"The Village": An Elegy for America's Artistic Center

The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues by John Strausbaugh. Illustrated. 624 pp. Ecco. $17.99 (paperback)

Sitting on a bench at Washington Square Park, having an espresso at Caffe Reggio, listening to music at the Bitter End, and wandering Cornelia, Jones, Barrow, and other winding streets that don’t follow Manhattan’s grid, one can almost imagine that Greenwich Village remains a center of bohemia and artistic experimentation. Armed with a good walking guide, one can visit the spots associated with famous artists and movements. That Village no longer exists, a reality that John Strausbaugh ruefully acknowledges in his outstanding history.

Strausbaugh’s narrative is encyclopedic in scope and teeming with Village characters, major and minor. Starting his narrative at a time four centuries ago as Manhattan gradually developed from its southernmost reaches, he quickly moves into the bohemian movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Marxism, Freudianism, free love, women’s emancipation and avant-garde art held sway. Every cultural and political movement is accounted for, as the Village gained a reputation as a countercultural haven: the New York School of abstract expressionists, the Bebop jazz musicians, the Beat writers, the folk-music scene, the ‘60s radicals, and the gay liberation movement. Along the way, we meet legendary figures: Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, John Reed, W.H. Auden, Jackson Pollock, Dizzy Gillespie, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs. We also stop in at legendary writers’ bars such as the Lion’s Inn and the Whitehorse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. And, of course, there are storied music venues, whether the Village Gate for jazz or Gerde’s Folk City for folk.

This captivating history reaches a melancholy climax, one recognized by anyone who has witnessed the Village’s contemporary evolution. The author recaptures the long history when the Village was a magnet for young artists and writers. Now, it’s affordable only to investment bankers and corporate lawyers, as “…skyrocketing prices drove resident bohemians and artists out of the Village…” This “shiny and new” gentrified area of upscale shops and restaurants is a far cry from a Village once known for its artistic and cultural experimentation and political dissent. Strausbaugh’s powerful history reminds us of those traditions and celebrates them, in an outstanding narrative that is ultimately elegiac.