Tavern, and large bohemian parties filled with harddrinking men and women.

A more striking evocation of those years appears in the late New York Times book critic and columnist Anatole Broyard’s posthumous memoir, Kafka Was the Rage: ‘We were all so grateful to be there – it was like a reward for having fought the war. There was a sense of coming back to life, a terrific energy and curiosity.... The Village, like New York City itself, had an immense, beckoning sweetness.... The Village was charming, shabby, intimate, accessible, almost like a street fair. We lived in the bars and on the benches of Washington Square. We shared the adventure of trying to be, starting to be, writers and painters’.