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

THE VILLAGE is a narrative history of “the most famous neighborhood in the world.” It can be thought of as a Bayeux Tapestry for Greenwich Village, unscrolling across four hundred years of the unique neighborhood’s life, from its start as a rural frontier of New Amsterdam in the 1600s through its long reign as the Left Bank of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its current phase as an affluent bedroom community and zone of popular restaurants and boutiques. For much of that period Greenwich Village was a culture engine -- the author’s term for a zone that attracts and nurtures creative people, radicals, visionaries, misfits and life-adventurers. Coming together in one place, they collide, collaborate, fuse and feud like energetic particles in an accelerator, creating work and developing ideas that change the culture of the world. Classical Athens was a culture engine, and Elizabethan London, and Paris and Berlin in the 1920s. Greenwich Village was an incredibly productive culture engine for an unusually long time.

Along with documentary research, the author conducted interviews with a number of current or past Villagers, including: filmmaker John Waters, who first hitchhiked to the Village from Baltimore as a teenager in the early 1960s and moved there in 1990; Alfred Leslie, 84, the last of the original Abstract Expressionists still living and working in Manhattan, who made the Beat film Pull My Daisy with Kerouac, Ginsberg and others; Tish, an 88-year-old female impersonator who has lived in the same apartment in the Village since 1955; the late Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first girlfriend in the Village who appears with him on the iconic cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; rock photographer Bob Gruen, who befriended John Lennon during his Village years; Sharon Blythe, daughter of the late Art D’Lugoff who founded the legendary Village Gate; avant-garde filmmaker and archivist Jonas Mekas, who came to New York from Lithuania in the late 1940s and quickly fell in with the crowd that included Maya Deren and Anais Nin; musician and composer David Amram, who became friends with Kerouac in the Village of the mid-1950s and still gigs there in his eighties; native Villagers who grew up in its now greatly diminished Irish and Italian working-class enclaves in the 1940s and 1950s; several playwrights who originated the Off-Off-Broadway movement at the Village’s Caffe Cino and Judson Church; George “Furious George” Tabb, a punk rocker and writer who grew up in the 1970s Village of the Village People and The Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight screenings; Randy Wicker, a pioneering gay rights activist several years before the Stonewall Riots; veterans of the riots and the gay pride movement that followed them; and younger Villagers who watched its transformation in the 1990s and 2000s.