The Village
Schleifer, Marc D.
This is the paradox of Greenwich Village: an historic artists' quarter panders its worst trivia with the civic pride of Zenith's Chamber of Commerce. Nowhere else in New York is the city's...
...The free association of interracial couples is the most obvious or visible symbol of bohemian sexual liberation —and as such, to the already socially and politically insecure Italian community, the most offensive...
...The first modern Village apartment houses were constructed for them...
...Still, the Village has held together, bound by the myth of community, a magical urban web supposedly embracing artistic Bohemia and a solid Italian neighborhood...
...But Village residents have been fighting for years against property interests supporting City Hall proposals to build a major traffic artery through Washington Square Park, and high rents have been driving both bohemians and Italians out of the district...
...Whether the coffee houses are seminightclubs featuring poets on display to the tourist trade, or quiet little places for the chess, checker and Go crowd, their extension into the "solid" Italian neighborhood of South Village has not displaced Italian community life...
...it then relocated on Bleecker Street...
...After a year of City Hall hearings, rallies, a 50,000 signature petition campaign and political threats against De Sapio, the Committee succeeded in forcing City Hall to reverse its position and initiate the road-closing proposals...
...An opinion poll and the subsequent block-by-block canvassing in the petition drive revealed that public sentiment for the Committee's position was strong throughout the district, yet none of the Italian settlement's civic and fraternal organizations (whose leaders are almost all identified with De Sapio's Tamawa Club) would par ticipate on the Committee...
...None of the suspects resided in the Village...
...Population studies reported by Vassar sociologist Caroline Ware (Greenwich Village 1920-1930) and more recent material gathered by the Greenwich Village Study Group establish that the numerical strength of the Italian Village community has been steadily declining...
...They have shared it for generations with New York University students who consider the lawn their campus, and also with the vanishing "old families" of Lower Fifth Avenue, whose brownstone houses have also made way either for the luxury apartment house or the expansion of N.Y.U...
...Increasing the number of men assigned to the district and enforcing a strict midnight curfew in Washington Square Park, the cops began a systematic campaign to harass Village haunts...
...Assuming this, and with the knowledge that most of the original immigrants were there involuntarily (for reasons of language, poverty and fear of discrimination), I would conjecture that the South Village Italian group, now lower middle class, is more sexually repressed today than it was fifty years ago...
...Most volunteers and organizational support for the Committee came from such New Settlement institutions as private school PTA's, VID, and The Voice...
...All this is not just a tale of misdirected energy...
...Carey carefully placed a cast of detectives disguised as beatniks in the "sinister" coffee houses of Macdougal and Bleecker...
...As for the remnants of the Italian settlement, we can only assume that those families which have chosen to remain in South Village have done so out of free choice and, despite changes in the neighborhood and higher rents, out of fierce loyalty to the style of their ethnic group...
...The police showed little respect for the nuances separating bohemian cafes...
...If there has been a Park invasion in recent years, it must be measured in terms of baby carriages, not guitar cases...
...This threat is felt most keenly by those members of the settlement actively engaged in violence—the young men and adolescents of South Village...
...The following month's spectacular "Village Dope Raid" that won Narcotics Squad Commander Edward F. Carey front-page headlines was the high point of the police campaign...
...With the brief exception of Norman Mailer's pieces expounding Hip, which appeared in the first months of the paper's existence, and other occasional radical contributions, The Voice has no real connection with either the remnant of prewar Village radicalism or with the "Beat Generation's" literary dissent in the fifties...
...In recent primaries, when Carmine De Sapio barely beat off the VID candidate, his tiny margin was provided by heavy majorities in the South Village Italian election districts...
...The folk singers had gathered in the Circle on Sunday afternoons for over a decade untroubled by neighborhood toughs...
...When the Narcotics Squad staged its comic-opera "dope raid,"its month-long infiltration netted thirteen marijuana smokers and a pound of pot...
...The proposed roadway would have split the Park in half, reduced usable park space and further threatened the district's insularity...
...a concentration of French restaurants in Manhattan's West Fifties does not presuppose a thriving Gallic-American community...
...For VID's demonstration of strength in the primary established the New Settle ment's actual community dominance...
...Five years ago a new and competing weekly, The Village Voice, appeared in the community...
...Its comprehensive off-Broadway theater-reviewing, intense news coverage and editorial comment on local controversies, literate profiles of Village personalities in politics and the arts, and occasional art, music and literary criticism make for a strange amalgam of New Yorker sophistication and New York Post "crusading liberalism...
...III As early as the twenties Caroline Ware observed the slow influx of a new social group into the Village: young couples and bachelors, professional men and business executives...
...A local family taking its customary summer stroll in Washington Square Park after attending the noon mass at the Church of Our Lady of Pompeii might easily be offended by the hundreds of high-spirited folk singers who gather around the Park on Sunday afternoons...
...City officials selected by De Sapio assured the delegations that the City would not earmark any more sections of South Village for slum clearance...
...The occasional Village artists, the easygoing folk singers, the Macdougal Street beatniks and the interracial couples do, in a way, threaten the disintegrating Italian settlement...
...During the bitter primary campaign, the De Sapio forces whipped the Italian community into a frenzied state, presenting it with a simple alternative: "Us or them...
...Nevertheless, Washington Square Village continued to be involved in controversy throughout the fifties...
...The sources of Village "charm" are found in the twisting streets deflecting the fast through-traffic that has dehumanized the rest of New York, and in the informal life styles of the famous bohemian and Italian settlements...
...The most reasonable explanation for their usual indifference is the "New York Mayor's Report on Marijuana" (assembled during the La Guardia administration), which declares marijuana to be a harmless, non-addictive agent...
...In fact, increased police restrictions in the last few years have cut the length of the informal folk concerts...
...Again a Magistrate dismissed the charge...
...The targets of an understandable resentment that has built up in recent years among members of the disintegrating Italian settlment seem obvious enough...
...For the integrity of the community had long before started to crumble...
...Featuring local advertising, it devotes its small segment of news space to accounts of social events in the churches and clubs of the Lower Fifth Avenue "old families" and the South Village Italian community...
...It is a threat that will not be discussed in the Times and is carefully avoided by liberals who revel in community discussions of "the Village problem" (just as Eleanor Roosevelt dismissed as "horrible" Norman Mailer's comment that the right to miscegnate is the real issue in racial conflict...
...In addition to a column listing the names of "prominent" diners at those restaurants that regularly advertise, the paper carries mild news reports on Village politics, praising the civic accomplishments of Car mine De Sapio's Tamawa Club...
...Somehow, weaker men, however innocent, have always been found to pay for the suffering of a threatened insular group...
...For the last few decades the district was serviced solely by a weekly newspaper called The Villager...
...More important than the rise of The Voice in terms of New Settlement power has been the growth of the Village Independent Democrats, one of the many insurgent "liberal reform" clubs in Manhattan...
...The New York Times re ported that many Village establish ments were approached by gang mem bers who promised protection at the classic 25 per cent rate...
...The Voice has rapidly picked up a paid circulation of over 17,000 and won considerable power in the community...
...And the park has never been the exclusive domain of the Village Italians...
...They were involved with their own families but lacked the deep-rooted community ties and taboos of the immigrant groups...
...The posh duplexes of West Village were yesterday's studios, and Greenwich Village 362 Study reports show that the celebrated cheap cold-water Village flats are today non-existent...
...The promoter of Washington Square Village, Morton S. Wolf, is known to be one of Carmine De Sapio's major financial backers...
...But this theory fails, I think, because it accepts the myth of a Village community...
...In the last few years the slow influx has turned into a residential flood...
...a block from Sheridan Square...
...The first real estate agent to challenge New York's Fair Housing Practices Law does his business...
...As a campaign slogan, this ethnic appeal was an example of political desperation...
...This, perhaps, is one of the virtues of Bohemia...
...Their social and political attitudes were "liberal" but untouched by the radicalism of Bohemia...
...the managers of these establishments suddenly became very cautious about serving tender-faced customers...
...they were the patrons of the earliest supermarkets in the district...
...Vincent Millay and the flapper loves of Max Bodenheim...
...The sexual revolution has matured within Bohemia since the self-conscious pioneering of Edna St...
...The increased concentration of coffee houses on Macdougal and Bleecker Streets can be traced partly to the conversion of inexpensive haunts along Fourth Street into solid middleclass restaurants...
...They were not identifiable by any particular ethnic or religious background as were the earlier German, Irish and Italian settlements in the Village, nor did they work in the community— as did many members of the bohemian and immigrant settlements...
...For in recent years the most important factor in the rapidly accelerating transformation of Greenwich Village into a well-to-do dormitory has been the creation of the luxury housing units of Washington Square Village...
...The paradox in this situation for the Italian settlement is less humorous...
...As a counter to the City plan, Villagers advocated complete closure of the existing roadway through the Park...
...Their involvement was as spectators, in line with their desire for a cultured middle-class life...
...However, most of the coffee houses—especially the more recent ones advertising beatnik poetry—are supported by a clientele about as bohemian as the patrons of the latest "authentic" Chinatown restaurant are Chinese...
...Many of the crowded cafe houses where self-proclaimed beatniks assemble were Italo-American grocery stores or quiet neighborhood expresso and pinochle clubs only a few years ago...
...Village wits refer to the project as "Tammany Towers...
...Circle In the Square," one of the oldest off-Broadway houses in operation, was evicted from Sheridan Square (classically, the geographic center of Greenwich Village) to make way for a new apartment house...
...For five years, groups of residents protested the roadway proposals...
...The fashionable "Garden Apartments" further west on Bleecker Street and the growing number of high-rent modern apartment houses built in the last few years within the heart of the Italian settlement —these and not the coffee houses that have replaced Italo-American grocery stores are responsible for the shifting character of the neighborhood...
...One Sunday afternoon in early October they stormed into the distinctly non-beatnik Cafe Figaro, located on Bleecker and Macdougal Streets, and broke up a Bach concert by the Silvermine Trio...
...The existence of any "settlement," ethnic or social in character, can only be measured in terms of residence...
...It is a threat of sexual liberation, dangling its sweets before the eyes of the repressed "tough" or of the guilt-stricken hood seeking an easy "lay" yet wanting to marry a virgin...
...Changing Village institutions and com munity power struggles have reflected the growing power of the New Settle ment...
...11 A case also exists for the theory that the recent violence is a natural reaction of the Italian settlement to the threat of bohemian "cultural imperialism...
...But persons familiar with the Village have reported a progressive decline in the availability of housing that the typical bohemian either prefers or can afford...
...Publicly financed as a Title I "Slum Clearance" project, Washington Square Village runs the North-South length of the Village Italian settlement and has cut considerably into the unofficial eastern border of the old neighborhood...
...In the Spring of 1958 the various organizations formed a Joint Emergency Committee to conduct a full-scale pressure campaign on the City and Borough administrations...
...Nor have members of the old Italian community been kept from using Washington Square Park by an invasion of bohemians...
...When the present site of the project was first proposed for slum clearance action in the early fifties, large delegations from the Village Italian community flocked to City Hall to protest...
...The establishments remaining in the Village are under constant pressure...
...But Village violence, though aggravated by the gangsters, cannot be dismissed as a shakedown operation...
...When word got back to the Station House that the neighborhood boys were roughing up Negroes with white girl friends, the police went into action...
...Resentful of the decline of its political power, the once secure Italian settlement is further frustrated by an inability to admit the betrayal of its interests by its own leadership...
...Apart from scattered dance studios and a few small bookstores, all that remains in the way of old bohemian institutions is concentrated in the Macdougal and Bleecker Street complex...
...But they are "impossible" targets...
...During the Summer coffee shops staging poetry readings were fined as cabarets operating without a license, until a Magistrate ruled that "the readings did not constitute entertainment in any general sense of the word...
...By the Fall bars favored by bohemians and interracial couples were being carefully watched for violations of fire laws on the usual standingroom-only week-end nights...
...This is the paradox of Greenwich Village: an historic artists' quarter panders its worst trivia with the civic pride of Zenith's Chamber of Commerce...
...Since the twenties Bohemia has gained collective insight from Freudo-Marxism, D. H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, the anarchists, and the hipster...
...To justify the "Fifth Avenue South" address promised to the project's backers, City officials proposed extending Lower Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park...
...At first most of the inci dents were confined to Washington Square Park and the MacdougalBleecker Street complex of commercial Bohemia...
...The law firm that represents Washington Square Village, Goldwater and Flynn, is generally considered to be the legal arm of the New York Democratic organization...
...What was surprising about this raid is that, compared to other municipalities, the New York police are fairly tolerant about the widespread use of marijuana in Manhattan...
...Residential relocation has created a situation where a "bohemian" enterprise is more profitable than one suited to the supposed needs of the old Italian neighborhood...
...It is sold chiefly for the benefit of apartment hunters, who traditionally rely on Villager classifieds...
...most, in fact, took public positions opposing the road-closure proposal...
...but judged as a statement of the real question of power, it was the only issue at stake in the election...
...Over the years they have been replaced by upper-income apartment houses...
...Again the issue was entertainment without a cabaret license...
...new apartment houses rise steadily...
...Although The Voice still hankers after the same local advertisers who support The Villager, the paper has done exceptionally well with national advertisers, devoting special issues to the promotion of hi-fi equipment, sports cars and world travel—all indices of the life style or expectations of the average Voice reader...
...The arrival of this New Settlement might be described as the suburbanization of Greenwich Village...
...The irony that the roadway, conceived as an encouragement to the promoters of more high-density housing for New Settlement residents, should be violently opposed by the existing New Settlement as detrimental to the charm that brought them to the Village was no doubt lost on most members of the Committee...
...Admittedly, it is difficult to classify such a social abstraction as bohemianism in a statistical survey...
...Although newspaper coverage did not begin until the latter part of Septem ber, 1959, the troubles first became noticeable to Village residents in the summer of that year, when groups of young men from the South Village Italian neighborhood began to harass bohemians...
...Broken windows and street beatings in Greenwich Village indicate, however, that in recent years even the myth has begun to collapse...
...Nevertheless, "Carey's Crusaders" donned their berets...
...Direct and derivative profits from real estate speculation are apparently vast enough for De Sapio and his closest associates to acquiesce in a development necessarily leading to the eventual loss of their political power in the district...
...The Village bohemian and Italian are members of two disintegrating settlements, but they still share an extremism in their respective social views, by contrast with the new Village settlers...
...Nowhere else in New York is the city's ghetto-complex so challenged as by the interracial atmosphere of Village streets and bars, yet it is as difficult for a Negro to rent an apartment in Greenwich Village as in any other white section of the city...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
