The village 400 years of beats and bohemians, radicals and rogues : a history of Greenwich Village

HAIL, hail, the gang's all here: a galaxy of scoundrels, artists and geniuses commingle in John Strausbaugh's ambitious 600-plus-page history of Greenwich Village. Strausbaugh - who presided over this newspaper's "Weekend Explorer" series on New York City and wrote what felt like the entirety of The New York Press in its 1990s heyday - turns a collection of stories and profiles into something less like a textbook than a party spinning happily out of control. Pushing off in 1640, Strausbaugh marshals archives, the Village's artistic output and interviews with members of several key scenes - including the jazz and folk explosions - to tell the story of the area's four centuries as a counterculture mecca. He calls the neighborhood "a culture engine - a zone that attracts and nurtures creative people, radicals, visionaries, misfits, life adventurers." He makes a convincing and frequently delightful case. New Yorkers fleeing an 1822 yellow fever epidemic settled what was then the countryside, and the region became a haven for cultural renegades, as well as freed slaves (the area south and west of Washington Square Park in the 1800s was nicknamed Little Africa). In Strausbaugh's telling, the Village's "golden age" was the 1910s, thanks to a who's who of rebels like Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger and Eugene O'Neill. After World War II, he says, the Village enjoyed a renaissance, when it "served again as a tiny speck of American real estate where nonconformists, individualists, bohemians, progressives, avant-gardists, experimenters, gays and lesbians could gather and feel at home." Innovation and debauchery ascended anew. From the Civil War down to World War I, Strausbaugh reports, the Village was "one giant red-light district." Hard-working, tea-drinking Willa Cather and library-loving Marianne Moore appear to have been just about the only Village figures who kept themselves in check. At the other extreme were those like Edmund Wilson, who, after reportedly being deflowered and left brokenhearted by the sexually adventurous Edna St. Vincent Millay, "astonished his contemporaries with the volume and variety of his conquests - actresses, poets, chorines, working girls, socialites." Sixty years later, the Village witnessed "quick sex in the dark, stinking, rubble-strewn and rat-infested sheds" on the otherwise abandoned waterfront. Strausbaugh covers familiar touchstones like the hangout Pfaff's, where Walt Whitman waited for reviews that never came, and the Stonewall Inn, where the modern gay rights movement was born. He betrays a fondness for colorful characters like the pugnacious 19th-century Irish writer Fitz- James O'Brien, whose nickname was "Fist-Gammon O'Bouncer," and the notoriously laissez-faire 1920s mayor Jimmy Walker, who took almost 150 vacation days in his first two years in office. And he has a great ear. Telling the story of Off Off Broadway's creation, Strausbaugh mentions work like "Awful People Are Coming Over So We Must Be Pretending to Be Hard at Work and Hope They Will Go Away." He cites the folk musician Dave Van Ronk on what Van Ronk expected to see when he arrived in the Village: "bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters and nymphomaniacs whose ideology was slightly to the left of 'whoopee!'" He also recounts John Waters's anecdote of arriving at Fran Lebowitz's house one night after being bloodied by a mugger and telling her, "I murdered five people and came to involve you." Strausbaugh does go rather heavy on the composer David Amram, quoting him in more than a dozen places, about half of which feel gratuitous. But it's hard to complain about his similar indulgence of the legendarily underappreciated novelist Dawn Powell. Strausbaugh should win some sort of award just for unearthing her eight-line decimation of Thomas Wolfe's 800-page novel "Of Time and the River": Oh Boston girls how about it Oh Jewish girls, what say Oh America I love you Oh geography, hooray Ah youth, ah me, ah beauty Ah sensitive, arty boy Ah busts and thighs and bellies Ah nookey there - ahoy! Strausbaugh makes a good case for revisiting not only Powell but also many other neglected writers, including Rosalyn Drexler, the 1950s wrestler-turned-novelist, and Ada Clare, the actress and author who 100 years earlier had trumpeted her scandalous single motherhood with calling cards that read, "Miss Ada Clare and Son." Then there are his origin stories. Strausbaugh offers Village roots for flash mobs, cabaret laws, Occupy Wall Streetlike park protests and New York University's lack of popularity with locals (its land grabs have been controversial since at least 1832). Rather less convincingly, he entertains the theory that costumed revelers migrating from the Waverly Theater's midnight showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" straight to CBGB begat punk fashion. (This story begs for photographic proof - perhaps Debbie Harry in Magenta's maid uniform.) In his introduction, Strausbaugh cautions against "judging the extremists too harshly," but he is not opposed to doing a bit of harsh judging himself. N.Y.U.'s reconstruction of the Poe House, he says, "looks like a skin graft that didn't take." On Maxwell Bodenheim: "Reading his facile, gaudy verses now, it's easy to think that it was the brute force of his sociopathic presence, rather than the poetry, that convinced the best poets in the Village at the time that he was one of them, potentially even the best of them." He calls Allen Ginsberg "sweet, hapless." Strausbaugh even dares suggest that Bob Dylan was not the second coming of Christ, but actually a climber "married to his own single-minded drive and focus." There are traces of the indignation Strausbaugh showed in 2008 as the author of "Sissy Nation: How America Became a Culture of Wimps and Stoopits." The "counterculture of the 1960s would be dumbed down for mass consumption in the 1970s," he writes, "as polyester bell-bottoms, 'soft rock' and Plato's Retreat." He makes it clear that he considers the Village long past its culture-engine days, and his narrative ends rather abruptly with the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic. (A short but moving epilogue takes the neighborhood into the present day, with its influx of "young mothers pushing strollers the size of Volkswagens.") But over all Strausbaugh maintains a nigh-on impeccable balance between affection and skepticism, especially in his sardonic accounts of present-day Village scenes like an event commemorating the horrific 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory disaster, at which "a greeter wryly pointed out the four fire exits." How rare and refreshing it is to find a chronicler who can remain dry-eyed and funny while describing the Village's transformation from laboratory for change to "Sex and the City" tour stop. Ada Calhoun, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is writing a book about the history of St. Marks Place.

*Starred Review* Cultural journalist Strausbaugh (Sissy Nation, 2008), a man of rattling opinions, makes all the legends about Greenwich Village and its bohemians new and vital in his sizzling and capacious history, by virtue of his archaeologically deep and patient research, vigorous style, and keen admiration for those who made the Village a world-altering cultural engine. He has retrieved stories of the forgotten and the famous, from the African Americans who farmed the bucolic land in the 1600s to such luminaries as Margaret Sanger, Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Baldwin, Jackson Pollock, and Bob Dylan. Strausbaugh cleverly anchors each phase in his ever-branching chronicle to the hot spot of the time, from Pfaff's, in Walt Whitman's era, to the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas downed his last whiskey; the Cedar Street Tavern, hangout of the abstract expressionists; and the writers' bar, the Lion's Head, where Norman Mailer held court. Strausbaugh goes into astounding detail in his coverage of the Village's radical politics and quest for sexual freedom, paying particular attention to its thriving homosexual community. Though now, as Strausbaugh duly records, the Village is a sanitized bastion of the wealthy, in its golden days, its diverse artists collided and fused like subatomic particles in an accelerator, unleashing an explosion of creativity that is still sending out shock waves.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

In this sprawling, crowded, biography on one of New York City's more alluring and storied neighborhoods, former New York Times commentator Strausbaugh traces the history of Greenwich Village from its beginning as bucolic countryside to its current incarnation as both tourist destination and astringent residence for the elite. In between, Strausbaugh introduces a dizzying array of historical figures and events so salacious the book reads more like one long gossip column full of sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, art, music, the mob, and more. None of this is a bad thing; for long stretches, the pages practically turn themselves. Along the way, readers are fed fascinating little tidbits and images: Washington Square Park as a boggy mass grave site for the city's paupers and Yellow fever victims, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her sister Norma teaching themselves to swear while darning socks, a drunk Jackson Pollock's frequent violent outbursts at the Cedar Street Tavern, and much, much more. No citation will do the book justice; it deserves to be read while walking below 14th Street silently mourning the loss of a neighborhood that has given so much by way of art and culture. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.