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Places That Matter
When I visited New York City for the first time as an adult, literally as I turned 18 on a month-long, off-campus college course, I was immediately drawn downtown to Greenwich Village. You can start to understand why in the 2005 documentary “The Ballad of Greenwich Village,” which I recently streamed on Amazon Prime.
I felt like I had found a sphere that nicely fit the cut of my cultural, intellectual and political jib, as it’s the epicenter of American bohemianism as well as Leftism, folk music, modern art and poetry, progressivism, living outside the mainstream and so much more. During that initial stay in what is the City (as far as I’m concerned), I took in a show by roots-rock pioneer Link Wray at the Gaslight II on MacDougal Street, a brief-lived resurrection of the original Gaslight Cafe, which had closed about a year before. It was a pivotal venue in the beat poetry and folk music scenes that also featured new young standup comics like Lenny Bruce and the now-disgraced Woody Allen and Bill Cosby as well as such non-folk musical legends as Jimi Hendrix and Charles Mingus. For a musical verité taste of the place in its heyday, check out Bob Dylan’s among Live at The Gaslight 1962.
I stopped in for a beer at the Kettle of Fish on that same block of MacDougal, a watering hole for the young Dylan and his fellow folkies. I also sipped espresso at Cafe Figaro at the intersection of MacDougal and Bleecker Street, and where, after I moved to NYC some four years later, I would enjoy java-fueled hangs late into the night with my friends, hoping to slot myself into the tradition of the bohos who had done the same there before me. I also ate at Mamoun’s, a little Middle Eastern food joint on MacDougal that opened the year before and says it’s the oldest falafel restaurant in New York and one of the first Middle Eastern restaurants in the nation. After spending a college study group in the Mideast and the region’s cuisine becoming a staple of my diet, during my years living in New York Mamoun’s was an at least a monthly regular repast.
On my first night out after migrating from upstate to the Big Apple following my college graduation, I went with some friends to the legendary Bitter End music club on Bleecker to see Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. At the end of the early show, we were invited on the PA to stay for the late show, no cover charge. My friends and I declined the offer, missing Bob Dylan, who dropped in to the second show on his return to the Village to gather the troupe for his Rolling Thunder Revue (and scooped up bassist Rob Stoner and drummer Howie Wyeth, whose band opened for and then backed Ramblin’ Jack). The music bar Kenny’s Castaways just down the street soon became my regular watering hole. Its Irish barkeep, Pat Kenny, would even cash my checks, and in the late ‘80s hired me to do PR for Kenny’s and The Bitter End.
Hence whatever form of latter day bohemian I fancy myself to be was largely imbued into my soul in good part thanks to the time I spent in Greenwich Village. My New York Times music and film critic friend Stephen Holden calls the “Ballad” doc a “trifle” in his review, and isn’t off base in his assessment. I prefer to regard it as a primer to the hood that can hopefully lead interested parties into the many home entertainment takes on its history and culture.
The film does have pungent commentary on the Village from Norman Mailer, a co-founder of the influential Village Voice alternative newsweekly, and Tim Robbins, who grew up there. It also notes how when the city fathers started laying out its expanding plan for Manhattan growth as a numbered grid, the Village resisted. And continued to resist the dominant paradigm for many decades to follow. It was a place outside the norm for people outside the norm. Another doc streaming on Prime, “Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation,” fills in some of the furher details on the folk revival scene of the late 1950s/early 1960s.
The Village figures largely into two of my favorite memoirs: “A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties” by Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s early 1960s girlfriend who was a Village habitue even before he arrived there, and folk revival pioneer Dave Van Ronk’s “The Mayor of MacDougal Street” (written with Elijah Wald). Van Ronk’s wife, Terri Thal, who was Dylan’s first manager, later manged the new folk trio The Roches and is a longtime social justice activist among other pursuits, recently published her book “My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me.” I have it slated as my present to myself for my upcoming 70th birthday. Another delightful time tunnel of a book that brings the Village folk scene of yore back to life is “Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña” by David Hadju.
Those interested in a deep dive into the birthplace of US bohemianism will be well served by two superb cultural histories: “Republic of Dreams. Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960” by Ross Wetzsteon, and “American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century” by Christine Stansell. You can get a sense of the spirit of the place in the films “Next Stop, Greenwich Village” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.” And the Gaslight is a prominent locale in the early episodes of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” one of the finest TV series of recent years.
The Village can also be rightly considered the birthplace of gay liberation, forged out of the 1969 Stonewall riots. Christopher Street in the West Village was long considered “the Main Street of gay America.” It’s just one of the many movements in the arts and politics nurtured by the place.
Soon after my planned imminent return to the NYC area, another stop into the Village is at the top of my list. It figures largely in who I became, even if I only briefly resided there on Hudson Street, as well as being where the fecund urban garden of outsider minds, muses and souls where American Leftist culture and creativity blossomed.
Alas, the rampant gentrication that has transformed much of Manhattan into a bedroom community and playground for the very well-off and wealthy. Greenwich Village and its adjacent neighborhoods used to be where cultural outsiders could find cheap places to live that enabled them the financial freedom to be creative.
But no longer. All three of its three zip codes were included in a Forbes magazine list of the 10 most expensive areas in the nation in terms of housing prices. So I wonder if the spirits of Van Ronk, Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock, Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas and so many other bohemians, creatives and activists still echo in the Village’s streets. Even if such traces may now be hard to detect, the array of works produced by and about the neighborhood’s denizens and the freewheelin’ spirit of the place have disseminated into the global vilage and will resonate forever.
This post is adapted from my long-running column in The Progressive Populist, sister publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Storm Lake Times, subject of the acclaimed 2021 PBS documentary, “Storm Lake.” Check out the Populist’s range of original and well-chosen Leftist writings from the heartland at www.populist.com, and please consider subscribing to its biweekly print edition.