Greenwich Village

“ Of course the best known of the Greenwich magazines is The Masses, owned by Max Eastman and edited by Floyd Dell. It has, in a sense, grown beyond the Village, inasmuch as it now circulates all over the country, wherever socialistic or anarchistic tendencies are to be found. But its inception was in Greenwich Village, and in its infant days it strongly reflected the radical, young, insurgent spirit which was just beginning to ferment in the world below Fourteenth Street. ”

“ Perhaps you will keep it as a rainbow memory, a visualisation of the make-believe country where anything is possible. But in any case you will not forget.
Many a place gets into your mind and creates nostalgia when you are far from it. But Greenwich Village gets into your heart, and you will never be quite able to lose the magic of it all the days of your life. ”

“ Greenwich was at all times a resort for those who could afford it, an exclusive and beautiful country region where anyone with a full purse could go to court health and rest among the trees and fields and river breezes. It was destined to become the most popular, flourishing and prosperous little village that ever grew up over night. Those marvellously healthy qualities as to location and air, that fine, sandy soil, made it a haven, indeed, to people who were afraid of sickness. ”

“ Somewhere or other I have called all this the Greenwich Village complex. It is not genuine artists, serving beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in those cockroached cellars and bawl for art; it is a mob of half-educated yokels and cockneys to whom the very idea of art is still novel, and intoxicating—and more than a little bawdy. ”

“ The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesqueness of clothes-lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence; and the new apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-line with their towering stories, implied a life as alien to the American manner as anything in continental Europe. In fact, foreign faces and foreign tongues prevailed in Greenwich Village, but no longer German or even Irish tongues or faces. ”

“ Greenwich, you see, maintains its old and honourable repute—that of being a resort and shelter and refuge for those upon whom the world outside would have pressed too heavily.
There is no one who has caught the inconsequent, yet perfectly sincere spirit of the Village better than John Reed. In reckless, scholarly rhyme he has imprisoned something of the reckless idealism of the Artists' Quarter—that haven for unconventional souls. ”

“ PART II—THE TEST I BEGINNINGS It was in that red gash of crosstown brick—West Tenth Street—that the new life began. The neighborhood was quaint and poor, a part of that old Greenwich Village which at one time was a center of quiet and chaste respectability, with its winding streets, its old-fashioned low brick houses, its trees, its general air of detachment and hushed life. Now it was a scene of slovenliness and dust, of miserable lives huddled thickly in inadequate houses, of cheap roomers and boarders, of squalid poverty—a mix of many nations well-sprinkled with saloons. ”

“ I like to believe that ugly things are slipping farther and farther from Our Village, that honest romance and clean gaiety are rather the rule there than the exception, and that, perhaps, the day will sometime dawn when there will be no more need of the shame of prisons in Greenwich Village.
The early social growth of the city naturally centred about its churches. Even in Colonial days conservative English society in New York assembled on Sunday with a devotion directed not less to fashion than to religion. We must not forget that America was really not America then, but Colonial England. ”

“ The atmosphere of chivalry to women, friendliness to men, and courtesy to every one, which is, after all, just the air of France."
[Pg 181] These things are all true; the most amazing thing about Greenwich Village is that the most unlikely things that you can find out about it are true. The obvious, every-day things that are easily believed are much the most likely to be untenable reports or the day dreams of imaginative chroniclers. You are safe if you believe all the quaint and romantic and inconsistent and impossible things that come to your knowledge concerning the Village. ”

“ Greenwich will not straighten its streets nor conventionalise its views. Its intellectual conclusions will always be just as unexpected as the squares and street angles that one stumbles on head first. Its habit of life will be just as weirdly individual as its tangled blocks. It asks nothing better than to be let alone. ”

“ If you probe further they will ask you to lift up your eyes at night to their electrically lighted pagoda roof and then tell them why they should not be content to be "a twinkling model set in a sea of slums." No. Impossible to get them excited by sly disparagements or open comparisons.
Impossible, that is, unless your comparison brings in Greenwich Village. Dare to assert that the model tenement district reminds you of Greenwich Village or the Latin Quarter of Paris, and you will encounter an explosion. ”

“ Workers and ambitious strivers have taken possession, once more, of the sacred grounds, where memories and hopes are holy possessions, where so many have worked and toiled and spread an evangel, now accepted universally.
New places have sprung up where idlers find themselves isolated, where enthusiasm and sincerity is written on walls and faces. And people are doing things once more in Greenwich Village. ”

“ The inside of the house was spaciously partitioned, with large, high rooms, massive stairways with fine mahogany woodwork, and a certain restful amplitude in everything which was a feature of most of the true Colonial houses.
Thomas Janvier quotes from some anonymous writer of an earlier day: "From the crest of this small eminence was an enticing prospect; on the south, the woods and dells and winding road from the lands of Lispenard, through the valley where was Borrowson's tavern; and on the north and west the plains of Greenwich Village made up a rich prospect to gaze on." ”

“ You will come away with the sense of wider horizons and deeper penetrations than you knew before. You will find novel colours in the work-a-day world and a sort of quaint music in the song of the city. Some of the glowing reds and greens and purples that you saw those grown-up children in the Village joyously splashing on their wooden toys or the walls of their absurd and charming [Pg 301] "shops" will somehow get into the grey fabric of your life; and a certain eager urging undertone of idealism and hope and sturdy aspiration will make you restless as you follow your common round. ”

“ Then there is that curious quality about Greenwich so endearing to those who know it, the [Pg 176] quality of a haven, a refuge, a place of protected freedom.
"It's a good thing," said a certain brilliant young writer-man to me, "that there's one place where you can be yourself, live as you will and work out your scheme of life without a lot of criticism and convention to keep tripping you up. The point of view of the average mortal—out in the city—is that if you don't do exactly as everyone else does there's something the matter with you, morally or mentally. ”

“ Sometimes they bloom [Pg 66] in real flowers that anyone can see and touch and smell. Sometimes they come only as flowers of the heart—which, after all, will do as well as another sort,—in Greenwich Village, where they know how to make believe.
Here is how Hugh Macatamney describes Greenwich:
"A walk through the heart of this interesting locality—the American quarter, from Fourteenth Street down to Canal, west of Sixth Avenue—will reveal a moral and physical cleanliness not found in any other semi-congested part of New York ”

“ It does not welcome tourists, though it is hospitality itself to wayfarers seeking an open door. It is the Village, and it will never, never, no never be anything else—the Village of the streets that wouldn't be straight!
Janvier, who has already been quoted extensively, but who has written of Greenwich so well that his quotations can't be avoided, says: "In addition to being hopelessly at odds with the surrounding city, Greenwich is handsomely at variance with itself."
New York, and especially Greenwich, grew by curious and indirect means, as we have seen. ”

“ Not all the commissioners [Pg 62] in the world could change the charming, erratic plan of it; not the most powerful pressure of modern business could destroy its insistent, yet elusive personality. The Village has always persistently eluded incorporation in the rest of the city. Never forget this: Greenwich was developed as independently as Boston or Chicago. It is not New York proper: it is an entirely separate place. At points, New York overflows into it, or it straggles out into New York, but it is first and foremost itself. ”

“ The new Greenwich Village Theatre which Mrs. Sam Lewis is godmothering, is—unless many sensible and farseeing persons are much mistaken—going to be the new Voice of the Village. It is going to express what the Villagers themselves are working for, day and night: beauty, truth, liberty, novelty, drama. It is going, in its theatrical form, to fill the need for something concrete and yet various, something involving all, yet evolved from all ”

“ Greenwich Village is not composed of outcasts, but it does not reject them, and it enables a man or woman who desires to know the outcast to satisfy the desire without feeling cut off from humanity. Hell Hole is a saloon in the back room of which pickpockets, grafters, philosophers, poets, revolutionists, stool-pigeons, and the riff-raff of humanity meet. Margaret loves this place and the people in it—so they told me—and there she did and said extreme things in which there was a bitter fling at decent society. ”

“ I could not help thinking that Greenwich Village might well adopt certain passages as fitting texts and interpretations of themselves and their own lives—"The lovers of gaiety and peace, long defrauded."
The Shee, as they dance, sing to the old grey [Pg 266] world-dwellers,—or Stevens says they do, and I for one believe he knows all there is to know about it ('tis a Leprechaun he has for a friend) :
"Come to us, ye who do not know where ye are—ye who live among strangers in the houses of dismay and self-righteousness. ”

“ These people are excessively poor, and have such a hard struggle for life as to have no desire to regard the laws of the Health Board. Constant complaints are made that the houses are hovels and the alley a breeding-place for disease.
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village sprang from the oldest known settlement on the Island of Manhattan. It was an Indian village, clustering about the site of the present West Washington Market, at the foot of Gansevoort Street, when Hendrick Hudson reached the island, in 1609. ”

“ In the resolute spirit of another Andor Andorra, the Village of Greenwich maintains its independence in the very midst of the city of New York—submitting to no more of a compromise in the matter of its autonomy than is evolved in the Procrustean sort of splicing which has hitched fast the extremities of its tangled streets to the most readily available streets in the City Plan. ”

“ It is true that changes do come over the Village like the waves of the sea, even as my friend said. But they are colourful waves, prismatic waves, fresh, invigourating and energetic waves, carrying on their crests iridescent seaweed and glittering shells and now and then a pearl. The Village has its treasure, have no doubt of that; never a phase touches it but leaves it the richer for the contact. ”

“ It was in a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I fancied them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed by the town ”

“ Brashear’s rooming-house on Grove Street wore its air of respectability like a garment, clean and somber, in an environment of careful behavior. Greenwich Village, not having fully awakened to the commercial advantages of being a locale, had not yet stretched between itself and the rest of New York that gauzy and iridescent curtain of sprightly impropriety and sparkling intellectual naughtiness, since faded to a lather tawdry pattern. An early pioneer of the Villager type, emancipated of thought and speech, chancing upon No. ”

“ Captain Sir Peter Warren, on whom be peace and benedictions, is usually given the credit of having given Greenwich its name, the historians insisting that it was the name of his own estate, and simply got stretched to take in the surrounding countryside. This seems rather a stupid theory. The Warrens were undoubtedly among the earliest representative residents in the little country resort, [Pg 36] but by no stretch of imagination could any private estate, however ample or important, be called a village. ”

“ Though they are strangers in a strange land—they have only dropped in to find out an address of a friend who lives in the Village—they never misunderstand the situation, their hostess nor the atmosphere for a moment. No one misunderstands the charming, picturesque camaraderie of the Village—unless they have been reading Village novelists, that breed held in contempt by Harry Kemp and all the Greenwichers. Anyone who goes there with an open mind will carry it away filled with nothing but good things—save sometimes perhaps a little envy. ”