Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village's known history dates back to the sixteenth century, when it was a marshland called Sapokanikan by Native Americans who fished in the trout stream known as Minetta Brook. When the Dutch first settled on Manhattan in 1621, naming the area New Netherlands, all but a small area on the Southeastern tip of the island was left untouched by the Europeans. When the colony passed to British hands in 1664 and became New York, a few farms and estates emerged some miles to the north of the city; the settlement evolved into a country hamlet, first designated Grin'wich in 1713 Common Council records.
The village was transformed overnight in 1828, when yellow fever caused thousands of city dwellers to flee to the Greenwich countryside. Many of these displaced city-folk enjoyed the country, and throughout the following decade the village grew as businesses and residents moved their permanent homes there.
As the population of Manhattan grew, the city felt the need for northern expansion in an orderly fashion. The city council adopted a grid plan in March 1817 which would have placed gridded streets running from river to river, cutting through the heart of the fledgling village. The village people were outraged. During the year that the grid war waged, an anonymous 62-page pamphlet was submitted to the city laying out an argument against the plan. Soon after, the council backed down and limited the grid to the east of what is now Sixth Avenue and north of what is presently Fourteenth Street.
During the early nineteenth century, as New York University grew on the east side of Washington Square, religious denominationscommissioned buildings with elaborate decorative schemes and the neighborhood soon became the site of art clubs, private picture galleries, learned societies, literary salons, and libraries. Fine hotels, shopping emporia, and theaters also proliferated. The character of the neighborhood changed markedly at the close of the century when German, Irish, and Italian immigrants found work in the breweries, warehouses, and coal and lumber yards near the Hudson River and in the Southeast corner of the neighborhood. Older residences were subdivided into cheap lodging hotels and multiple-family dwellings, or demolished for higher-density tenements.
A Greenwich Village street at night, 1955.The Village at the turn of the twentieth century was a quite picturesque and ethnically diverse area. By the start of World War I it was widely known as a bohemian enclave with secluded side streets, low rents, and a tolerance for radicalism and nonconformity. Attention became increasingly focused on artists and writers noted for their boldly innovative work. The bohemian atmosphere helped to make Greenwich Village an attraction for tourists. Entrepreneurs provided amusements ranging from evenings in artists' studios to bacchanalian costume balls. During Prohibition local speakeasies attracted uptown patrons. Decrepit rowhouses were remodeled into "artistic flats" for the well-to-do, and in 1926 luxury apartment towers appeared at the northern edge of Washington Square. The stock market crash of 1929 halted the momentum of new construction.
During the 1930s, galleries and collectors promoted the cause of contemporary art. Sculptor Gertrude Whitney Vanderbilt opened a museum dedicated to modern American art on West 8th Street, now the New York Studio School. The New School for Social Research, on West 12th Street since the late 1920s, inaugurated the "University in Exile" in 1934.
The Village had become the center for the "beat movement" by the 1950s, with galleries along 8th Street, coffee houses on MacDougal Street, and storefront theaters on Bleecker Street. "Happenings" and other unorthodox artistic, theatrical, and musical events were staged at the Judson Memorial Church. During the 1960s a homosexual community formed around Christopher Street; in 1969 a confrontation by the police culminated in a riot known as the Stonewall Rebellion, regarded as the beginning of the nationwide movement for gay and lesbian rights. Greenwich Village became a rallying place forantiwar protesters in the 1970s and for activity mobilized by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
Further Reading:
Banes, Sally. Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1993.
Beard, Rick, and Leslie Cohen, editors. Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture. New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1993.
Gold, Joyce. From Trout Stream to Bohemia: A Walking Guide to Greenwich Village History. New York, Old Warren Road Press, 1996.
Gross, Steve, et al. Old Greenwich Village: An Architectural Portrait. Washington, D.C., Preservation Press, 1993.
Kellerman, Regina M., editor. The Architecture of the Greenwich Village Waterfront: An Archival Research Study Undertaken by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. New York, New York University Press, 1989.
Kugelmass, Jack, et al. Masked Culture: The Greenwich Village Halloween. New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.
McDarrah, Fred W., and Gloria S. McDarrah. Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Selzer, Jack. Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-1931 (Wisconsin Project on American Writers). Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Ware, Caroline F. Greenwich Village 1920-1930: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-War Years. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994.
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