100 Years of 100 Things: Greenwich Village

Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz and I'm filling in for Brian today. Next on today's show is our segment of 100 years of 100 things. Brian's been doing this all year, and we're now at number 82, 100 years of Greenwich Village. One of New York's most storied neighborhoods. Greenwich Village has been a center of bohemian life over the course of various eras, decades, and generations. It has housed America's greatest artists, it has had broad global cultural impact, and to help us look back on the last 100 years of Greenwich Village is John Strausbaugh, a journalist and the author of the 2013 book The Village: 400 Years of Beats, Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues.

He joins the show now to look back on the last century of Greenwich Village. Hey there, John.

John Strausbaugh: Hey, Matt. How are you?

Matt Katz: Doing great. So glad to have you with us. Listeners, do you have a personal story from Greenwich Village from maybe a different era that you want to share? Do you have a question about its history for John? Give us a call or text at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. John, as I read your book 100 years ago, that's approximately 1925, the biggest issue or the biggest flashpoint, the biggest tension in Greenwich Village seemed to be basically gentrification.

How about that? I mean, you wrote that landlord--

John Strausbaugh: It is amazing. [laughs]

Matt Katz: It is amazing. You wrote that landlords and developers were luring professionals and office workers to Greenwich Village. People who like the idea of living near artists and bohemians, but who also effectively drove out the actual artists. Then you have this 1927 Christian Science Monitor headline that reads, Greenwich Village Too Costly now for Artists to Live There. One Room and Bath Costs $65. John, this is an enduring struggle in Greenwich Village, right? Gentrification versus artists?

John Strausbaugh: And in bohemian neighborhoods universally. The same thing happened on the Left Bank, the same thing happened when Chicago had a bohemian era, San Francisco. Artists congregate in a place because it the rents are low. America's not a good place to make a lot of money if you're making art.

They look for cheap rents and the Village for a long time, was a cheap place to be and it had cheap little bistros and cafes where you could eat. The great advantage of any bohemian zone, is that you're rubbing shoulders and probably other body parts with all these other artists and writers and intellectuals and it's very inspiring and stimulating for your own work.

There's a point at which it attracts people who want to be around artists, hipsters, we'll say. That's when the rents start going up immediately. It's happened over and over, not only in the Village, but around the world. Then in the Village, there's been periods where it keeps happening, and people were saying-- The Christian Science Monitor in that article was saying, "The Village is over as an arty neighborhood. There's no way it can survive this." Somehow, it miraculously did.

Matt Katz: Maybe one of the reasons it did survive is because of those elements you just referenced. Bodies rubbing up against each other and one of the places that happened about 100 years ago, this is during Prohibition. One of the places that happened were speakeasies. I mean, Greenwich Village has had a drinking culture that continues to this day.

You write colorfully about how Greenwich Village was full of speakeasies during Prohibition, even gay and lesbian speakeasies and these secret saloons had poetry readings and men and women mixing in a drinking establishment for the first time. Drinking is in the bones of the Village, isn't it?

John Strausbaugh: It's what we would call a wet neighborhood, and it always has. All of New York City did-- Even the mayor of New York City at the time, who was from Greenwich Village, Jimmy Walker, did everything they could to get around Prohibition and to flaunt it and evade it. It's been said that for every legitimate bar and tavern that they closed down in the 1920s in Greenwich Village, two speakeasies were created at the same time.

There was more drinking going on in the Village during Prohibition, not less and I think that's true at least of all of Manhattan, but I think all of New York City. People did not stop drinking for Prohibition.

Matt Katz: Then some of these speakeasies cater to gay and lesbian clientele.

John Strausbaugh: There had always been. One of the keys to the Village, I think, is that you have that up until, let's say, the 1960s, there were not like all these nodes of arty, hip America that there are now. Every college campus now, is a node of arty, hip America. Back then, if you were an artist, a painter, a poet, a dancer, gay, lesbian, politically radical, especially on the left, you were pretty much anywhere else in the United States of America an outcast and a loner and considered a weirdo.

There was one place you heard of, if you were in the middle of Idaho or on the West Coast or anywhere else in America, you heard about this place called Greenwich Village, where you were not only welcome, you were encouraged to be as big a personality as you could be and make art and make your poetry.

I think that has a lot to do with its survivability for so very long, starting back in the 1850s even. It was a refuge for people who left other places around the country to be there. By the 1920s, there was a thriving underground, but thriving gay and lesbian culture that would later flourish after the Stonewall Inn Uprising of 1969, and there's a reason why that happened in Greenwich Village, because there was a long tradition of gay and lesbian life in the Village.

Matt Katz: Before Stonewall, you wrote about-- After World War II, Greenwich Village was the tiny speck of American real estate where non-conformists, individualists, bohemians, progressives, avant gardists, experimenters, and gay and lesbians, and psychological and sexual adventurers could feel at home.

John Strausbaugh: Well put.

Matt Katz: It was well put. It was a culture engine for the world. We're talking about the '50s, and this is when coffee houses really boomed there. Popular with students, artists, musicians, bohemians, or you said they're cheap places where they could loiter, talk, and read Sartre. What these coffee houses like at the time after the war? Were they just beaming with the heartbeat of the counterculture?

John Strausbaugh: I think you could put it that way. To the extent that there was a counterculture, it was in places like Greenwich Village and specifically Greenwich Village. The coffee houses that started blooming in the village in the 1950s did so because it was really cheap to sit there nursing a cup of coffee and talking with your pals and hanging out.

So much so that of course, the beats and beatniks got the reputation for being lazy layabouts who don't do anything all day long, but sit around in cafes and sip a cup of coffee. That's discounting all the work they were doing otherwise, that they were up all night creating all sorts of culture, not just for Americans, but for the whole world.

They were buzzing with-- David Amram, who is still around and still a great musician, and was there. He got to the village in 1955, and he still talks about how he had gone to college, but he got his real education in those coffee houses and cafes and bars in the village in the 1950s.

Matt Katz: You write that they were, as you just mentioned, this was the center of the beat movement, and then beatniks, which is an interesting term and it became something of a meme maybe to use today's parlance [inaudible 00:09:25] necessarily reality.

You said that there were tour buses that would come to the Village to check out the beatniks, to look for the black clad hipsters. I mean, that is-- and people would dress up as beatniks and go to the Village and hang out to try to-- and they weren't necessarily poets or whatnot. They might've read Howl and got into the whole scene or just dallied, flirted with it.

John Strausbaugh: Then the folk music scene that attracted people from all over the country, like Bob Dylan who arrived in '61. It was the same sort of thing. There was all sorts of folk music tourists because there was an explosion of folk music venues in the Village and recording studios and record stores in the '50s.

That was going on at the same time and that hip tourism had been happening in the village since the 19th century. Back in the 19th century, people were going to Greenwich Village to see artists and bohemians, as they called them at that point. Later it becomes beats and beatniks. Later still, they're looking to see hippies hanging around, especially in Washington Square park and they're putting their beads on and letting their hair down a little and coming to see them.

That tourism effect is always a pressure on the neighborhood because then what do you do with-- If you're just living there and trying to make art, how do you deal with all the crowds, for one thing, but also your landlord's going to notice and your rent's going to start going up, and eventually it's not an affordable neighborhood for artists and the hippies and the beats and the beatniks, and they all move to the East Village or other places.

Matt Katz: I want to play some tape from an amazing WNYC documentary that aired on the station in 1959 and it's about the beatniks. Here's two minutes from Footloose in Greenwich Village.

John Strausbaugh: Oh, I know this.

Matt Katz: Great. It's wonderful. Maybe a minute and a half. Let's hear it.

Speaker 2: How many Beats or members of the Beat Generation are there in the Village and who are they? This is not clearly defined. There is a lot of confusion about it. Even though they have become the Village's most recent attraction. Some simply say--

Speaker 3: I'm just a member of this generation. That's all.

Speaker 2: It's difficult, actually, to find anyone who will deliberately label himself as being beat. This is true even in the coffee houses which are supposed to be the beatnik's headquarters. One floor beneath ground level of an ancient Brownstone on lively McDougal street, crossroads of the Village, there is time for a brief conversation with some poets who read nightly at the Gaslight Cafe.

Despite the fact that the readings have been advertised as being by poets of the Beat Generation, there is no clear picture even here of what this means.

Speaker 4: As far as Beat Generation goes to me, I am myself now writing at this period, in this time, if the tag Beat Generation is given to the area in which I write or the time in which I write, I can't do anything about it. I am not beat, I'm not finished, I'm not done. I want to write, I'm going to write, and if I don't change my style, and if I don't get any polish and discipline, if I don't do anything, then there's no reason in writing.

Matt Katz: John, your reaction to that tape.

John Strausbaugh: That's fabulous. I listened to that before. It's a phenomenon that-- I mean, we see it going on-- Whenever there's a underground culture, an arty culture, a counterculture, outsiders need to give it a label and give it a name and create memes about it. That was happening in the Village, in-- well, the Village wasn't even being called the Village much in the 1850s.

When Walt Whitman and some actors and other writers were hanging out in Greenwich Village, people struggled to figure out, "Oh, these must be bohemians." And so then they become bohemians. Then in the '50s, they become beats and beatniks. Later, oh they must be hippies. They must be punk. They must be this, they must be that. It's always a label ready for the rest of the world to slap on these little scenes.

Matt Katz: It all unfolded there. We got so many texts about people's memories and thoughts on the Village.

John Strausbaugh: Oh, great.

Matt Katz: One listener wrote, my father went to Cafe Reggio in the '30s with other young artists and it's still there on McDougal, right?

John Strausbaugh: Yes, it is. It's a very different Cafe Reggio than It was even 10 years ago, but it's there different.

Matt Katz: Different, how so?

John Strausbaugh: It's been, I don't want to say gentrified because that's rude, but it has definitely been upscaled.

Matt Katz: Got it. Another listener texted, you can't tell the history of the Village without mentioning the Woman's House of Detention and of course, you talk about that in the book. A crucial nexus of queerness and counterculture that's now largely forgotten. According to this listener, it played a big role in the Stonewall riot.

John Strausbaugh: Sure. It's not as forgotten as it could be. People remember it. When I was doing the book, which was 10 years ago now, I interviewed a bunch of people about the Women's House of Detention, The House of D, as it was called. John Waters talked to me about it. Some people would come to the Village just to stand outside and watch the goings on, as people always were milling around.

It was right behind the Jefferson Market Library. It's a big, hulking, rather unappealing looking building. It didn't look really like a prison either. It looked like an ugly high rise and it was packed with-- There was always something going on. All different kinds of inmates, from people who were just in overnight to long term and a lot of repeats.

If you were just some female off the streets who had gotten maybe drunk in a bar that night and got taken in, that's where you ended up with all the hardcore criminals who were also in there. It was an amazing place, there was a lot of lesbian activity in and around it and was perfectly of a piece with that neighborhood in the '60s when it was on the way to the Stonewall Uprising.

Matt Katz: This is the Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Matt Katz filling in for Brian today and we are talking about the history of Greenwich Village with John Strasbaugh. Let's go to the phone lines. We have John in Park Slope. Hi, John.

John: Hi, Matt. John Strausbaugh is wonderful. I read his book and I recommend it to everybody who loves History of New York. It is one of the most wonderful books in the world when you know about history of New York City. I just wanted to mention that we always talk about James Baldwin, Bobby Dylan, and the people that were there, the artists and so on, creatives.

There was a quotidian-- I grew up there in the '50s and '60s, and I was born there, St. Vincent's Hospital but the quotidian life of Greenwich Village was important. The matrix that was created by the Italians, by the West Enders, we used to call them. That was the thing that held the village together until all of us, the hipsters-- not the hipsters, but the beatniks and the Italians had to move out because NYU and the rest of the-- the rents just went into incredible heights and we all had to move out to different places.

The quotidian life of the Village, I mean, there were the push carts on Bleecker Street. I still remember them as a child. The Italian guys, the fishmongers, the butchers, the bakers, the really great stuff that you can't even get now unless you have a grandmother who is Italian or Jewish, cooking at home.

The quotidian life, is the thing that kept us all together and the neighborhood. My mom knew almost-- six old Italian women would name you everybody in Greenwich Village in the Italian community. Yes, there were the bad things like the Genovese crime family was down there, but they was everywhere. It was what we used to call the, the swells north of the park.

South of the park was us then west of the park, all the way beyond 7th Avenue were like a mixture of Irish, German, people who had trades in the old days still and people like Barbra Streisand were making a little bit more money living on that wonderful, I think near Commerce street or something, a little alley. Wonderful townhouse that was there.

There were different, different sections of the Village, from Canal street all the way up to 14th Street, Hudson river to Broadway. There was no SoHo or anything like that. That's my comment.

Matt Katz: Thanks for the memories, John. Really appreciate it. He brought up so many aspects of village life that's gone, right?

John Strausbaugh: And John's point is a good one. I tried to get to it in the book as well that it was a working class neighborhood. It was predominantly Irish and Italian. The artists, the bohemians, the beats, the beatniks were a very visible minority, but they were definitely a minority in the neighborhood.

They were there because it was a working class neighborhood, so you could afford to be there. When it became a hip, gentrified neighborhood, it drove everybody out. That's a phenomenon that you can over New York City. It's not just in Greenwich Village. The Lower East Side now is completely different from when I lived on the Lower East Side, and that was only 30 years ago. Very different place.

Matt Katz: Let's go to Sheila in what she calls the West Village. Hi, Sheila.

Sheila: Hi, I live in the West Village now, but I came here to the city in 1959, moved immediately into an illegal loft because I was a painter and married to a painter, and we would always go be in the Village. There was such a wonderful culture-- I hate the word culture. There were a whole bunch of painters that really cared about each other.

We searched each other out, we found each other, and we would have the most amazing loft parties in the illegal lofts that you ever heard of, with the most marvelous musicians. We weren't just painters. We were with poets, we were with photographers, dancers, all kinds of people. We all were helping each other.

We had a lovely way of encouraging each other. Some of these people became super famous. Another thing I wanted to say is that there was no hierarchy. We helped each other. Also, we used to hang out of the Cedar Bar, which was a great, great combination. The minute you walked in, you were accepted as somebody in the arts, probably a painter.

People would meet each other, they'd learn about each other and of course, that was the beginning of the loft thing, which now these lofts are really, really super expensive. We were there, and I just want people to know how hard the painters worked, the poets, the photographers. It may have seemed like we were always partying, but there was a lot of good, hard work because how could they have ever become so good as sculptors, painters-

John Strausbaugh: Exactly.

Sheila: -worldwide. They partied hard because they'd been working hard, and they had strong personalities and great imaginations but it was a wonderful time and it was--

Matt Katz: Wow. Thanks so much for the memory, Sheila. Maybe the partying also helped the artistry as well. I mean, it's all interwoven.

John Strausbaugh: That's exactly the case, I think. That's how that neighborhood operates and why so much-- I happen to love the word culture. So much culture comes out of neighborhoods like that and the East Village in its day, and I suppose Brooklyn today, because everybody's bumping up against everybody else all the time and they're partying together and working together and sleeping together and fighting and doing everything else that people do when they're all together in one spot. Especially creative people in a neighborhood like the Village.

Matt Katz: We can't ignore the fact that Bob Dylan arrives there, performs at Cafe Wha, the very, very literal start of his music career. John Lennon--

John Strausbaugh: The afternoon he gets there.

Matt Katz: Amazing. John Lennon, after the Beatles break up, he ends up in--

John Strausbaugh: Where do he and Yoko go? Of course they go to the Village. Where did Jimi Hendrix get his start? At the cafe a few years after Bob Dylan. It was an amazing place.

Matt Katz: Let's go back to our phone lines. Hi, Eric in Brooklyn. How you doing, Eric?

Eric: Good, how are you?

Matt Katz: Good. Thanks for calling in.

Eric: Thank you for taking my call. I grew up in Manhattan, around Murray Hill area, and around age 15, summer of '76, I made my way down to Washington Square Park. It was actually National Marijuana Day, actually put me there. That started becoming my place to gravitate to, to find my friends and hang out and do whatever.

There at that time, was the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, who became my friend. He had at that time, during that summer, left home in Brooklyn and run away to Washington Square Park, where another subsequent friend of mine, a guy named Alvin Fields, took him in. They lived on Little West 12th street, which was really the meat market back then.

What I'm trying to share with you, like Dylan, like Hendrix, like all these other artists, Jean Michel, upon leaving home for the first time in New York City, leaving Brooklyn, he gravitated to and went straight to Washington Square park in Greenwich Village. That's a little bit of an untold aspect of his legacy that Washington Square park, which he was there just hanging out.

My friend was playing music and busking, and Jean Michel picked up a hat or something and collected the money for him. Then Alvin asked him, "Where are you living?" He said, "Right here." Then Alvin took him in.

Matt Katz: Whoa.

John Strausbaugh: That's great.

Matt Katz: Oh, man. Amazing memories, Eric. Thanks so much. Washington Square park, we didn't even really get to talk about the heart of the Village in many respects.

John Strausbaugh: It's the site in, I think, it was about 1960, '61 of the conservative newspapers in town, not the Post, but I think it was the Tribune at the time. There was a big headline, 3,000 beatniks riot in Washington Square Park. They were playing music and the cops came to shut them down because some of the neighbors on the north end of the park had complained about the music in the park.

They were just resisting, they weren't rioting and there weren't 3,000-- Somebody said in the New York Times the next day, I don't think there's 3,000 beatniks in the entire city of New York, let alone in the park that day. There might've been a couple of hundred. There's a great film of that afternoon that you can see online, which shows them. They're just kids playing guitars and bongos and the cops get heavy with them.

Matt Katz: The recent history of Greenwich Village seems to involve just much more wealth, sky high rent, and the expansion of NYU. We got a text from somebody. How was New York University able to buy all of that property from West 4th street to West 8th street, changing the feeling of the Village? How did they encroach in such a way?

John Strausbaugh: From the very beginning, interestingly, when I think it was still called the College of New York City in the 1800s, right away, it got a complaint from a neighbor that the building they built was hanging over the neighbor's building and encroaching on his space. It's a long history with the NYU devouring Greenwich Village one bite at a time.

Until now it's a virtual campus for the school. The school was just a little commuter college. When it began expanding, it got much more money, much more funding, and with that funding, it bought and bought and has bought and is still buying real estate, not only all over Greenwich Village, but the Lower East Side and downtown and down in the financial district. It has metastasized.

Matt Katz: What does the future hold for the Village?

John Strausbaugh: It has been counted out many times in the past and was reborn. I'm not going to say that's impossible, but it seems doubtful. It has become so expensive. In the book, I say it used to be a magnet for misfits and now it's a magnet for millionaires. I don't see how that can be turned back.

You'd have to have a great economic upheaval, greater than we went through with the COVID upheaval, to see that real estate come down enough that it would become anything remotely like the Greenwich Village of old. I think that Greenwich Village, the left bank of America, had a very long run from the 1800s until the mid-1980s, 1990 but I think it's done.

Matt Katz: To close, I want to ask something of a personal question. Last year, I made a podcast called Inconceivable Truth. It was about the search for my biological father. By the time I found out who my father was, he had already died, so we never met but I did find out that at the time I was conceived, he lived at 103 McDougal street and I found this out from the white pages at the time.

This would've been the mid to late '70s and since I'm on this journey trying to learn more about him, I was hoping you might be able to give me a sense of what life was like at that time on that block. To me, McDougal is, is really the central thoroughfare of the Greenwich Village. I'm curious if you could maybe paint a little picture that era, that block.

John Strausbaugh: It still was then. It is not remarkably different from the way it was at least starting in the '50s, and I think maybe even in the 1940s. It was the entertainment zone, McDougal, along that block and on either side of it. There was a lot of clubs, there was a lot of nightlife, there was a lot of little restaurants, as there are today.

It has not changed remarkably, except I guess there aren't the clubs that there used to be. There were more music spots back then, but by the '70s, the neighborhood, as all of New York City, as all of America had hardened some. There was no Summer of love in the '70s, it was a little rougher. It's the Valerie Solanas era, the girl who tried to assassinate Andy Warhol. It was a tougher neighborhood at that point, I think. He was probably a tough guy.

Matt Katz: Maybe he was a late night guy if he was drawn to living on that block at that time.

John Strausbaugh: Yes, I think you had to be if you were living there. Like today. I mean, if you're on that block today, you're probably out a lot because it's still noisy on the weekends, at least. It gets noisy.

Matt Katz: Sure. Right. That was 100 years of 100 things. Thing number 82, 100 years of Greenwich Village with John Strausbaugh, author of the 2013 book, that's when your book came out, right? 2013?

John Strausbaugh: Yes.

Matt Katz: The Village: 400 Years of Beats, Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues. The book is still completely compelling and paints an amazing, fascinating picture of Greenwich Village. John, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing so much of this history with us.

John Strausbaugh: Thank you very much.

 

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