Greenwich Village: The Outsiders' Map

If you walk Greenwich Village expecting to see the bohemian neighborhood, you will find the bohemian neighborhood, and you will miss what it actually was. The Village's reputation is romantic. The reputation is also a kind of cover. What the streets between Washington Square and the Hudson River actually produced, in the century and a half from roughly the 1850s to the 1990s, were the people and institutions that the rest of America eventually treated as ordinary. Each cohort got dismissed as costume during its decade and became canon the next. The romance is real. The romance is also the surface of something more consequential underneath.

The pattern starts in the 1850s. Walt Whitman drank at Pfaff's, a beer cellar on Broadway between 1859 and 1862, after the first three editions of Leaves of Grass had already appeared. The crowd at Pfaff's was the first self-conscious American bohemia, the historian Christine Stansell has argued, modeled on the Paris cafe scenes that some of them had visited. The word "bohemian" was new in English at the time. The Pfaff's crowd took the word and the idea and the practice (sit in a cellar, talk all night, do not be useful) and grafted it onto a Manhattan that was inventing the publishing and theatrical industries a few blocks east. Whitman watched. Most of his Pfaff's poems went unpublished in his lifetime.

The pattern was already legible. The Village let people be visible in a way the wider city did not. Visibility had a cost (the surrounding city wrote you off as costume) and a benefit (a critical mass of similarly written-off people could find each other and, eventually, write something the wider city wanted to read). Pfaff's closed during the Civil War. The pattern persisted.

The middle century

By the 1920s, Caroline Ware's Columbia sociological study (Greenwich Village, 1920–1930, Houghton Mifflin, 1935) was calling the neighborhood "America's bohemia," with an academic's care and a participant's nostalgia. The streets had filled with painters, anarchists, free-love advocates, suffragists, and the first wave of Italian American immigrants whose tenements bordered the literary scene from Bleecker south. The Provincetown Players, who had moved from Cape Cod to MacDougal Street, premiered Eugene O'Neill's early plays in a converted bottling plant. Edna St. Vincent Millay rented a room on Bedford Street that the neighborhood still calls the narrowest house in the city, though it was actually not built for her. The 1920s Village was the place where, if you were a young woman who wanted to write or paint and a Bostonian or a Midwesterner had told you that was not a permitted career, you went.

The Beats picked up the thread in the late 1940s. The San Remo Cafe at 93 MacDougal and the Kettle of Fish at 59 Christopher were the canonical Beat-era bars. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and a rotating cast of younger writers drank, argued, fell in love, and sometimes wrote in those rooms across the early 1950s. The Beats were, again, dismissed as costume during their decade. Howl was on trial for obscenity in 1957. On the Road came out the same year. By 1965 the writing that had been a San Remo subculture was being read on every American campus. The coalition the Beats had begun to articulate (queer, Black, immigrant, working-class, anti-war, refusing the suburban contract) was exactly the coalition that would fill Christopher Park four years later.

The Folk Revival ran in parallel. Dylan arrived at Cafe Wha at 115 MacDougal on January 24, 1961, his first day in New York. He played the early-evening hootenanny set, a few rooms down from where Ginsberg had drunk through the 1950s. The Bitter End on Bleecker opened that same year and hosted the hootenanny sessions that became, within a few seasons, the commercial breakthrough of folk music into the mainstream. Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and dozens more passed through those rooms. The political content of folk in the early 1960s (civil rights, anti-war, labor) was the same political content the Beats had been working on a decade earlier, set to a different musical idiom and aimed at a wider audience.

The corner that produced an institution

The pattern reached its sharpest form on the night of June 28, 1969, at 51 to 53 Christopher Street. The Stonewall Inn had reopened as a Mafia-run gay club in 1967, two years after a fire destroyed its previous incarnation. It was raided regularly. The June 28 raid was a routine one. What was not routine was that this time the patrons fought back.

The historian David Carter's Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (St. Martin's Griffin, 2004) remains the academic baseline for what happened that night and the six nights that followed. Carter is careful about what is and is not knowable. He documents the presence of Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman who was a fixture of the Village street scene, on the night of the uprising. He also documents that Johnson herself, in a 1987 interview with Eric Marcus, said she arrived at the bar around 2 a.m., after the uprising had begun. The often-repeated story that Johnson threw the shot glass that started the riot is, in Carter's careful 2019 Gay City News follow-up essay, not assignable to her or to anyone else. "None of these three [Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Stormé DeLarverie] actually started the uprising," Carter wrote. The uprising started before any one named figure can be securely placed at its center, and the historical record has the kind of irreducible fog that real events tend to acquire when they are made by crowds.

What the uprising produced is much easier to trace. The Gay Liberation Front was founded weeks later. The first Christopher Street Liberation Day march followed on June 28, 1970, the model for every modern Pride march. Stormé DeLarverie spent decades patrolling the Village's streets as an informal protector of queer women. Marsha P. Johnson co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Sylvia Rivera, advocated for incarcerated and unhoused trans New Yorkers, and was found dead in the Hudson River in 1992 under circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. The Stonewall National Monument was designated by President Obama on June 24, 2016, the first United States National Monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights. The corner where it sits is the corner where the Village's century-and-a-half pattern of producing the next century's mainstream condensed into a single weekend.

What the pattern means

Walk Christopher Street toward the Hudson and you reach the White Horse Tavern at the corner of Hudson and 11th. Dylan Thomas drank his last 18 whiskies here on the night of November 3, 1953, returned to the Chelsea Hotel, and died at St. Vincent's Hospital a few days later. The White Horse went on. James Baldwin drank there. Norman Mailer drank there. Pete Hamill, Bob Dylan, Hunter Thompson, Jim Morrison: each at one point sat at the bar that is still serving the year you read this. The pattern that started at Pfaff's is still alive at the White Horse. The Village is the place where the cohort that the wider city has not yet accepted comes to be visible to each other, and where the writing and the politics and the bars and the songs and the relationships that come out of that visibility eventually become the things the wider city, two decades later, takes for granted.

The romance of the Village is real. The mechanism is the romance plus the visibility plus the cost. Take the walk slowly. The streets are full of plaques.