Talkin' Greenwich Village:
The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital
by david browne
hachette, 352 pages, $32.50
I moved to New York in 2011 and started hanging out in the Village, not realizing that it was, at that point, largely a fake neighborhood—NYU kids and the wealthy. Enacting the cliché in full, I would write in my journal in Washington Square and do looping walks around downtown, looking for bookstores and coffee shops, anywhere I could loiter. I discovered Caffe Reggio, one of the last holdouts of an older New York, on MacDougal Street (another cliché). My favorite movie that summer was Woody Allen’s nostalgic-for-nostalgia Midnight in Paris. During that time, I started dating Heather, a singer-songwriter who had grown up in the Village. She lived in a tiny apartment with her mom and slept in a little cubby room tucked near the kitchen.
By 2013, my sister had moved to New York as well, and I fell in with a group of neo-folkies and Village kids. There were two sisters who had likewise grown up in a one-bedroom Village apartment with their artist parents—whose relationship seemed to be perpetually on-again, off-again. Then there was Lewis, a half-American, half-Danish folk singer, who I later found out had also dated Heather.
Sometimes we’d gather at the apartment of Vincent Livelli, a ninety-seven-year-old man who had been part of William Gaddis’s literary crowd in the 1940s. Lewis had “discovered” Vincent ranting at a West Village bar called Canteen one night and started asking him questions. Vincent, who in 2020 would be described as the “last of the Village bohemians” by New York magazine, lived on Charles Street in an apartment frozen in time. For Vincent, the world of yesterday was vivid and near at hand: He lived in a bohemia of the mind. My sister and I, my journalist friend Alex, and Lewis and his model girlfriend would listen—sometimes rapt, sometimes bemused—to the loquacious but mostly deaf Vincent, as he told his stories about the lost world of New York in the forties. For us younger people, it was a miraculous portal to the authentic, pre-gentrified, pre-optimized past.
That was my Village phase. Eventually Lewis moved to Paris; my sister left New York; the artist sisters disappeared. I went to grad school. Lewis has since joined a successful band that maintains an early-’70s Leonard Cohen aesthetic and sound. I’ve found some success as a playwright, and my sister continues to record beautiful folk songs. I still go to Caffe Reggio, though I don’t spend much time in Washington Square. Today, the park feels like a physical manifestation of internet culture. Zoomers sit vaping, mesmerized by their phones; tourists set up selfie sticks; skaters dominate the concrete areas. Washington Square feels like a place to be disconnected, together.
Reading David Browne’s Talkin’ Greenwich Village helped me make sense of my own experience as a romantic young artist in New York who was driven not only by nostalgia, but by a deep need for artistic community. The book, essentially a constellation of biographies of key Village musicians (Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, Eric Andersen, Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell, Suze Rotolo, The Roches, National Lampoon, and Suzanne Vega) that also touches on the history of spaces (Kettle of Fish, Café Wha?, The Gaslight, Café Au Go Go, the Blues Project, Blue Note, The Bitter End, and the Village Vanguard), demonstrates that bohemians and bohemia are symbiotic: The place and the people co-create each other when the underlying conditions are right.
The Village had all the ingredients of a perfect urban ecosystem: charming old-world architecture, deep history, and a multiethnic character; affordable rent, a working-class Italian community that resisted rapid gentrification; ample public space (Washington Square Park), and a robust network of platforms for artistic expression. It resisted exploitation, mass demolition, and unchecked gentrification for much of the twentieth century. It had just enough charm and architectural dignity to be appealing, situated in Lower Manhattan, yet it remained a little too violent and working-class to draw the wealthiest mid-century elite.
The Village was rough and beautiful. It was jazz and folk, black and white, gay and straight. A pedestrian walking down MacDougal Street in the early 1960s would hear a cacophony of “strumming, coffee machines, and smatterings of applause” from coffeehouses and clubs. It was a place where a young Ornette Coleman could “dyna[mite] known boundaries,” and young folkies from out of town could enter a “more liberating world” just by knocking on the right door (often that of Village fixture, guitar teacher, and blues singer Dave Van Ronk).
Bohemia is the material substrate through which genius emerges. The unique conditions of the Village produced an environment in which genius could make sense of itself and wheat could be separated from chaff (or Dylan from wannabe Dylans, who became so numerous that they inspired the famous Bob Dylan sound-alike contest). The mid-century Village was a layered, organic, seething society: multiethnic, multigenerational, transclass, ideologically open and experimental. You needed the GI Bill; Robert Moses threatening to tear the neighborhood down; the influence of Parisian existentialism. You needed immigrants threatening gentrifiers; new highways bringing in out-of-towners; beatniks, gays, union organizers, slumlords, and dope dealers. You needed cheap dives and esoteric bookstores. You needed beautiful, dignified architecture to offset the squalor.
And you needed what you always need—the luck of having the right people at the right time. As Browne’s history of the Village suggests, it doesn’t take that many hustlers to turn a neighborhood into a cultural magnet if the base conditions are there. The Village music scene in the late 1950s and 1960s was the creation of a relatively small network, maybe a few hundred entrepreneurs and artists.
Creative scenes are competitive and mimetic. Rivals are centrifugal engines that drive scenes faster and higher. When artists—in this case, musicians—are in close proximity, they push each other, and in turn push and provoke and excite their audience and fans. Something like this happened in Renaissance Florence, where each workshop dared the others to make something sublime. Proximity matters. Someone’s playing at the venue down the street.
For every Bob or Joni, there were thousands who didn’t make it, but who served them drinks, who gave them an idea, a hook, a chord progression, a phrase—who provoked them and challenged them. For every Blue Note or Vanguard, there were venues that failed, got robbed, hired the wrong people, or didn’t maintain their books. You run into your creative rival at the bar, which in the mid-1960s was Kettle of Fish (where Dylan held court). You’re tired of being compared to so-and-so; you want to distinguish yourself. You go home and you write a new song.
These social mechanics—wherein creative rivalries oscillate between friendly and zero-sum—are universal, and I know them well. I only learned about them in practice when I encountered the Dimes Square scene during the pandemic. The pandemic created just enough squalor and gloom, and lowered rents just enough, for just long enough, for that latest bohemia to emerge. The downtown of the 2020s is centered on readings, screenings, and plays; but the sense of proximity, constant myth-making, and artistic competition that I experienced, and still experience, would have been familiar to the downtown bohemian of 1961.
These dynamics, however, were exactly what the Village, as I knew it ten years ago, completely lacked: the competitive dynamics of a living scene, the tense, exciting proximity of rivals. My own Village hangouts a decade ago were enabled only because we had access to someone’s parents’ small, rent-controlled apartment, and because Vincent had been living in his bohemian palace since the 1960s. No one was making it on his own. Real creative pressure was absent.
None of us young people could have afforded a place of our own in the Village, nor was there a substantial creative life in the neighborhood. We were essentially living in a museum—self-consciously, nostalgically, hopefully. Even the musicians in our group, like Lewis, didn’t perform in Village bars—that would have felt almost corny.
Yet even now, and even in parts of New York, there are unique advantages on the margins. So much of the inventiveness of the mid-century Village was driven by industrious proprietors who got started with a loan. And, though the complexity and risk of starting a small venue now in New York City is deplorable, I’ve found that cheap technologies like smart bulbs and Bluetooth speakers can turn any room into a theater. Social media has made marketing cheap and easy.
My own bohemian theater company resides in an industrial building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, next to a sewage plant and cement factory. Though Greenpoint is partly gentrified now, the Polish community owns enough real estate to maintain the soul of the neighborhood, and there are enough post-industrial buildings that artists can afford to rent studios. I hope that in sixty years I will, like Vincent, have young friends to tell my story to.
Matthew Gasda is a playwright and director in New York City.
Image by Rowland Scherman, public domain. Image cropped.