The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village

by John Strausbaugh

Overview

Cultural commentator John Strausbaugh's The Village is the first complete history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential and infamous New York City neighborhood.
 
From the Dutch settlers and Washington Square patricians, to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and Prohibition-era speakeasies; from Abstract Expressionism and beatniks, to Stonewall and AIDS, the connecting narratives of The Village tell the story of America itself.
 
Illustrated with historic black-and-white photographs, The Village features lively, well-researched profiles of many of the people who made Greenwich Village famous, including Thomas Paine, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Twain, Margaret Sanger, Eugene O’Neill, Marcel Duchamp, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock, Anais Nin, Edward Albee, Charlie Parker, W. H. Auden, Woody Guthrie, James Baldwin, Maurice Sendak, E. E. Cummings, and Bob Dylan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062078216
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/26/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	672
Sales rank:	510,580
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

John Strausbaugh covered downtown Manhattan history and culture as a writer and editor for the weekly New York Press from 1988 through 2002. For the New York Times he wrote and hosted the "Weekend Explorer" series of articles, videos, and podcasts on New York City history. He has also written for the Washington Post, NPR, and PBS. His previous books include E: Reflections on the Birth of the Elvis Faith, Rock 'Til You Drop, and Black Like You. A former resident of Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and Hell's Kitchen, he now lives in Brooklyn Heights.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

Part I From the Beginning Through the "Golden Age"

1 Bossen Bouwerie 3

2 A Magnet for Misfits 9

3 The First Bohemians 27

4 The Restless Nineties 47

5 The Bohemians' Neighbors 61

6 The "Golden Age" Begins 79

7 1913 97

8 The Provincetown Players 107

9 The Golden Age Wanes 117

10 The Next Wave 139

Part II The Dry Decade, the Red Decade, World War II

11 The Prohibition Years 155

12 The Coney Island of the Soul 173

13 The Red Decade 189

14 The Wrong Place for the Right People 201

15 Swag Was Our Welfare 215

Part III The Greenwich Village Renaissance

16 A Refuge in the Age of Anxiety 227

17 The "New York School" 241

18 Duchamp, Cage, and the Theory of Pharblongence 261

19 Bebop 271

20 The Beat Generation 289

21 Pull My Daisy 309

22 Village Voices 319

23 Standing Up to Moses and the Machine 337

24 Off-Off-Broadway 349

25 The Folk Music Scene 377

26 From Folk to Rock 399

27 Lenny Bruce and Valerie Solanas 417

28 The Radical '60s 433

29 The Lion's Head 445

Part IV The Last Hurrah

30 Prelude to the Stonewall Uprising 455

31 Stonewall 473

32 Village Celebrities of the 1970s 485

33 After Stonewall 507

34 Art in the Junkyard 527

35 The 1980s and AIDS 535

Epilogue 545

Acknowledgments 555

Notes 557

Bibliography 581

Index 595

What People are Saying About This

Kurt Andersen

“Strausbaugh has produced the definitive history of America’s bohemian wellspring and prototypical modern neighborhood with all the verve and fun and rigor it deserves.”

Michael Lesy

“The very best kind of cultural history: Literate, lucid, erudite, and entertaining.”

Teresa Carpenter

“A great, sprawling saga of genius and vice in New York City’s Greenwich Village. John Strausbaugh captures Bohemia at its best and level worst, reminding us why we love this place. His account is breathtaking.”

Editorial Reviews

[A] loving and thoroughly researched look at what [Strausbaugh] calls ‘a zone of rogues and outcasts from the start.’ . . . Fine social history humanized with a sort of paradise-lost wistfulness.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Strausbaugh has produced the definitive history of America’s bohemian wellspring and prototypical modern neighborhood with all the verve and fun and rigor it deserves.” — Kurt Andersen, bestselling author of True Believers and Heyday

“A great, sprawling saga of genius and vice in New York City’s Greenwich Village. John Strausbaugh captures Bohemia at its best and level worst, reminding us why we love this place. His account is breathtaking.” — Teresa Carpenter, bestselling author of New York Diaries

“The very best kind of cultural history: Literate, lucid, erudite, and entertaining.” — Michael Lesy, author of Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties

From the Publisher

A great, sprawling saga of genius and vice in New York City’s Greenwich Village. John Strausbaugh captures Bohemia at its best and level worst, reminding us why we love this place. His account is breathtaking.

Teresa Carpenter

Strausbaugh has produced the definitive history of America’s bohemian wellspring and prototypical modern neighborhood with all the verve and fun and rigor it deserves.

Kurt Andersen

The very best kind of cultural history: Literate, lucid, erudite, and entertaining.

Michael Lesy

Strausbaugh…turns a collection of stories and profiles into something less like a textbook than a party spinning happily out of control. Pushing off in 1640, Strausbaugh marshals archives, the Village's artistic output and interviews with members of several key scenes…to tell the story of the area's four centuries as a counterculture mecca. He calls the neighborhood "a culture engine—a zone that attracts and nurtures creative people, radicals, visionaries, misfits, life adventurers." He makes a convincing and frequently delightful case.

The New York Times Book Review - Ada Calhoun

If nothing else, the book represents an enormous amount of research and provides hours of entertaining reading.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

…a buoyant, 600-page romp through the neighborhood's countercultural history.

The New York Times - Sam Roberts

In this sprawling, crowded, biography on one of New York City's more alluring and storied neighborhoods, former New York Times commentator Strausbaugh traces the history of Greenwich Village from its beginning as bucolic countryside to its current incarnation as both tourist destination and astringent residence for the elite. In between, Strausbaugh introduces a dizzying array of historical figures and events so salacious the book reads more like one long gossip column full of sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, art, music, the mob, and more. None of this is a bad thing; for long stretches, the pages practically turn themselves. Along the way, readers are fed fascinating little tidbits and images: Washington Square Park as a boggy mass grave site for the city's paupers and Yellow fever victims, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her sister Norma teaching themselves to swear while darning socks, a drunk Jackson Pollock's frequent violent outbursts at the Cedar Street Tavern, and much, much more. No citation will do the book justice; it deserves to be read while walking below 14th Street silently mourning the loss of a neighborhood that has given so much by way of art and culture. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

The author of Sissy Nation: How America Became a Nation of Wimps and Stoopits (2008) and other cultural criticisms and histories returns with a long, loving and thoroughly researched look at what he calls "a zone of rogues and outcasts from the start." Strausbaugh begins his chronological Village tour in the 17th century, when the Indians, Dutch and English were contesting for Manhattan. But once might prevailed, the area--which was indeed once a separate village--evolved initially in the post-Revolutionary era as something fairly upscale: summer retreats for the wealthy. Later, Paine and Poe were there, as was Walt Whitman, who took Emerson for a drink at Pfaff's. As the decades proceeded, the author necessarily focuses on key individuals, events and places. The many African-Americans who once lived there emigrated to Harlem; the 1911 Triangle fire propelled social change; liberals and radicals arrived, including Lincoln Steffens and Emma Goldman. Writers and artists proliferated, and soon it was a hotbed for small theater productions. Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill mounted early shows there; later came Albee and Shepard. Publications and publishers came, too--The Little Review, Village Voice, Evergreen Review, Grove Press. Strausbaugh charts the music history of the area, from jazz to folk (Bob Dylan will not like his portrait here) to rock. Early and/or sordid death is a theme--from Phil Ochs and Dave Van Ronk to Lenny Bruce. The author spends a lot of time on the emergence of the Village as a battleground for the LGBT communities--from actual clashes (Stonewall) to the desperation of AIDS. He seems saddened by the gentrification of the Village--at the impossible prices and rents that exclude the creative and contentious bohemians of yesteryear. Fine social history humanized with a sort of paradise-lost wistfulness.

Kirkus Reviews