The night the new kid showed up, David Amram thought he’d already met his share of Greenwich Village characters and eccentrics. Born in Pennsylvania, a trumpet player who’d switched to the more mellifluous French horn, Amram had performed in army bands before moving to Manhattan in 1955. There, the curious and loquacious musician found a neighborhood equally taken with Beat poets and writers. By the first month of 1957, he’d left his apartment on the Lower East Side and moved into a fifth-floor walkup on Christopher Street, which put him squarely in the West Village and the new center of the action downtown.

That year, twenty-seven million people owned homes across the country—more than twice as many as a decade before, and many in newly created suburbs. For them, the so-called postwar American Dream was a fantasy come true. But Amram, along with a mounting number of musicians who began migrating to New York City, had a different type of dream in mind. Following on the heels of writers and painters, they longed for a world where they could live idiosyncratic, artistic lives and reject the mounting conformity around them. And nothing embodied that appeal more than Greenwich Village.

Since the beginning of the century, jazz had been among the soundtracks of the area that extended from the Hudson River to Broadway (or close to it) going west to east, and from Fourteenth Street to Houston Street north to south. Many of those Village bars and nightspots were gone or sported new names, but as Amram learned as he began poking his head into any club or hole-in-the-wall that welcomed the music, the options again seemed plentiful. At 15 Barrow Street, just off Sixth Avenue, a narrow staircase took him down into Cafe Bohemia, a former strip club about the size of a suburban rec room. As legend had it, Charlie Parker had run up a thirty-dollar tab at the bar and offered to play there to work off his debt. He didn’t show, but a sign announcing his appearance led other bop players to show up. Before long, Cafe Bohemia, around the bend from the triangle-shaped Sheridan Square, was reborn as a jazz club, the likes of Charles Mingus and Miles Davis occupying its small, slightly elevated stage.

As Amram recalled, the regulars were “a total spectrum of American society—street people, college professors, weirdos.” Still, he knew he’d found something of a home when, walking past the club another night, he came upon John Coltrane sitting on the sidewalk, wolfing down a piece of berry pie. Seeing the French horn tucked under Amram’s arm, Coltrane launched into a spellbinding riff on black holes in the universe, ancient Egypt, and the pyramids. Amram also met the formidable Mingus, a small mountain of a man known both for his volcanic bass playing and equally explosive personality. Sitting in with him one evening, Amram felt a sharp jab to his ribs. “Listen to the bass, motherfucker!” Mingus barked. Another night, Amram heard, “No more than two choruses, motherfucker!” After Mingus had been needling him far too much another evening, Amram summoned up the courage to confront him: “You can’t treat me like this. Man, I’ll see you outside!” Mingus was so taken aback that he put his arm around Amram and bought him a drink. “If I had said, ‘I love playing with you,’ he would have hit me in the mouth,” Amram said. “He was much more comfortable being in that [confrontational] kind of situation.”

Those were just a few of the lessons Amram learned at the Cafe Bohemia and its environs. The Village was, in his view, “a gigantic 12-step program of people considered total losers and failures and disgraces because they were pursuing something unrealistic and more or less deemed worthless by society. But they were doing it with a vengeance.”

Cafe Bohemia itself barely held more than fifty customers, but as Mingus told Amram, every night for him was akin to playing Carnegie Hall. “Man, if everyone’s stoned or looking to score dope or wants to borrow money from you,” Mingus told him, “just find one person who’s listening and then play for them all night.” To Amram, such encounters made clear how the Village performance spaces differed from the ritzier jazz spots uptown: a freedom to make mistakes, to learn and stretch out without fear of losing an audience or botching a possible record deal. He also felt that the impermanence of Village jazz—the way it was never the same twice and had its own spirit and values—held a magical allure for audiences and musicians alike.

The first month of 1957, Amram, with his French horn and a small combo, started an eleven-week residency at the Five Spot, the increasingly fashionable jazz bar on the eastern border of Greenwich Village, just off Third Avenue in Cooper Square. The club had once been the Bowery Cafe, the last stop of the night for winos and the working class. In 1946, after they’d returned home from serving in World War II, brothers Joe and Iggy Termini had inherited the space from their father, renaming it the No. 5 bar after its address, 5 Cooper Square. Unexpectedly, urban planning, normally never a friend to music venues in Manhattan, came to the bar’s rescue. When the city began tearing down the Third Avenue overhead El train in the summer of 1955, the neighborhood grew airier, sunnier, and more appealing to those who wouldn’t normally venture into it. As the Daily News described it, “Gone are the shadows that covered the dingy flats tracing some of their soot to the steam locomotives that ran above the street.”

Eager to remake the place, the Terminis hired a jazz quartet that had caught the attention of painter Herman Cherry, who lived across the street and who began bringing in his artist friends. The renamed Five Spot wasn’t as posh as uptown jazz joints or Harlem’s Cotton Club: sawdust covered the floors, and musicians attempting to jam on its stage could smell urine from the restrooms on the other side of the wall. Its capacity was limited to 75 people. But the beer was 75 cents a bottle, the chicken in a basket only $1.75, and the Terminis were open to the progressive jazz starting to bust out around them. Cherry adorned the walls with his art and flyers and with posters for jazz shows around town, and it wasn’t long before anyone who wedged into the Five Spot could spy Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, or Willem de Kooning at one of its little wooden tables. Pianist Cecil Taylor became the first jazz name to play there; Thelonious Monk would be booked later in the summer.

Even in that context of artistic dissidents, Amram didn’t fully know what to make of the six-foot-two twenty-year-old who approached him one night. Although he still bore hints of baby fat on his face, Dave Van Ronk already had the rumpled magnetism of a hardened sailor, down to his grainy voice and the strands of dark hair that would fall over his face. During a break, Van Ronk approached Amram: “French horn—I don’t hear that much in jazz,” he said. Amram then listened as the kid launched into a discourse on German composer Richard Wagner’s complicated politics, followed by an analysis of Aleksandr Kerensky, the socialist revolutionary who’d been cast aside and denigrated after the Bolshevik revolution. “I don’t think he got credit for his ideals,” Amram agreed, but Van Ronk continued. “His ideals are what sank him!” When Van Ronk went on at length about Leon Trotsky, Amram received a crash course on the Russian Revolution.

Amram didn’t know it at the time, but as with so many musicians who gravitated to the area, Van Ronk had a troubled backstory and a yearning to leave it all behind. His parents, Charles Van Ronk and Grace Alice Ritz, had broken up not long after the birth of their son David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk in June 1936. Van Ronk would never meet his birth father and never expressed any interest in doing so. He and his mother wound up in Richmond Hill, Queens, a neighborhood of, he would say, “working stiffs” and “paralyzing boredom.” At fifteen he was essentially kicked out of school by a principal who called him “a filthy ineducable little beast,” a phrase he would remember for decades. A stab at what he called “continuing education” didn’t last too long. Soon after, he was arrested for juvenile delinquency and petit larceny.

Van Ronk’s mother had pushed him into piano lessons, which gave way to ukulele. Van Ronk first heard “St. James Infirmary,” already recorded by Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw, Jimmie Rodgers, and Cab Calloway, while listening to a jazz band in the early fifties, and it became one of the earliest, if not the first, blues songs he would learn on the ukulele. Soon Van Ronk started singing with a local vocal group. He’d been introduced to jazz by way of radio and the piano-playing grandmother who helped raise him. He’d also learned about blues thanks to economics: during a visit to Chelsea’s renowned Jazz Record Center in search of a disc by Armstrong’s Hot Five, he’d instead found a less expensive record by Blind Lemon Jefferson. “If the Hot Five cost a dollar and a half and the Blind Lemon Jefferson cost 35 cents,” he recalled in his posthumously published memoir, “if you’re a 14-year-old kid, what are you going to do?” In grade school he learned to play guitar, taking lessons from a local jazz guitar player and worshipping Charlie Christian, the Black swing and jazz guitarist. Van Ronk later told his friend Christine Lavin that he would tape sheet music to the ceiling of his bedroom and practice while lying in bed.

Van Ronk also learned tenor banjo, considered a more acceptable instrument for jazz at the time, and became enamored of trad jazz, which harked back to the genre’s New Orleans roots in the early twentieth century. For a moment he imagined he had a career playing that music and joined a few combos in and around the city while working at a printing company in downtown Manhattan; he also toiled as a messenger for the Commercial Bank and Trust. Another rising genre at the time held little appeal. “God, I hated folk music when I was a kid,” he said onstage later in life. “I wanted to play jazz in the worst way. And I did.” But jazz gigs didn’t translate at the time to earning a decent living, and he would long joke that he went into playing jazz weighing 240 pounds and was down to 170 by the time he gave up on it as his main focus.

Van Ronk would later place his first visit to the Village at around 1951. The area wasn’t as romantic as he’d envisioned: exiting the train, he was surprised, he wrote, to see that it looked “just like fucking Brooklyn,” all apartment buildings and narrow streets. He still needed income, and the merchant marine, the organization of civilian seamen that helped transport goods by sea in and out of the States (and would serve as a second line of defense in wartime), became a solution. On January 22, 1957, just before the start of Amram’s Five Spot shows, Van Ronk had his fingerprints registered with the merchant marine. Before he shipped out, he yearned to hear jazz and dropped by the Five Spot. As he would later write, he knew the venue well; he lived in an apartment across the street with friends, and they would often listen to musicians warm up in the afternoon and snap up the players’ leftover joints in the phone booth inside.

That night he introduced himself, Van Ronk told Amram he remained invested in jazz but that he’d become discouraged by the amount of technique involved in mastering it. Despite his misgivings about folk, he’d begun to realize it would be comparatively easy to master. Thanks to the Anthology of American Folk Music, an assortment of reissued 78s by collector Harry Smith released in 1952, Van Ronk had heard recordings by Dock Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt, and other mysterious denizens of a world of American music largely unknown to him and his friends. The music was raw and rambunctious, eerie and spooky, and it couldn’t help but pull him in.

Van Ronk realized that acoustic music like folk wasn’t considered as sophisticated as jazz. “You may not like my music,” he told Amram. Jazz had its place, he continued, but folk was “different.” Both the songs and stories in folk, and the music’s place in American history, spoke to him. It may have also better suited his range. His grandmother sang Irish ballads with a voice so loud that, he later wrote, she “drove the neighbors nuts.” Van Ronk’s delivery, a scratchy and primal bark that also had a sweet, lilting side to it, was more at home in folk than in jazz.

Amram came away from the encounter thinking of Van Ronk as “a great guru philosopher, crazy and wonderful.” But Van Ronk wouldn’t be able to take in much more of Amram’s residency. On March 31, the day after Amram’s last show, Van Ronk would be officially endorsed for service as a merchant mariner, toiling as a seaman, mess-hall worker, and “wiper,” a worker who cleaned the components of a ship engine; his first tour of duty was scheduled to start April 11. By the time he returned in mid-summer, the Village would be an even more welcoming place for him, his friends, and their music. A new era was on their horizon, and everything from the number of musicians on the scene to the authorities and landlords keeping an eye on it all would soon ramp up.

Music and Greenwich Village had been inseparable for decades, but as Max Gordon sensed early on, the relationship wasn’t always congenial or supportive. Gordon wasn’t the first entrepreneur to open a club in the Village, but he was among the earliest to find himself face-to-face with its hurdles. An elfin-looking man born in Lithuania but raised in Portland, Oregon, Gordon had opened the first incarnation of what he called the Village Vanguard on Charles Street in early 1934. But police hassles, local laws, and the fact that the space contained only one restroom soon drove him to find a new home for his business. Looking elsewhere, he came across an oddly shaped room not far away: a basement with a wide bandstand area that narrowed as it moved toward the bar in the back.

True to its neighborhood and its reputation for attracting political and cultural iconoclasts, the space had its own idiosyncratic origin story. To serve the city’s west side, a new subway line had been constructed in the 1920s. Because it would snake through the Village, a slew of buildings were torn down or sliced in half to make room for tunnels and stations. As a result, one of those structures, at 178 Seventh Avenue South, now resembled a pie cutter; Gordon soon learned why its previous incarnation—a speakeasy, the name for burrowed-away joints and spaces illegally selling alcohol—had been called the Golden Triangle. Retaining the Village Vanguard name, he rented the space—with a cash infusion from someone he later called a “shylock who liked the idea of a club because he thought he could pick up women there”—and moved whatever was inside the first space to the new one. As he was preparing for its grand opening on February 22, 1935, a cop walked in, saw that Gordon was using beer cases for seats, and asked, ominously, if he was selling alcohol, which required a liquor license. “Let me sell the beer,” Gordon replied. “Then I’ll have the money to pay for a license.” He was off the hook, at least for a while.

Since its inception, Greenwich Village had functioned as both sanctuary and battleground. Galleries, small presses, and enough writers with enough works to line the shelves of a small library were drawn to its narrow, crooked, often confusing streets and ambience. At various points, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, and Henry James had called the Village their home; Herman Melville worked at the US Customs Office there. Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane all bunked at one time or another at the so-called House of Genius on Washington Square South. Even the geography of the area played into that image: as historian and onetime Village Voice editor-in-chief Ross Wetzsteon would later write, the sheer bewildering layout of the Village—especially the new grid laid out in 1811 that overlapped with the meandering streets of the Village—had “metaphoric resonance as well: rejecting orderliness, refusing conformity, repelling the grid.”

The ethnic groups and factions that came in and out of the area had periods of cooperation and intermingling. They could also clash, as when the Lenape indigenous people who had called it home eventually battled with Dutch settlers in the middle of the seventeenth century. In time, the Village’s developing music community would prove to be equally turbulent, if not as violent. Although it would be difficult to determine the first or earliest venues in Greenwich Village, music clubs began appearing in the early twentieth century. In 1919, weeks after the US Senate overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, police raided the Greenwich Village Inn, a speakeasy on Sheridan Square. The spot was managed by Bernard “Barney” Gallant, a restaurateur and member of the New York Liberal Club, a prominent debate and discussion group. Gallant became a local hero when six staff members at the inn were arrested for selling hard liquor to undercover police; to spare his staff, Gallant himself spent several weeks in the Tombs, the city’s notorious jail.

That notoriety extended to the Greenwich Village Inn Orchestra, such a sensation that an uptown radio station ran wires down to the club to broadcast its melodies on the air. Thomas Edison’s phonograph company soon issued Greenwich Village Inn Orchestra recordings, such as the peppy foxtrots “Somebody’s Crazy About You” and “Keep on Dancing.” Meanwhile, customers at nearby bistros might have heard the district satirized in song by Bobby (or Robert) Edwards, the so-called “Bard of Bohemia” who’d graduated from Harvard and moved to the Village in 1904. In his lengthy ballad “The Greenwich Village Epic,” he eagerly skewered the area as “the field for culture’s tillage / There they have artistic ravings / Tea and other awful cravings.”

In the middle of Prohibition, the cocktail of the Jazz Age, speakeasies, illegal alcohol, public dancing, and white and Black crowds commingled in bars and clubs was too much for the wealthier and more politically connected part of New York eager to control that type of conduct. When it was first put into effect on January 1, 1927, Local Law 12, otherwise known as the “Cabaret Law,” was a reaction to illegal bars and sought to put constraints on what it called a “public dance hall” or a “cabaret.” The latter was defined as “any room, place, or space within the city where any musical entertainment, singing, dancing, etc., is permitted as part of the restaurant business or the business of selling food or drink.” To obtain a cabaret license, which cost $50 a year, owners had to pass through a gauntlet of inspections from the building, licensing, and health departments, and businesses would have to close between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m. (Decades later, it would be alleged that the interracial dancing in clubs, especially in Harlem, may have also given rise to the law.) When the law was amended in 1931, another layer of bureaucracy was included: the issuing of licenses was transferred to the police commissioner, who was also tasked with inspecting each venue.

Even before he allowed his first customers into the Village Vanguard, Gordon learned how the new law worked. After he’d graduated from Portland’s Reed College in 1924, Gordon moved to New York to attend Columbia Law School but was stranded in the city without a job after he decided not to pursue a law career. Encouraged by a friend, he borrowed some money and opened a coffeehouse, the Village Fair, on Sullivan Street, in 1932. There he hosted poets and writers and learned firsthand about the tricky and sticky relationship between the neighborhood and the police, even during the waning days of Prohibition. Since clubs weren’t allowed to sell booze, Gordon, as he later wrote, would always see “a guy in a doorway hanging outside Village joints” who could supply a bottle of some libation, which could then be taken inside. Gordon ended up under arrest after an undercover cop convinced a waitress to buy some alcohol, then bring his bottle of booze to him while he was inside the Village Fair. The charges against Gordon were eventually dismissed, but it was too late to salvage his business.

As a columnist of the time put it, Gordon’s new Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue South lay “at the foot of a gloomy flight of stairs,” but the murk lifted once customers looked around. Its light-blue walls were festooned with murals depicting horses playing a piano and women floating through space, and the entertainment Gordon served up was equally lively. Early on, poets, including Harry Kemp and Maxwell Bodenheim, dominated the lineups. By 1937, Walter Winchell, the syndicated columnist, snarkily commented that Saturday nights at the Vanguard were filled with “‘bohemians’ from Brooklyn and the Bronx squinting through the soupy smoke.”

Reflecting the Village’s nonconformist inclinations, the Vanguard also became headquarters for some of the city’s most insubordinate art. At the end of the thirties, the Revuers, a comedy posse that included Judy Holliday and Adolph Green, began working up satirical songs and skits. As with its parody of the upscale Cue magazine and its listings, the sketches often took aim at the uptown crowd. Also at the Vanguard, a group that called itself the Calypso Singers mocked Wendell Willkie, the presidential candidate who’d switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican (he paid “an income tax that’s not too alarming,” they sang). Meanwhile, their version of “Netty Netty,” a naughty slice of calypso meets swing, included bedroom-frolic lyrics that, Winchell wrote, “will make you blush.”

Folk music also settled into the Vanguard, which booked Lead Belly, the stately, white-haired folk and blues singer who had served time in prison and was discovered by folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan during a visit to one of those prisons. During World War II, soldiers on leave were spotted at the club listening intently to Richard Dyer-Bennet, a British-born, California-raised singer and guitarist who performed in a suit and bow tie. His pristine, starchy style treated folk as if it were classical music, but the traditional songs he’d collected, ones about returning soldiers and dead knights, made him one of the Vanguard’s regular bookings. The South Carolina–born Josh White was a quadruple threat as a singer, guitarist, actor, and occasional bandleader. Crashing through racial barriers, White became a genuine crossover star of his time, starring on Broadway, selling a million copies of “One Meatball,” and appearing occasionally at the Vanguard (where he would appear on the same bill as Lead Belly).

In the audience at one of White’s shows in 1949 was Elliott Adnopoz, a Brooklyn kid who would eventually be better known as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. As Elliott and his friend Peter LaFarge, a cowboy singer and balladeer, sat a few rows back from the stage, LaFarge chuckled at something White said. White recognized the voice and invited them both backstage, where Elliott caught sight of a bottle of Cutty Sark whiskey and “three beautiful blonde women,” he recalled. “Never seen anything like it. And he played beautifully.” The Vanguard was so crowded for White’s sets that Gordon once had to haul out beer cases for added seating. In 1951 Harry Belafonte made his public transition from jazz to folksinger, singing work songs at the Vanguard.

Just a few years after it opened, the Vanguard had plucky company. A short walk down Seventh Avenue South and then east on Sheridan Square, Cafe Society was the brainchild of Barney Josephson, a shoe salesman of Latvian descent then living in Trenton, New Jersey. After a trip into the city, Josephson became obsessed with the idea of opening a club there and found his own basement, this one at Two Sheridan Square. At one time a speakeasy, the space had been vacant for a number of years. Playing off the Depression era in which the country was mired in the late thirties, Josephson gave his club both an ironic name and setting. To gently satirize doormen at upscale apartment buildings, club greeters wore gloves with the fingertips torn off, and the walls were decorated with pointed drawings of the obscenely wealthy (like an old, balding rich man leering at a young blonde, his arm around her). Behind the bar was a mural of animals, including an elephant nursing a hangover with an ice pack on its head. Large pillars obscured some of the views, particularly from the back, but Cafe Society still felt, in the words of the club’s motto, like “The Wrong Place for the Right People.”

Josephson made it clear who the right people were. As a young man, he’d picketed a Jim Crow theater in New Jersey and seen Duke Ellington play the Cotton Club. As one report at the time described it, he wanted a home for “reputable Negro artists,” and Cafe Society would be that place—less stuffy and more racially integrated than the fancier joints. Josephson also insisted that Black entertainers wear suits and banned references to “crap shooting” and other pastimes. The move struck some as smoothing down Black culture, but to Josephson, changes like those would dignify the performers even more.

When Cafe Society opened in January 1939, Josephson had a liquor license but not a cabaret one, and construction was so rushed that he was forced to resort to a nearby hot-dog stand to feed customers. But from the start, the club was a sensation. Producer and record scout John Hammond, a friend of Josephson’s, suggested he hire Billie Holiday as one of its first acts, and it was there, that same year, that Holiday debuted “Strange Fruit,” an eerie, almost cinematic song written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx who was inspired by a magazine photo of a southern lynching. Reports would vary regarding how much Holiday initially liked the song, but at Cafe Society it became one of the first and most prominent written-about performances in the Village. The song would be saved until the end of her set, at which point the wait staff would ask customers to neither eat nor drink in order to ensure as much quiet as possible. Some in the crowd, who simply wanted entertainment as opposed to a chilling social commentary, walked out. Holiday would end up singing at the club for eight months straight, and more importantly the Village began developing a reputation for music as provocative as the literature that had preceded it.

Although little else offered up at Cafe Society downtown would match “Strange Fruit” in terms of headlines, Josephson was relentless in pursuing a diverse lineup and crowd. The club hosted a rare racially mixed band in 1939. Pianists Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, and Albert Ammons made it a destination to hear New York boogie-woogie, the caffeinated form of blues piano that had started in Texas earlier in the century before migrating north to cities like St. Louis and Chicago. When writer Damon Runyon took young friends down to see those pianists at Cafe Society in 1939, he wrote that they “almost went into convulsions when the music started.” Ivan Black, a publicist who worked to ensure that the club received good press, went into overdrive, feeding an item to a gossip column about a “Cafe Society Cocktail” made with rum and lime.

In October 1940, Josephson opened an uptown sibling of Cafe Society on East Fifty-Eighth Street, but the downtown joint continued to take artistic risks. A folk and blues scene, which was also taking hold at the Vanguard, filtered over to Cafe Society, which booked Josh White, Sonny Terry, and Susan Reed, an eighteen-year-old redhead who crooned folk songs. As on Easter Sunday in 1941, where else would one go in New York City to see the Golden Gate Quartet singing “John the Revelator” and pianist Art Tatum playing composer Jules Massenet’s Élégie? The landmark “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938, produced by Hammond, traced the history of Black music for both white and Black audiences. For its part in the series, the Cafe Society hosted its own events of the same name, one in 1940 bringing together—for $1.50 a ticket—Holiday, Tatum, Lewis, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the sexually fluid Black singer and guitar player who propelled gospel music into the mainstream.

Not far away, first in a loft in the East Village and later at 130 West Tenth Street, a three-story brownstone, what amounted to a Village folk-music commune was hatched. The Almanac Singers, a loose-knit group centered around Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell, had already been around for a few years, singing antiwar and pro-labor songs. Soon after their friend Woody Guthrie joined up with them in the middle of 1941, the group had moved to the Tenth Street digs, dubbed “Almanac House,” where they continued the Sunday-afternoon music-making jams that had started in previous dwellings. If visitors timed it well, they’d encounter Lead Belly, White, or Dyer-Bennet sitting. With Guthrie part of the group, the Almanac Singers helped pay their rent with hootenannies in the basement.

Left-centric and sympathetic to Communism, the Almanac Singers had already recorded two albums before Guthrie joined up, and they were soon featured on radio shows and courted by agents. But their views made them a natural target for the FBI, which had already begun monitoring them. The press, once on the group’s side, began turning on them, calling them “the favorite balladeers of the Communists.” Thanks to the fragile relationships within the group—Seeger as the hardworking organizer, Hays as the alcohol-inclined wild card and grump—the Almanacs already had a nitroglycerin quality to them, and they crumbled in the early forties.

The spirit of the Almanac Singers carried on, albeit without Guthrie. Seeger started what looked to be a promising career of his own, but before long he was singing with Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman. By 1948, the group, eventually called the Weavers, had already played publicly before Max Gordon hired them at the Village Vanguard starting in the last month of 1949. With their penchant for formal wear and a repertoire that included more than a few apolitical songs, like Lead Belly’s lullaby “Goodnight, Irene,” the Weavers subversively blended folk, traditional songs from around the planet, and a soupçon of Village politics. During their run at the Vanguard—which the Daily News dubbed part of the “cellar circuit”—they were signed to Decca Records.

But as with the Almanac Singers, forces began bearing down on the musicians and the world they were creating in the Village, and the music scene south of Fourteenth Street was slowly being crushed in the second half of the fifties. Cafe Society crumbled first. In 1947 Barney Josephson’s brother Leon, who had Communist inclinations, was found guilty of contempt after he declined to answer questions from the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The brothers were soon pegged as Communist sympathizers by columnists like Winchell. With Leon Josephson in jail, business at both clubs plunged. The uptown club closed in 1947; a year and a half later, the downtown space was put up for sale. New owners retained the name and tried to adapt to changing musical times, hiring musicians who played bebop as well as more traditional Dixieland. One teenager who managed to sneak into Cafe Society and hear Holiday during her later days was Van Ronk, who would recall her ravaged but still alluring intonation.

Even if the downtown or uptown Cafe Society had continued to flourish, neither may have been able to book some of the artists it wanted. In 1940 the city had expanded on its Cabaret Law with the issuing of cabaret cards, which musicians would need to play nightclubs or other venues where liquor was sold. As part of the application process, they had to be photographed, fingerprinted, and interviewed as if they were criminals; they could easily lose their card if they had ever been arrested or had a prior record. As a result, Holiday and Thelonious Monk were among those who lost out on Village club work; Monk even resorted to using a fake name, Ernie Washington, to get gigs.

When Seeger and Hays were also targeted as either members of the Communist Party or sympathetic to it, the Weavers imploded nearly overnight; their record deal and live shows abruptly came to an end. On November 15, 1954, two FBI agents zeroed in on Hellerman, who, in the words of one report, had “entertained at various other Communist Party rallies from 1947 to 1953.” That day, Hellerman was approached by two agents at his home at 7 Morton Street in the West Village. After the agents introduced themselves, Hellerman resisted any interaction, insisting that his personal and private activities were none of the Bureau’s business and refusing to speak with them. He also argued that the Bureau had no right to maintain files or keep track of anyone unless that person had broken the law. In their report the agents wrote that Hellerman was told “in no uncertain terms” that the Bureau had the right to “pursue its responsibilities.”

Hellerman was neither arrested nor jailed, and a few of the other venues in the area, like the Village Vanguard, survived. But the arrival of rock and roll, with the first records by Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley right around the corner, was one of several signs that the Village was being left behind or scorned.

As the Village music community of the first half of the century was crumbling or under siege, a fresh one was ascending, and few witnessed it more up close than Lionel Kilberg. On March 10, 1957, the twenty-seven-year-old salesman for the Air Express freight company dutifully filled out the same application for New York’s Department of Parks, as it was then known, that he’d been using for two years. Once again, he was requesting permission for “folk singing with instruments” around the fountain in the middle of Washington Square Park, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., each Sunday in April. In phrasing he duplicated for each monthly application, he typed, “Only purpose [is] to gather for the playing and singing of folk music,” adding, as he always did, that the sessions had been taking place for roughly a decade and that an estimated three hundred people would participate. Again, he typed “no” in the spaces that asked if the gatherings would involve a parade or speeches, or if buses and trucks would be needed.

The application was approved by two city officials nine days later, and starting Sunday, April 7, the weekly gatherings once again resumed in the park. By subway, foot, or car, a parade of youthful and very earnest musicians began filtering into the park, lugging cases or bags filled with acoustic guitars, banjos, fiddles, autoharps, or mandolins. A new season of music making in the ten acres of the park would begin and, in this year’s case, with a newly added level of scrutiny.

For more than three hundred years, Washington Square Park had lived several different lives: marshland, a burial ground for impoverished yellow-fever victims, a site for public executions, and a drilling-practice area for New York’s militia, by which time it had been renamed the Washington Parade Ground in honor of the first president. In 1827 the area was proclaimed a public park, with accompanying winding paths and additional trees. But a structure completed in 1895—a seventy-three-foot-high marble arch—not only distinguished Washington Square Park but also served as a portal into another world increasingly set to music. That same decade, bandleader Luciano Conterno’s famous 9th Regiment Band played the “Star-Spangled Banner” in the park; within a few years, other ensembles performed the “William Tell Overture,” French composer Charles Gounod’s Faust, and the act-three quartet from Verdi’s Rigoletto. The classical-music tradition would continue right through 1957; that summer, conductor Fritz Rikko was scheduled to conduct works by Vivaldi, Bach, and Haydn.

Folk sing-alongs and strum-alongs also found a place in the park. According to musician Barry Kornfeld, a local couple, Hank Lifson and Jean Silverstein, had started singing and playing guitars together in the park each Thursday. In the summer of 1945 a local printer, George Margolin, was reportedly walking through the public space, guitar in hand, when someone called out, “How ’bout a song?” He obliged, gathering a small crowd around him. The following year, he was back, singing, as he told historian Timothy Josiah Morris Pertz, “Jimmy Crack Corn,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and other all-chime-in favorites as well as pro-labor songs that reflected his leftist orientation.

Be it musicians, would-be players eager to learn a technique or two, or those who just wanted to watch, the preferred destination was the fountain with the recessed bowl that sat just south of the Washington Arch. The fountain was actually the second such structure in the park. Built in 1851, the first had been called “very nice” in the inaugural issue of the New York Times that September. But it lasted only about twenty years. In the 1870s a new fountain was needed—in part to make sure that the carriage horses clomping through Washington Square could have more water—and the original was demolished and replaced with one made of graywacke stone and relocated from the southeastern entrance of Central. Roughly seventy feet in diameter, it featured a recessed basin that, from above, looked like a giant eyeball in the middle of the park. With the advent of the folksingers, it had become a makeshift performance area, musicians taking up spots along the concrete rim. Around the perimeters of the park, painters sitting on fold-up canvas chairs sold their art—or had the pieces scrutinized by young women and men in sandals, some with black-rimmed glasses and books on existentialism (or what the Times called “high-class paperbacks”) jammed into their back pockets.

As the crowds began building, the Department of Parks, along with the wealthy neighbors who lived in the string of row houses and apartment buildings that encircled portions of the park, took notice. In what constituted the first conflict over music in the park, officials determined that such gatherings would require official authorization.

Everyone knew that risks were involved in not obtaining the proper approvals for any similar gatherings. When organizers of a pro-Bolshevik march in the park earlier in the century hadn’t filled out the necessary paperwork, the protesters ended up clashing with police. Unwilling to make such a mistake, the folk musicians took the Department of Parks up on its threat and began requesting permits. As Kornfeld would later write, “They were repeatedly refused until, as legend has it, a certain young lady had to sit in the lap of a Park [sic] Department official in order to secure that first permit.”

The first permit may, in fact, have been firmed up by a woman—none other than Jean Silverstein. In the spring of 1949, Silverstein, then living on Park Avenue, completed the one-page application to have a “group assemble for folk singing” from 3 to 7 p.m., “every Sunday that the sun shines (April through Sept.).” To justify the request, she typed, “We are a group that likes to sing. Many children come down to sing with us and on Sunday afternoons in the summer it’s pleasant to sing outdoors.” (Curiously, the application was originally made out for Union Square Park, but that name and address were xx’ed out and replaced with Washington Square Park.) Along with another bass player, Irwin Lutzky, Kilberg took over the permit paperwork a few years later, by which time the city had already curtailed the sessions, which now had to wrap up at 6 p.m.

As the fifties progressed, the fountain jams made local heroes of some of the pickers who frequented them. Kilberg was known for his so-called Brownie bass, a homemade washtub bass made from a West Virginia metal tub and a pole used for window washing. A bass-fiddle string (or sometimes a piece of clothesline) ran from the bottom of the tub to the top of the pole, where he placed a miniature fire hydrant toy in honor of his late dog, Brownie. By lengthening the pole and playing with gloved fingers, Kilberg could hit several different notes. With guitarist Mike Cohen and banjoist Roger Sprung—a TV repairman by day at his home in Lake Mohegan, New York—Kilberg played in a trio, the Shanty Boys. Sprung, a masterful musician who’d been alerted to the park sessions by his brother (and early permit holder) George in 1947, had such a loud, sparkling style that it sounded as if he had an amplifier, which he didn’t.

The lineups would also include skilled banjo players such as Eric Weissberg, Marshall Brickman, and Erik Darling, who would later take Seeger’s role in a reconstituted Weavers. Although bluegrass and old-timey music dominated the outdoor hoots, it was also possible in 1957 to venture into the park and hear a blues singer or a mandolinist playing the Italian folk songs he’d learned from his family. A bearded, bedraggled-looking Woody Guthrie suddenly appeared one day; his wife, Marjorie, would also sometimes drop off their son, Arlo, and let him wander around with his guitar until he found a group he could join.

Even when the designated permit holder was carrying a copy of the paperwork in his or her pocket on those Sundays, the city seemed intent on hampering the proceedings as much as possible. One afternoon, police allowed only one musician to play because the original wording on the permits referred to a singular “stringed instrument.” If more than the number of people specified on the application showed up, some would be chased off. To add extra hardship to the proceedings, the permits—which, starting with Silverstein’s first, allowed for the sessions to go on for months, until the start of fall—eventually had to be renewed each month.

Along with the increasing scrutiny of the city and the denser groups of tourists and onlookers who began to gather around the singers and players, the media were starting to take notice. The New York Times had run a short article on Kilberg and his Brownie bass in 1955, but two years on, other outlets were getting in on the act. The same year of the Times story, Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher, and Norman Mailer had launched the Village Voice to compete with the comparatively old-school Villager. Priced at five cents, the Voice ran all of eight pages weekly, filled with local news, observations, and crammed restaurant and store advertisements. Its first edition included a front-page story about the fountain jams, and in April 1957 it published a photo of the first spring session of the season.

The Daily News soon after ran a Sunday feature story, which reached five million readers, on what it called “The Circle”—the name for the performers who gathered in and around the fountain. In it, Kilberg recalled the sight of an introverted kid who watched a group of players, was pulled in for a sing-along, and eventually asked one of the musicians for banjo lessons. “This kid has found himself new friends,” Kilberg said. “Most of the tourists look on the folk at the Circle as bohemians, but actually these kids come from the five boroughs. They come down here to play some music and let off some steam. I believe there’s nothing better for a person than singing and yelling in a crowd.” They were also kids who felt disconnected from pop culture and the Eisenhower era, looking for common ground and a place where they could congregate and meet fellow outsiders who’d discovered folk music. Some didn’t care much for rock and roll, and if they had liked it, they wouldn’t have necessarily told anyone.

At promptly 6 p.m., the music in the park would have to stop. “The cops would come in like a phalanx—‘put away that thing,’” recalled Peter Stampfel, a beatific, genial fiddler and banjo player who’d grown up in Wisconsin and arrived in New York City a few years later. “They hated that people were playing music.” To some, like Kornfeld, the curfew was tolerable; after four hours, everyone was worn out from all the strumming, harmonizing, and fingerpicking. Some would break into smaller groups and head out for a meal or resume the playing at the local American Youth Hostel on Eighth Street. Jane Jacobs, an associate editor of Architectural Forum and Village resident who became caught up in the battle for the park, would call it “the incubation ground for the revival of folk singing, literally it was.” But the time restrictions placed on the musicians were another reminder that the nascent scene was being monitored; the musicians were literally playing on borrowed time.

On April 25, 1957, just over two weeks after the Sunday afternoon hoots resumed, Gerdes Restaurant formally reopened in its new location at 11 West Fourth Street, at the corner of Mercer. Much like at its previous nearby location, Gerdes would still be a working-people’s bar. In its first advertisement in the Villager, the prominent community newspaper, the new Gerdes promised “giant sized cocktails served daily.” For the moment, there was no mention of music.

That same day, residents of the Village would awake to the news many had heard about and dreaded: a proposal for a four-lane roadway that would slice through Washington Square Park had been endorsed by T. T. Wiley, the city’s traffic commissioner. The plan to connect Fifth Avenue, on the north side of the park, to West Broadway, on the south, dated back nearly a century. In the 1870s, Boss Tweed, the Tammany Hall powerhouse, had wanted to provide those living on what would eventually be renamed West Broadway with ritzier “South Fifth Avenue” addresses, a potential boon for the real estate market. A roadbed was built, but the plan stalled. In 1952, Robert Moses, the parks commissioner who had earlier introduced plans to close off the park, announced he would be picking up where Tweed left off. Because the roadbed built in the Tweed era still existed, Moses wanted it to connect to “Fifth Avenue South” as well as to a proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. Wiley and others, including Manhattan Borough president Hulan Jack, insisted that the plan was necessary to relieve the traffic congestion that would begin in midtown and work its way down to the Village; after all, they maintained, Fifth Avenue hit a dead end. Over the next few years, numerous proposals were discussed for the highway, some involving a partially sunken road and a footbridge for pedestrians.

In its first issue of 1957, the Village Voice warned, in an alarming editorial, “The Square is certain to be an issue” that year. But the plans for remaking the Village weren’t limited to the park, as Gerdes co-owner Mike Porco was learning all too well. By the time he was eight, Porco had been trained in his native Italy to be a carpenter and cabinetmaker. His father and grandfather had already moved to America, and his father summoned young Mike to work with him. In February 1933 Mike landed in America from his home country, expecting to be met by his father; instead, his uncle Angelo greeted him at the dock, informing him that his father had died while Mike was en route. Mike was eighteen and didn’t yet know a word of English, and his uncle Angelo became his surrogate father.

The Porcos lived in the Bronx, where they soon opened a family restaurant, but the Village, and its buildings tightly packed with blue-collar workers and diverse families, beckoned. Porco found a job at Gerdes, part of a five-story warehouse at 11 West Third Street, at the southwest corner of Mercer. Herman Gerdes had first leased the space in 1911, eventually opening a liquor store that became a sandwich shop and then a family restaurant. Eventually, his grandson William Gerdes took it over. In 1952 Gerdes sold it to Porco, along with his brother John and a cousin, Joe Bastone, and the three men planned to continue pulling in the working-class Italians who were its reliable customers.

The timing was not on Porco’s side. The following year, the city announced a “Committee on Slum Clearance,” headed by Parks Commissioner Moses. A formidable city makeover artist, Moses had made his name on large-scale projects like Jones Beach State Park and the Northern and Southern State highways, which connected Manhattan with parts of Long Island but also demolished long-standing communities in the process. His latest proposal, called Washington Square Southeast, was of a piece with his previous works, such as bulldozing parts of the South Bronx for the Cross Bronx Expressway. The white population of the Village was starting to flee to uptown or the suburbs. To reverse that trend, Moses turned to the recently instituted Title 1 of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, which would allocate federal funds to demolish so-called slums to make way for private housing. Starting in 1955, the land south of the park, which included 16 residential buildings and 132 families—what the New York Times called a “blighted area”—was condemned by the city. That October, the city turned the area over to Moses, who envisioned selling the land to private developers for a proposed massive apartment complex and to New York University, which offered $25,000 as a show of interest in the project and would pay a mere $5.50 per square foot.

For Villagers, the thought was unsettling. Washington Square Southeast, wrote former New York State assemblyman Nicholas A. Rossi in a letter to the Times, “would begin the destruction of our Village.” Slowly, though, the plans took shape. In a move that enraged locals who didn’t consider their homes to be slums, the board of estimates voted unanimously in the first month of 1956 to raze buildings from Mercer Street in the east over to West Broadway, then from Washington Square North to Houston Street. In the end, more than a thousand mom-and-pop businesses, along with 650 industrial and commercial buildings, came down. An estimated one hundred families were moved out to make way for Washington Square Village, three monolithic buildings with more than 2,000 apartments that sat between West Third, Mercer, West Houston, and West Broadway.

Few felt the impact of those plans more than the owners of Gerdes, which, by the summer of 1957, would be on the wrecking-ball list as part of NYU’s expansion plans. Forced to move to a new site, Porco and his partners lucked out when they found a two-thousand-square-foot, high-ceilinged space on West Fourth Street. The restaurant was separated from the bar area by a waist-high dividing wall, which could draw two different crowds and two different sources of income. When it opened in April, Gerdes dubbed itself, on its matchboxes, a “restaurant and cocktail lounge” with “party facilities” and “excellent food.” Since the new Gerdes would remain a restaurant, Porco was able to obtain a new liquor license, and the plan called for the spot to be open twelve straight hours, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Even though it was a mere one block north of the first location, the new Gerdes faced challenges from the start. Many of its regulars were now gone from the neighborhood; even worse, the corner of Mercer and West Fourth was more desolate than it had been before the demolitions. NYU’s more aggressive push into the area meant an influx of students, some of whom were tapping into the revived interest in folk music. No one at Gerdes thought to lure them in with ballads or musicians, but that would change soon enough.

During one of his return trips to the city in 1957, likely in the summer, Dave Van Ronk was taking in the sights along MacDougal Street. In decades past, the block had been home to speakeasies and so-called tearooms that were gathering places for gay women. Now the one-way strip was lined with butcher and sandwich shops and cafés like the San Remo, the Italian restaurant that transformed at night, in the words of the Daily News, into “a hangout for the youngsters who like to consider themselves bohemians.”

But as Van Ronk noticed, a new and curious business had opened its doors in the storefront at 110 MacDougal, on the east side of the block. Flapping out front was a flag, complete with a logo depicting a fan-like wheel. Hand-painted lettering on the front door announced the space was now the “Folk-Lore Center,” home to “Books Old and New on Folklore Folk Dance.” Inside were shelves of LPs, stringed instruments, and guitar strings, and the owner was Israel Young, a Village character all his own.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Young—Izzy, as everyone called him—had been born in Manhattan in 1928. When he was barely two years old, his family moved to the Bronx so that his father could open a bakery. After Young was enrolled in the High School of Science in 1945, a fellow member of the Astronomy Club introduced him to square dancing, which became an unexpected passion. Although he would never consider himself a performer of any type, Young joined the American Square Dance Group, which he would later call the city’s first major folk group. Before long, he was sporting blue jeans and a red bandanna, and square dancing with them. “It would be like, you know, masturbation,” he told folklorist and writer Richard Reuss. “After you do it, you say you’ll never do it again, and then another.” The folk songs that accompanied the dancing were secondary, but Young was nonetheless lured into the melodies and stories of traditional music. “It was pure, it was simple, it was direct, it was honest and sincere,” he told Reuss. “It was a light to me. And I said, ‘This is the way life should be.’ In the way of the folk songs, even if someone got killed, it was a direct relationship.”

At Brooklyn College, Young was initially a premed student, then switched his major to English, and eventually stopped attending classes altogether. By then, the early fifties, he’d begun collecting rare books and soon had the idea of publishing a catalog selling folk-music books—and, in turn, opening a store to carry them. As many would eventually observe, business did not come naturally to Israel Young, but the last week of February 1957, he signed a lease for 110 MacDougal.

Young sported the short hair, button-down shirts, and horn-rimmed glasses of a book-loving nerd. But while he may have been a bookworm, he was far from a pushover. He had the brusque, rough-hewn accent of the Bronx kid he was, and his chest was so stocky that it always looked as if he were ready to butt heads (or bodies) with someone. He wasn’t fond of the hardy-voiced commercial folk groups that were starting to spring up, and if any customers were to disagree with him, he wasn’t afraid to kick them out. In the Greenwich Village of 1957, folk music couldn’t have found a more perfect bodyguard.

The idea of a folk store wasn’t as harebrained as it sounded. In what were the makings of another boom—or “folk scare,” as many, including Van Ronk, would joke—the music was again storming into the mainstream. In late 1955 the Weavers had re-formed, and the recording of that show, The Weavers at Carnegie Hall, showed up in record stores in April 1957. Cashbox, the prominent music-business magazine, called it “a must for any folk record collection.” The same month, Harry Belafonte, now a folk and calypso singer, had not one but three albums in the Top 10; Elvis Presley had only one. Out in San Francisco, the Kingston Trio, a trio who looked as if they were students in the most clean-cut college in the country, took over a residence at the Purple Onion. With their striped shirts, carefully rehearsed harmonies and stage patter, and generally go-down-easy sound, they were even more polished than the Weavers, never mind the scraggly Almanac Singers. Within months, they would be signed to a major record label, Capitol.

In terms of its square footage, the Folklore Center (the hyphen was dropped after the sign was made) couldn’t compete with the more expansive record stores uptown, but that wasn’t Young’s goal. He wanted to sell not just music books but also sheet music, and as he would write in his journals, he began selling ten-inch LPs, some to libraries and some to dealers of rare books. “This should be a tremendous beginning offer that will make me many friends and also see who is on my side in Folk Music,” he wrote in a journal. He had doubts that folksingers would buy books, “and if they do, they expect discounts, etc.” But he also hoped his store would be a gathering place for the community and the authentic style of music he championed.

On April 5, 1957, two days before the Sunday jamborees in the park would resume, the Folklore Center opened with a party starting at 9 p.m., and the folkies and old-timey music fans stayed until 4 a.m. The following week, a photo in the Village Voice of the tightly packed store was captioned “The Mob Scene”; Young was described as “an adventurous book dealer.” The use of mob would take on an entirely new meaning in the years to come, both in the Village and within the Folklore Center. But for now, the idea that anyone could flock to such a singular storefront was satisfying enough. As Young had written in his journal in February, when he signed the lease, “I love the future.”

August 18, 1957, brought its usual barrage of news in the city and its boroughs. Two cars collided in the East Village, injuring nine, including a sixty-eight-year-old woman pedestrian; a milk strike loomed; the Yankees trounced the Baltimore Orioles, seven-nothing, in the first game of the day’s doubleheader. Beyond Manhattan, two guided-missile facilities had been discovered in the Soviet Union, and Sir Winston Churchill’s son-in-law died from an overdose of sleeping pills. But in a community of musicians eager for more professional places to make something approaching a living, the opening of the Village’s first venue for something other than jazz made for a blazing headline all its own.

Starting that month, stashed among the books and periodicals on display at the Folklore Center was the first magazine devoted to the community in and around the park. Dubbed a “non-profit, great-cost amateur publication,” the first issue of Caravan was sixteen pages of mimeographed folk-music news, gossip, and reviews edited by Lee Shaw, a twenty-five-year-old equally taken with science fiction and vernacular music. Her sci-fi fanzine Quandry had a following, as did the similar-subject magazines she worked on with her husband of the time, fellow fantasy writer Larry Shaw. After witnessing the Sunday park jamborees, she decided to participate by way of a publication that would document the scene.

Initially, Shaw called her collection of folk lyrics and folklore Chooog 2-5, but after one issue she scrapped it and began again with Caravan. Based out of the couple’s apartment at 78 Greenwich Street, the first edition featured a column devoted to “The New York City Scene,” which updated readers on a Washington Square Park session that had been rained out a few weeks earlier; as a result, Caravan reported, a television talent scout missed out on the action. When Young asked if he could carry Caravan in the Folklore Center, Shaw increased the printing—to two hundred copies—and gave half to Young in exchange for free records.

In its news-tidbits section, Caravan also announced “Dave Van Ronk is back.” Van Ronk’s merchant marine duty—what he would call “the most regular work I ever did”—had taken him to New Orleans and California and introduced him to parts of the country he’d never seen before. The work also exposed him to the racism that acutely existed outside the five boroughs of Manhattan. “Even in a city like New Orleans,” he would later tell the Village Voice, “you’d make some Negro friends and then you couldn’t even find a place to sit down and talk to them.”

Upon his final return to New York, Van Ronk crashed at the Shaw apartment and started attending the Sunday-afternoon jams in Washington Square Park, which he may have discovered around the time he first visited the Village. But Van Ronk had returned in more ways than one. Caravan’s inaugural issue included a critique of new releases from Elektra Records, an indie label devoted to folk and world music that had its offices on Bleecker Street. According to the critic, bylined “Blind Rafferty,” one collection of Haitian music “sounds like a chic nightclub act,” and an Elektra blues record suffered from a “sickening glibness.” As many would soon find out, Rafferty was, in fact, Van Ronk, and the column and subsequent pieces made it bracingly clear that he had his opinions on what was, and wasn’t, authentic.

Caravan also heralded the arrival of a new “coffee-shop-what-have-you.” Revealing how compact the Village community was compared to those in other cities, the new music venue, at 106 West Third Street, was around the corner and just a few minutes’ walk from the Folklore Center. The long, dank space was said to have been a livery stable for former vice president Aaron Burr and later a garage, but a Village landlord named Rick Allmen sensed a different future for the building. The son of a pharmacist who’d hoped Rick would follow him into the family business, Allmen instead pulled together two hundred dollars, half from his savings and half from a friend, to open a music club. Renting three trucks to excavate the remnants of the former garage, Allmen borrowed tables and chairs from friends; his father offered to help paint the walls, and Allmen’s grandfather would pitch in on the dishwashing. To ensure that the place was warm when the weather turned cold, Allmen had to bring hot charcoals to emit added heat. But he also realized that candles would work better: they’d lend the space, he said, “the image everyone has of the Village.”

Allmen named the place the Cafe Bizarre, for good reason. Desperate for any decor whatsoever for his venue, he didn’t know what to say when friends came by with a few discarded mannequins they’d found, but he strung them up from the ceiling with wires and at odd angles. The creepy fixtures, he told the Brooklyn Daily, lent the space “the most fantastic and eerie look you could imagine.” To Van Ronk, it felt like a “cut-rate Charles Addams haunted house,” but anything that called attention to a Village club at the time wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

On opening night, August 18, 1957, the stage amounted to wooden platforms, a ghoulish MC made weak attempts at scary jokes, and the sound system periodically emitted feedback squeals. But the lineup brought together a certified star on the scene, Odetta, the Alabama-born actress who had switched over to folk and already had several albums to her credit; her deep voice and persona were regal and imposing. Also on the bill were Logan English, a Kentucky-raised folksinger and guitarist—and, in one of his first professional gigs, if not the first, Van Ronk.

Now twenty-one, Van Ronk was still finding his way as a singer and fingerpicker, and he could never recall what songs he performed that night. But Caravan reported that at the beginning of his second set, Van Ronk sang “blues with an intensity and vitality, and sometimes violence, that comes across powerfully to an audience.” Others on the scene were more musically pure, both in terms of their delivery and instrumental skills, but few were as uncompromising as Van Ronk. Here was a roughhouse kid from Queens who loved the blues (and ragtime and jazz) but merged it with his own voice rather than imitate his sources. He didn’t gently harmonize or croon, instead riding roughshod over the melodies. When needed, he could also veer into a softer, singsongy voice. But as fresh as he was, he sounded prematurely grizzled, like someone singing around a campfire during an expedition to the Old West a century before.

Though skeptical of the Cafe Bizarre, starting with its furnishings, Van Ronk later had to admit that the experience of playing on a stage, a single spotlight on him, was transformative. The experience both shocked and elated him. Afterward, Odetta complimented him. Maybe he, along with some of his friends on the scene, had a future in all of this.

When he showed up at the Village Vanguard in the middle of October 1957 to prep for his first shows as a bandleader, Sonny Rollins sensed that the club hadn’t fully made the transition from its past life to its new incarnation. Walking down the stairs to the basement, he took note of the wooden floor that had once welcomed dancers. In another vestige of its previous life of hosting poets, folksingers, and cabaret acts, the club still had a maître d’. At some point Rollins also spied Mo Howard, the bangs-haired member of the Three Stooges comedy group, another holdover from a former era.

Earlier that year, Rollins had been approached at a different venue by Max Gordon about playing at his club in the Village. The name “Village Vanguard” rang a vague bell for Rollins; he thought he might have played there as a sideman with someone or other, maybe Miles Davis. Gordon never said it explicitly to Rollins, but change was coming to the Vanguard. In June 1957 he’d placed an ad in the Village Voice announcing his club’s revised menu—creole shrimp, chili, and ribs—but more importantly its “new jazz-room policy.” The Vanguard had featured the music before, but jazz would now dominate the bookings.

Dating back to the early decades of the twentieth century, jazz was hardly foreign to the Village. On West Third Street, Eddie Condon’s Place, named after the guitarist and bandleader, offered traditional fare; David Amram first went there when he was all of fourteen, and in later years two Village musicians, Terre and Suzzy Roche, would be so inspired by a set they saw at Condon’s that they would write a song about one of its players. Jazz had also been on the menu periodically at the Vanguard. In the forties, Gordon booked jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams and trumpeter Hot Lips Page, with Monday-night jam sessions starting in 1942. In 1948, Gordon’s future wife Lorraine, then in a relationship with the head of Blue Note Records, suggested that Gordon book Monk. The dates were famously ill-attended, but Gordon didn’t completely ditch the idea of sticking with jazz.

By the time Gordon approached Rollins about a booking, the music was undergoing one of its cyclical reinventions. The big-band era that had begun just before World War II was winding down, and the music was growing more daring with the arrival of bebop, then cool jazz and hard bop. The progress coincided with the Vanguard’s own business issues. By 1957, according to Lorraine Gordon, her husband was encountering problems booking the nightclub acts and comedians who’d once brought audiences into the club. Thanks to the television revolution, audiences seemed more inclined to stay home and watch those entertainers on the new technology. (The club had also experienced a few earlier hassles: in 1944 it was cited by the Office of Price Administration for a violation after Gordon started charging $1.50 for ham and eggs, a 30-cent increase; he had to pay a fine.) Even though he was far from an expert on jazz—in time, he would turn to Davis to suggest new acts, according to Lorraine—Gordon sensed that the music was entering a new phase, and in mid-1957 he made the decision to concentrate on it.

With his short fade and goatee, Rollins was physically the man for the job; he resembled an elegant beatnik, someone born to be in the Village at that time. Walter Theodore Rollins had hailed from Harlem, where he had started as a piano student but switched to alto and then tenor sax as a teenager. As evidence of his gift, he was all of eighteen when he first started recording with other musicians; by the time he was twenty, he had already gigged with Monk, Davis, and Art Blakey. During the early fifties, Rollins was on fire, recording with Davis and Monk and on his own.

But thanks to a heroin habit, his life was starting to go off the rails. His addiction led him to lose out on a gig with Charlie Parker, and Rollins was arrested for drugs and spent time in a federal narcotics rehab hospital in Kentucky in 1955. Moving to Chicago after he was released, Rollins toiled at menial day jobs to avoid falling into old habits. “I was trying to stay away from the nightclubs where I would know people and it would be an enticement to get back into drugs,” he recalled. “Guys would say, ‘Hey, Sonny, I got some good stuff—let’s go get high.’ But I resisted the temptation.”

After practicing alone in the basement of a YMCA where he worked as a janitor, Rollins was invited to fill a vacant slot in the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet. Brown’s death in a 1956 car accident put an end to that promise, but Rollins, who had temporarily returned to New York between tours with that band, stayed in town and began making even greater strides. In 1956 alone he rolled out an astounding six albums; one of them, Saxophone Colossus, was his definitive statement up to that point. By then, critic Leonard Feather was calling Rollins “a tenor sax force in jazz.”

For Rollins, the Village didn’t necessarily encourage such mad-scientist experimentation. “If I got a gig in Birdland, I would be playing my ass off trying to play,” he said, referring to the midtown jazz spot. “And if I played at the Vanguard I did the same thing, so that didn’t apply to me. I was just trying to make the gig.” But he noticed the difference in the clientele: in his mind, the Vanguard audience was more racially diverse than the crowds at Birdland and other uptown venues. He was also drawn to the Vanguard by its ambience: “small and friendly, and one of the best sounds in New York,” he said. Although he always applied pressure to himself and musicians, the Vanguard itself felt stress-free to him. He could feel free to creatively wander, even if it meant firing one of his first lineups at the club. “I was a hard task master,” he said. “I was firing guys left and right if they didn’t live up to my standards. I’m not sorry about it. I was trying to get the music right. I was young and reckless.”

In October, Rollins started a two-month residency at the Vanguard, and with a splash. His new label, Blue Note, decided to record one of his performances for a live record, which would not only be Rollins’s first such LP but also the first taped at the club. Here, at least, the pressure was on; Rollins would now be leading his own band, and the venerated recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder would be taping the shows. Chaos and upheaval were also in the mix. By the time of the recording date, November 3, Rollins had opted for a trio—himself, drummer Pete “La Roca” Sims, and bassist Donald Bailey. The combo played an afternoon set, but for the second, Rollins replaced them with his first choices, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Wilbur Ware. As author Aidan Levy wrote, Jones appeared at the club “half in the bag and still seething” over being fired from another gig.

No matter the state of the rhythm section, Rollins walked on a tightrope wire: there was no set list or any other accompanist, such as a pianist, who could ground the music or take solos when Rollins needed a break. But all those potential distractions only freed him up further. Throughout the sets, he would hold long notes, grunt and squawk on his instrument, and play everything from Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” to the more relaxed and sensual “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” (from the 1927 operetta The New Moon and cowritten by Oscar Hammerstein). He played one of his own songs, “Sonnymoon for Two,” a twelve-bar blues inspired by his marriage that year to Dawn Noreen Finney. Unlike his former boss Davis, Rollins didn’t enjoy listening to tapes of his shows and didn’t bother to do it this time. But Blue Note edited down the two sets to the length of one LP and began prepping the album for release early the following year.

For the time being, Rollins and Gordon were getting along, and Rollins would remember Gordon’s fascination with jazz musicians, as well as the softness of his hands. “You know he never did any hard work,” Rollins said. “His hands were like a baby’s hands.” Rollins still steered clear of drugs, even as he saw with increasing and disturbing frequency the way that pot and heroin were affecting some of his friends and colleagues. For him, and a parade of players to follow, the Village had a new habitat for their music.

The voice emanated from somewhere in the park, although Happy Traum couldn’t determine the precise spot at first. Growing up in the Bronx, the kid born Harry Traum—but nicknamed “Happy” by a household helper and then his parents—was one of many teenagers starting to flock to Washington Square Park. At summer camp, a few older counselors invited him to a late-night drive into the Village, where Traum had seen something magical: two musicians playing nylon-stringed guitars at the fountain. Learning of the Sunday-afternoon join-along sessions, he began taking the subway there, gravitating toward musicians he could accompany and learn from.

Traum followed the sound of that thunderous, raucous singing, which led him to a bench east of the fountain. There sat a roustabout with a wave of dark hair, huddled over his Gibson, singing and playing “St. James Infirmary.” Also known as “Gambler’s Blues,” the song was dark—the narrator, drinking at a bar, telling the tragic tale of finding his lady friend in a morgue—and Van Ronk’s prematurely wizened delivery made it sound as if he’d witnessed that sad sight for himself. Traum went over and introduced himself. Even though Van Ronk was sitting and playing alone—unusual in and of itself because all the other musicians playing in his vicinity seemed to prefer groups—Traum perceived the power of Van Ronk’s personality and his role as, he said, “a figurehead of sorts.”

Van Ronk hadn’t returned to the park and music of his own accord. In hopes of auditioning at the Chicago club Gate of Horn for its owner, Albert Grossman, Van Ronk had hitchhiked to Illinois in the fall of 1957, but Grossman was unimpressed when Van Ronk sang a few songs, and the musician retreated to New York. Along the way, he’d lost his wallet, which contained his seaman’s papers. The thought of meeting with officials to replace them was, he wrote, “asking for trouble” given his political views. Back to Manhattan it was, where Van Ronk struggled to put money into the pockets of his peacoat. Since the Cafe Bizarre wasn’t offering regular work, he began working at a bookstore on University Place while continuing to crash with the Shaws. One of his regular haunts was the Cafe Figaro, a coffeehouse at 186 Bleecker, at the corner of MacDougal Street, where anyone could linger all day over a coffee and a game or two of chess, and it was there, on a fall 1957 day, that he recognized a woman he’d met months before and wanted to know a little better.

Even before they’d been introduced, Van Ronk and Terri Thal were kindred spirits in their political and musical interests. Raised in Brooklyn, the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria-Hungary, Thal was already politically engaged: she attended meetings of the Young Socialist League and had been inducted into the world of folk by way of Pete Seeger records. Tall, strapping, often bluntly opinionated, and fond of cat’s-eye-frame glasses, Thal radiated independence and robustness. She and Van Ronk had first crossed paths at a party on the Upper West Side in either late 1956 or early the following year. “A guy named Shel was driving me crazy, saying he wanted me to go into the bedroom with him,” Thal recalled. “It had nothing to do with sex. He wanted to turn me on. I was still a kid from Brooklyn. Marijuana was that evil stuff that grew in the fields outside Lafayette High School.” A scruffy guy who turned out to be Van Ronk approached them. “Shel, leave her alone,” he said. As Thal would recall, “We spent the rest of the evening together. He said he didn’t want to see somebody drive away an attractive woman.”

Now, months later, Thal and some of her friends from Brooklyn College were at the Fig, as the locals called it, and there was Van Ronk again. Recognizing her, he wandered over to their table, struck up another conversation, and offered to escort her back to Brooklyn, a ride that took him an hour each way. Very soon after, they were a couple. She knew he was a folksinger, but, she said, “Being a folksinger was not that big a deal then. There was no work in New York, and no way to earn a living as a folk singer.”

Soon after Thal and Van Ronk’s reconnection at the Fig, the fall temperatures became too chilly for Sunday-afternoon hootenannies in Washington Square Park; permits to play outside were rarely filled out after October. The November issue of Caravan confirmed that the gatherings would wrap for the season. In the spirit of good-natured folk ribbing, the magazine added, “This means dozens of folksingers searching for backrooms (preferably with heat) wherein to gather and sing. Be warned!”

But on the heels of a year that saw the music community expand in ways few would have predicted, the end of the park jams no longer had an air of finality about them. Thal was right in the sense that, at that time, making a living as a folksinger (or jazz player) seemed as unimaginable as hearing that music on the radio. But maybe it would be possible in the future. The opening of the Cafe Bizarre and the revamped policy at the Village Vanguard offered more opportunities for exposure and, perhaps, pay. Ads for the Vanguard, the Five Spot, and Cafe Bohemia were beginning to appear in the back of the Village Voice.

In October, the same month Rollins had settled into his run at the Vanguard, a new jazz club, the Half Note, opened at Hudson and Spring Streets in what was still known as the South Village. With pianist Randy Weston as its initial booking, the Half Note demonstrated its dedication to jazz even in the way its menu included hero sandwiches named after different styles, like a New Orleans (sausage and parmesan cheese) and a Cool (a combo of cheese and cold cuts). By December, the club was playing host to Charles Mingus—a match that felt right to Daily News jazz critic Don Nelsen, who called the Half Note “a snuggery where [Mingus] could develop his special brand of jazz for the public ear.” Meanwhile, the Five Spot’s profile had been further enhanced in mid-summer, when Esquire had included a photograph of a puffy-cheeked Amram playing his French horn to a huddled-together, multiracial crowd at the club.

Thanks to exposure like that article, along with the attention the park had received in the New York press, the world above and far beyond Fourteenth Street began taking notice of the Village’s artistic panorama. The Village Voice itself was about to be immortalized by Hollywood; early in 1957 the movie Stage Struck, starring Henry Fonda and Susan Strasberg, had been filmed partly along MacDougal Street and included a fake coffeehouse that shared a name with the paper. Joe Gould, the highly eccentric Village fixture who claimed to be writing a huge tome about the lives of ordinary people, died that summer. But his passing felt less like the end of an era than the beginning of a new one.

Even the battle for Washington Square Park was looking a little less dire by year’s end. At a town hall meeting, local Villagers vehemently argued against the plans to build the proposed roadway, and internal city conflicts were also bubbling up. At one public meeting that fall, Moses and Manhattan Borough president Hulan Jack argued over whether the proposed roads should be thirty-six or forty-eight feet wide; Moses called the former “ridiculously narrow.” Activist Shirley Hayes submitted the signatures of sixteen thousand residents who supported the novel idea of closing the park to traffic entirely. For the moment, the area makeover was delayed.

Consciously or not, the culture overall was shifting in favor of the nonconformists who were increasingly making their way to the Village. Early in the year, the US Customs Office had seized copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, published by San Francisco’s City Lights Books in 1956. For selling the work, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of the City Lights bookstore and publishing house, had been arrested, along with one of his clerks, on obscenity charges. In early October 1957, both were acquitted of “willfully and lewdly” selling supposedly indecent literature. In what felt like a vindication of the counterculture, the judge in the case decreed that despite language that was “coarse and vulgar,” the paperback had “redeeming social importance.” The cathartic release that was rock and roll couldn’t be denied, but an ominous roadblock loomed when Elvis Presley, whose walloping “Jailhouse Rock” dominated the radio that fall and early winter, received his army draft notice on December 20 while on Christmas break at his Graceland home.

The Village and its musicians were far from in the clear. In the spring of 1957, Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose investigations of alleged Communists in the government had made him a national scourge, died of complications connected to alcoholism. But that same year, Pete Seeger was indicted for refusing to answer questions about his political affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee (he would eventually be convicted, but an appeals court would shoot down the indictment), and the FBI now had Van Ronk in its sights. In late 1956 he’d attended a meeting of what the Bureau called the Young Socialists League on West Fourteenth Street (it may have actually been the Socialist Youth League, a Trotskyite group), and the FBI, which was tracking the organization, had included his name in a report. On December 4, 1957, an FBI informant called the Bureau with some information—“in which the Bureau would probably be interested”—about Van Ronk possibly working with what the report called “a ‘New Anarchist Youth Group,’ which would be similar in principals [sic] to the Industrial Worker [sic] of the World.” The Bureau responded that it appreciated the tip but that the caller “should not actively seek information on behalf of the FBI.” The Bureau itself, though, would actively resume keeping an eye on Van Ronk.

Despite the protests from the community and the petition that appeared to hit the brakes on his plans, Moses remained committed to the idea of connecting the areas above and below Washington Square Park. Shortly before Christmas, a major rainstorm engulfed the city in 40-mile-per-hour winds, toppling the Christmas tree erected in Washington Square Park. But more unsettling news was to come. The actual day prior to Christmas, Moses reiterated his plan to alter Washington Square Park. In a seething statement issued by the Department of Parks, he deemed the idea of closing off the park “completely unworkable,” claiming it would “endanger lives and destroy the value of abutting property.” The developers of the apartment complexes south of the park were, he said, “formally, officially and reliably promised under the Slum Clearance Act a Fifth Avenue address.” By New Year’s Eve, the battle lines had been drawn: the city and its agencies and real estate owners on one hand, the reborn music community on the other.

Chapter 1

the rising sun

1957