The Battle for Gotham (17 page)

If there is anything remaining of the Greenwich Village in which I grew up in the ’40s and ’50s, it is elusive. Many of the brownstone-lined streets remain, their West Village quality intact, but the box-like shadow of intruding apartment houses is never far off the horizon.

Gone is the spirit of the small community, separate and distinct from the rest of New York and the nation. Gone is the feeling that whatever was off-beat in the Village—the people, the dress, the symbols, the issues—was at least its own and not imported.

Gone too is the predominance of small shop-owners—more craftsmen than businessmen—who once thrived in the low-rent store fronts or cold-water lofts.

It is difficult to assess change in Greenwich Village. On the most personal level, nothing is the same. Yet in a larger sense there is still something special about the Village. It is still a geographic area unique to this city in architectural diversity, with a personality all its own. It is still the hub of newness—new movements, new dress, new life styles—even if all these are immediately commercialized. And it is still politically avant-garde, the first to take politics out of the hands of the professionals, the leader in zoning fights and landmark preservation.

What I wrote forty years go almost sounds current. The laments of many Villagers today are very similar, although a lot of specifics are quite different. I also noted that “bit by bit NYU was taking over prime Village real estate to create a campus for itself.”

It was an ideal location for a child. The park was my backyard, and there were few park regulars we didn’t know. Except for the university students, park people were Villagers and their friends. Strangers were immediately recognizable. Crowds were unusual even on warm weekends, and tourists were few and obviously out of place. Folksingers, artists with their easels, the chess players were always there, but they were just a part of the scene. No one interfered with anyone else. Buses still trafficked through Washington Arch to turn around and start back up Fifth Avenue, but that never stopped the ball games, roller skating, or the biggest sport of all—seeing who could throw the ball to the top of the Arch. Our mothers let us play in the park, unwatched, confident that should a fall or fight occur, some grown-up would take care of it. There was little mischief you could get away with without your parents hearing about it.

Today, forty years later, all of the streets I walked are much improved. The strip clubs are gone from West Third, and the celebrated Blue Note survives. The variety along MacDougal is similar but of a higher quality, a mark of definite economic upgrade but not necessarily lifestyle change. It is truly a mixed bag, with a tattoo parlor here and there.

For after school, the then still uncommercialized coffeehouses—where the espresso was brewed by the elderly Italian proprietor—were the equivalent to everyone else’s corner drugstore soda fountain. There were the Italian hero shops, bakeries, vegetable stands, pushcarts with flavored ices. “Some of the South Villagers were pushed out by newcomers, others departed seeking upward mobility,” I noted in the article. “Today the Italian enclave is still very much in existence but it is also smaller.”

LITTLE ITALY TODAY

The South Village and Little Italy used to be one and the same. Today, Little Italy survives commercially only and covers a smaller area. Most of the resident Italians have moved on, but many of the well-known restaurants and specialty shops remain, some owned and operated by Armenians. The Italian feel is less but endures nonetheless because of the businesses that remain.

The area, like so many others, is undergoing development pressure, and community efforts have been aggressive to have it designated a historic district. Deservedly so, at that. One can assume this sizable area south of the park, with its colorful assortment of cafés and shops, was omitted from the original landmark district designation because in the mid-1960s, working-class districts of tenements and assorted businesses were not considered high architecture worthy of designation. Instead, they were targets of slum clearance. The South Village was more than just the cradle of Italian immigration. It was the epicenter of the beats from the 1920s on and the folk communities of the 1950s and ’60s so long identified with the Village.

But in my 1969 article, I focused on the changing assortment of businesses that changed everything as rents escalated: “Most obviously hurt were the small entrepreneurs—the ones who slapped together jewelry, crafted hand-sewn shoes and bags, or created other ‘Villagey’ merchandise. Then, too, success led some of these craftsmen to the less personal but more lucrative world of Uptown. The small stores were the heart of the Village’s life style, one of the things that kept it a community within a city. Their demise has only accelerated the destruction of the neighborhood’s character.”

On Eighth Street, everything new was offensive: open-front hot-dog stands that were a cheap reflection of Times Square, chainlike clothing stores offering the newest in ugliness and claiming their styles were of the Village. And one stretch of small stores was enclosed in a most incongruous imitation of a colonial-style suburban shopping center, with the pointed roof, redbrick front, white columns. If the new stores throughout the area weren’t part of citywide chains, I noted, they looked like they might as well be. This intrusion was perhaps the most distasteful. Whatever used to be in the Village—good or bad—was at least its own.

Another diminishing characteristic of the Village, the article noted, was its rich source of used and rare bookshops. Only a few remained. One bookseller in business since the 1920s observed: “One old brownstone was better for me than a 20-story apartment house. The brownstones had libraries, room for books. Sure, apartment dwellers read, but they have no space. All they want is paperbacks.” The concentration of used book-stores that still existed was in the East Village, dominated by the phenomenal Strand Book Store. Renovated in 2007, it remains one of the great stores of that kind in the country.

Then the article spotlighted some of the Village battles, noting the defeat of William Zeckendorf from completely transforming the Village into another Upper East Side. New high-rises were erasing the architectural and economic diversity.

While I was still living there I saw the high-income No. 2 Fifth Avenue replace the “Henry James” houses on Washington Square North. The Strunsky houses on Washington Square South in which, for many years, many artists lived were bulldozed to make way for the imitation Federal-style NYU Law School.

I had made only a quick and meager mention of the Moses defeats, mentioned with the same interest as the demise of Carmine DeSapio as a reigning political power. The Village always seemed to have multiple battles going on at the same time. The combative nature of its citizens was famous. But to me, those battles were just that, a series of citizen battles, and the role of neither Moses nor Jacobs had yet made much of an impression on me. In retrospect, this amazes me.

By the 1950s, I noted in my article, the Village had started to join the rest of New York, and penetration by new groups and outsiders seemed to change it. The beats took over MacDougal, and Washington Square changed from a community to a metropolitan park. The Village still was a place with character, but it seemed to be fighting a rearguard action.

AS MUCH AS THINGS CHANGE . . .

Greenwich Village will probably always be “the Village.” Change inevitably brings differences from one era to another. But the essential character endures, reflected in the coffeehouses, artist studios, jazz clubs, railroad flats, walk-up apartments, esoteric bookshops, and artisan-based businesses.

In 1969, the changes I observed seemed a dramatic contrast to the Village of the 1940s and 1950s. In truth, they were. The 1960s were years of great ferment throughout the country. Here, national dramas always played out in the extreme. But more apparent today, somewhat in contrast to my 1969 observations, is how well this historic enclave absorbs those great social and economic shifts while retaining its essence.

The historical distinctions endure within this neighborhood of contrasts within a city of contrasts. More than most neighborhoods, the Village is difficult to categorize. Block by block, the neighborhood changes. Some broad distinctions are discernible. The elegant and luxurious Greek Revival and Federal townhouses of the northern streets remain among the city’s most fashionable addresses. The venerable wide assortment of houses and tree-shaded streets of the West Village retain the quiet residential air of the era of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, e. e. cummings, and John Reed, despite the scattered presence of brassy, commercial tourist spots.

The Lion’s Head on Sheridan Square, where journalists from the onetime diversified daily press gathered, disappeared as the selection of newspapers dwindled. But the White Horse Tavern, once the meeting place of Dylan Thomas, Norman Mailer, Michael Harrington, Jane Jacobs, and William Styron, survives on Hudson Street. The southern portion of the Village is still where the humbler assortment of tenements mixes in with townhouses and storefronts. Here, where the remnants of Little Italy survive, urban renewal did the most damage. And the enduring rakish and radical character of the East Village, birthplace of the flower-child generation and theatrical innovations like La Mama, is reflected in outlandish and colorful hair and dress styles, New Wave eateries, and entertainment uses.

For post-World War II America, the Village was the cradle of free-spirited, bohemian culture in the city and country. Abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, the beats, radical politics, sexual freedom, folk-song artists—all manner of countercultures and cutting-edge movements—were born or nurtured there. Greenwich Village once seemed so separate from the rest of the city. Today, it is more integrated and not so far out of the mainstream. The center of the cultural avant-garde shifted long ago and now migrates every few years to the next yet-to-be upscaled city neighborhood, usually with the artists in the vanguard.

STILL A WORLD APART

For many who live there, however, the Village is still a world apart from the rest of the city. And for some, it has the hometown feel they left behind to come to New York years ago. Kansas City-born author Calvin Trillin moved in 1968 with his wife, Alice, to a Federal row house when, he recalls, local stores put pictures of neighbors on their walls and when both rich and poor attended the public school, as did their daughters. Trillin wrote in a
New Yorker
article in June 1982: “I have always believed that my attachment to the Village has to do with what it shares with the Midwest, rather than with what Midwesterners would consider arty or bohemian. Compared to uptown Manhattan, it has always seemed less formal, more neighborly, less densely populated, built closer to human scale, and less dominated by the sort of building that requires walking past a doorman and into an elevator in order to go home—an act that Midwesterners tend to find considerably more unnatural than a drunken poetry-reading in the park.” Twenty-eight years later, Trillin says that the fundamental atmosphere is the same. “A lot has been fixed up,” he says. “The stores are better and there are more and better restaurants, more places than I can eat at. I never on purpose go to a restaurant I can’t walk to.”

Even for me, having moved away so long ago, some places feel very familiar, even if considerably changed. The walk I took to school, primarily down MacDougal, has improved since my 1969 look back. But the lackluster assortment of gift shops and restaurants doesn’t seem to have much character or appeal. Maybe it never really did.

The school I walked down MacDougal to get to, the Little Red Schoolhouse, remains an educational stronghold in the city and is totally recognizable in its original Bleecker Street location. This simple four-story redbrick schoolhouse has been comfortably expanded into a sensitively restored Federal row house next door. And the school added space in a modest, contemporary way next door to that on Sixth Avenue. The playground we used around the corner at Sixth Avenue and Houston survives due to its ownership by the New York City Parks Department.

Today, this vibrant district remains a great magnet for the unconventional; it is, however, no longer the only one to do so because so much of the city has improved in recent decades, so that now no one area of the city is the favorite locale of the avant-garde, the artist, the off-beat lifestyle. In fact, what is unconventional is not easy to determine these days. Decades ago, a reasonable assumption could be that people dressed in all black were from the Village. Today that black-clad person could just as likely be an internationally known establishment architect from midtown or an uptown restaurateur.

The Village is still the great gathering place it has been historically. The variety of personalities is endless. Weekend users pour in from around the city and out of town, a long-standing phenomenon. In Washington Square Park, until the recent controversial redesign, a varied crowd still hung out around the huge circular water fountain that many people call “the fountain” or “the Circle.” The Circle was our summer wading pool. In great numbers on Sundays, folksingers gathered playing guitars, banjos, harmonicas, and handcrafted improvised instruments. They sang all the familiar songs of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the unknowns. Many became famous, including Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, but those days are a distant memory. Diverse crowds assemble there now. Groups cluster. But the music is gone. Now it is just one of the city’s many magnetic gathering places.

LANDMARK PROTECTION WORKS

The historic grittiness of Greenwich Village remains stable in large part because the complex urban fabric does, still fostering a diversity of uses and people. One hundred square odd-shaped blocks on a crazy quilt of meandering streets, Greenwich Village retains varied elements of historic layers that began with Dutch farmers in the 1700s. Affluent, upwardly mobile downtown merchants and bankers came in the 1800s. Downtowners fleeing cholera and yellow-fever epidemics migrated in the 1900s. In parallel time periods, the rough-and-tumble port activity along the Hudson waterfront spilled out onto Village streets.