➊ WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK (African-American History)—Though predominantly white, Greenwich Village wasn’t always that way (see Greenwich Village II Tour—Gay Street). In the seventeenth century, when the Dutch set up New Amsterdam, they used more than three hundred slaves—out of a total population of fifteen hundred—to do all the essential labor in the new colony.
Slavery started in New Amsterdam in the mid-1620s, when the first eleven male slaves, pirated from a Portuguese vessel, arrived; some of their names were Paul D’Angola, Simon Congo, John Francisco, and Big and Little Manuel. The Dutch were less vicious than the British in their slave-owning practices; they allowed Africans to testify in court, own property, and legally marry. They also promised the first African slaves their freedom after between ten to forty years of servitude (how generous).
These first slaves were given land and freedom in a series of thirty grants from 1635 to 1665, totalling one hundred fifty to two hundred acres, including the Washington Square Park area with plots extending to Astor Place on the east side, Union Square to the north, and Sixth Avenue on the west. Eventually, all of the land was either taken back or bought back by whites, as there were several loopholes in the original grants.
➋ JUDSON MEMORIAL BAPTIST CHURCH (55 Washington Square South)—Founded in 1891 by Edward Judson, the church was designed by architect Stanford White. It served, at the turn of the century, as a headquarters for social work, before the institutionalization of the profession. The church got immigrants jobs, provided healthcare, took care of immigrant children, and tried to get donations from the rich living north of the park to help the immigrants living south of the park.
In the 1950s, Bob Spike, a civil rights activist, led the church in establishing political art exhibits, and strengthening the notion that since it exists for the community, no issue is too controversial for church involvement. That philosophy continued under Reverend Howard Moody; the church was the first in the area to establish a drug treatment clinic in 1961.
The following year the Hall of Issues began, a tradition wherein anyone can put up their own artwork Sundays from 2:00 to 5:00 PM.
During the Folksinger Riots of 1961 (see Greenwich Village I Tour) the church provided refuge for those fleeing the police.
In 1965, Bob Nichols, an activist, went on a hunger strike for over a week from a couch in the church to protest President Johnson’s ever-escalating Vietnam War, prompting a letter from the Department of Defense; they were worried about his health—and, no doubt, the possibility of negative publicity should he get seriously ill.
In 1967, the church openly made referrals to women for then-illegal abortions and, despite a front page article in The New York Times, they were never shut down.
In the mid-1960s, Police Chief Stanford Garelick spoke at a community forum on the entrapment of gay men at bars in the Village and Times Square area. He said he would put a stop to such harassment, but there were actually arrests at gay bars the very night of the forum, proving his admonition, that gay men report any raids to the police, was disingenuous. Reverend Moody testified in the City Council on behalf of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Bill each year, and included his church in the march in the Gay Pride Parade each year.
In 1992, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT-UP) took part in an open-casket funeral march which started at the church. Thirty-eight-year-old activist-architect Mark Fisher wanted to demonstrate, with his body, the “criminal neglect” of the government that facilitated the spread of AIDS. The funeral, which took place in the rain, was inspired by the many South African funerals by anti-apartheid activists. The body was carried to President George Bush’s presidential re-election headquarters on West Forty-third Street, where the Yuppies inside stood aghast.
In 1970, the church put on its famous flag show, where everything imaginable was made using the design of the flag—Abbie Hoffman’s shirt, bras, cakes, coffins, dolls, etc. It was shut down by the police after three days.
In the late 1970s, Reverend Moody and his assistant, the late Arlene Carman, worked with prostitutes, setting up a hospitality van, and providing healthcare referrals—they eventually wrote a book about their experiences (Working Women: The Subterranean World of Street Prostitution). They felt the church shouldn’t judge the prostitutes, but instead improve their working conditions. Arlene was mistakenly arrested for solicitation one night on Eight Avenue and won a $6,000-$7,000 settlement, further empowering the women.
The church’s bulletin board has always had political quotations on it, and during the Vietnam War kept a bodycount of those killed both in combat and at home, like Black Panthers and students. When President Ronald Reagan went to pay homage to the Nazi cemetery in Bitburg, Germany in the mid-1980s, the message on the bulletin board exclaimed, “For God’s sake, Mr. President, Never Again Means Never Again.”
The church recently completed a renovation, and continues to be a beautiful Greenwich Village landmark. For years, NYU has wanted to take it over—they do own the section west of the tower, which was a hotel—and yet the church remains a beacon of service to the people.
The Judson Memorial Baptist Church on Washington Square.
PHOTO BY PETER JOSEPH
➌ CORNER OF LAGUARDIA PLACE AND WASHING-TON SQUARE SOUTH (former site of the Loeb Student Center)—The Loeb Student Center was erected in 1959 and, contrary to NYU’s wishes, served as the school’s command post for the national student strike that began after President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Several students returned from a Black Panther rally in New Haven, Connecticut and presented three demands, as part of a call for a national student strike. The NYU students approved a call for a student strike and the last three weeks of classes were cancelled.
When school resumed in the fall, activists have said, it was like re-inventing the wheel in organizing because the summer break had de-politicized the campus.
In 1968, the South Vietnamese Ambassador to the U.S. tried to speak to a gathering of the Young Republicans, but was prevented by local activists who lowered the South Vietnamese flag and raised the flag of the National Liberation Front. Tom Wicker of The New York Times also had a talk disrupted at the center, an action widely criticized on free speech grounds.
Also in 1968, an overflow crowd paid tribute to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the 1980s, veteran Yippie pie thrower Aaron Kaye hit hydrogen bomb creator Edward Teller with, appropriately, a mushroom pie.
➍ BRUNO’S GARRET (58 Washington Square South)—
Next door to the current student center at Thompson Street, in a previous building, Guido Bruno ran a tourist trap in the 1910’s that took advantage of all of the people coming to Greenwich Village to soak up the “struggling-artist” atmosphere. After paying ten to twenty-five cents to enter, you would see a dozen or more people pretending to be artists in sandals and beards. Dirty dishes and mattresses were strewn about the room to complete the artificial effect. It was as phony in its day as reality television shows are in the present. In the 1910’s the real radicals and bohemians were already complaining about gentrification and tourists invading the neighborhood as jewelry, clothing and knickknack stores opened up. Rents started increasing as well and tourists would just walk up to local residents in a bar and ask them to lead them on a free tour of the village as if no one had anything better to do. Tour buses also conveniently let tourists off right in front of Bruno’s Garret. He was later sued after charging poets money to be included in a poetry anthology that was never published. Mr. Bruno did publish some artists, including Oscar Wilde, Djuna Barnes and a then-unknown Hart Crane. After a fire in 1917, the building became a coffee shop and spaghetti joint.
➎ SITE OF THE OLD BREVOORT HOTEL (Formerly 15 Fifth Avenue, currently the Brevoort Apartments)—The old hotel opened in 1854 and housed many people over the years during its nearly century-long existence: Eugene O’Neill, Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Dreiser, Isadora Duncan, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. It took up the southern two-thirds of the block between Eighth and Ninth Streets.
Its cafe was a famous hangout for the “Village Crowd,” and cases upon cases of whiskey were given away on the night of June 30, 1919, the last day before Prohibition went into effect. A massive panic swept the country—the fear that alcohol would be a thing of the past. The fear proved short-lived, even though the cafe was padlocked in 1926 for violating Prohibition, illegal liquor flowed during Prohibition, particularly in the Village.
Its radical history began in 1915, when a dinner was held in honor of birth-control activist Margaret Sanger, facing trial after fleeing to Europe for a year for putting out an eight-page birth control newspaper called The Woman Rebel. Sanger wrote about how people were going to use birth control whether the government approved or not and that it was a choice between having available birth control or infanticide and abortion. The charges against Sanger were dropped (see the Chelsea–Ladies’ Mile Tour).
That same year, on the eve of Emma Goldman’s trial for publicly explaining how to use a contraceptive, a banquet was held in her honor here. Rose Pastor Stokes handed out typewritten sheets with information on birth control, and the next day Emma served as her own lawyer in court. The judge ended up sentencing her to fifteen days in jail or a $100 fine and since Emma was morally opposed to paying a fine to the government, she served the time in the Queens County Jail.
In 1919, the Brevoort Hotel was one of the few venues in New York City willing to host a reception dinner for Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman on the eve of their deportation from the United States.
In 1917, Big Bill Haywood of the IWW had a meeting here to decide on a defense strategy for himself and 165 other union members who were indicted under the Espionage Act in Chicago for impeding the war effort by encouraging people to avoid the draft. This attempt to shut down the IWW resulted in long, punitive prison sentences and fines of $2.5 million. But Big Bill jumped bail and escaped to the Soviet Union, where he eventually died, sadly disillusioned after Lenin’s promises to organize worker-run factories never materialized.
In 1936, the American Labor Party (ALP) was founded at the Brevoort Hotel by union leaders Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky, as well as Barney Vladek of the Jewish Daily Forward. Set up as a vehicle for socialists to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president without having to pull the lever for the Democratic Party, the ALP later also gave birth to the Liberal Party from members who were anti-communist.
The hotel finally closed in 1948; it was felt that even after renovation, it would still fail new fire safety codes. In 1955, the current Brevoort Apartments were built. They went coop in 1981 and currently offer one-bedroom apartments for $1.6 million.
Remember that you are standing on land that once belonged to African slave Simon Congo, though the building is named for Hendrick Brevoort, a rich Dutchman who later owned eighty-six acres of land stretching north to Fourteenth Street. The Brevoort family name is on several buildings in the area. Simon Congo’s name is on none.
➏ 12 EAST EIGHTH STREET—Max Eastman lived here in a room on the second floor in long-time friend Eugen Bossevain’s apartment. Bossevain married Edna St. Vincent Millay, and lived in the “narrowest house in the Village” (see Greenwich Village II Tour). Max also lived in 1912 at 27 West Eleventh Street with his first wife, Ida Rauh, when she gave birth to their only child.
➐ WEINSTEIN HALL (5-11 University Place)—In the summer and fall of 1970, a series of dances were held at this NYU dormitory by the Gay Liberation Front and the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee. They were eventually cancelled because, as an NYU Vice Chancellor said, “[impressionable freshman]...could swing both ways.”
In September of that year, up to 100 people organized a sitin in the sub-basement of this building for seven days. The students above them voted to have the dances, but NYU ultimately prevailed: New York City’s Tactical Patrol Force (riot police) were sent in, and a crowd of four hundred people were kicked out of the building with twenty-nine getting arrested. Among the protester’s demands were free tuition for all gay people and other oppressed minorities, and an end to the teaching of myths and lies about gay people. Though this action didn’t immediately change NYU’s policy, it was part of the massive post-Stonewall uprising of the gay and lesbian community, which got more and more visible every month.
Though not the same building, this was the site where the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory moved its operations after the horrible 1911 fire (see Greenwich Village I Tour).
➑ THE GOLDEN SWAN (Southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street)—Memorialized by the current Golden Swan Garden, there used to be a real dive-bar here in a three-story building nicknamed “The Hell Hole.” Village regulars like Dorothy Day, Eugene O’Neill, Terry Carlin, Mary Heaton Vorse, Hippolyte Havel, and John Sloan would come for cheap drinks, a sawdust-covered floor, and free food. O’Neill incorporated some of the characters in the bar into his play The Iceman Cometh. A local gang, the Hudson Dusters, made this their hangout when they weren’t out robbing people or throwing ballots into the river on election day for the local Democratic Party. Prostitutes patronized the bar too and the elevated subway rattled past up and down Sixth Avenue. But it all came to an end after twenty years in 1922 and the building was demolished in 1928. In the 1980s this was an outdoor recycling center and in 2000 the current garden was created.
➒ WASHINGTON SQUARE CHURCH (135 West Fourth Street)—Built in 1860, this church also has a progressive history. Paul Abels, the pastor from 1973 to 1984, was the first openly gay minister in a major Christian denomination in the U.S. He began conducting wedding ceremonies for gay couples, and finally left the church over the national Methodist conference, which voted to bar gays and lesbians from the clergy. He died of AIDS in 1992.
The Harvey Milk School—now at the Hedrick Martin Institute at 2 Astor Place—for gay and lesbian high school students, started here.
In the 1960s, Reverend Finley Schaef donated $40,000 to the Black Panthers, and during the Sunday service the Panthers spoke to the parishioners.
Vietnam War resisters came here for draft counseling, and Daniel Berrigan and Jane Fonda spoke here. During a service where draft resisters openly declared their resistance, police entered the church and dragged them away. During the Gulf War, the militant and inspiring high school group, Students Against War, held their meetings here. In the 1980s, Mobilization for Survival, one of New York City’s leading antinuclear groups, had their offices here and most recently, in the mid-90s, the Committee in Support of the Zapatistas met here.
Washington Square Church—a site of activism to this day.
PHOTO BY PETER JOSEPH
The women’s movement had a very important event here in 1970, when abortion was still illegal in New York State. Before the Roe vs. Wade decision by the Supreme Court in 1973, New York women established their own test case, Abramowicz vs. Lefkowitz, which was being heard by the U.S. (Southern) District Court. However, Judge Edward Weinfield decided that women testify too “personally and emotionally,” and he wouldn’t allow those women who had had an abortion to testify in open court; they could only testify through deposition. The outraged women’s movement set up in the church to take live testimony with a large media presence, but an assistant district attorney interrupted the proceedings and everyone trooped down to the federal courthouse for a ruling by the judge.
Due to pressure from the women’s movement, the judge relented and women such as Grace Paley and Susan Brownmiller gave testimony. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the case did not become a national precedent because while a decision was pending, the New York State Legislature overturned the anti-abortion laws and New York State got abortion rights three years before the 1973 Supreme Court decision. The great radical women’s group Redstockings also had a speak-out at the church on abortion in 1969.
➓ MAX EASTMAN’S APARTMENT (118 Waverly Place)—Max lived here twice, the first time with his activistsister, Crystal Eastman, from 1909 to 1911. Max was one of the leading radicals and intellectuals in the Village, a lifelong Trotskyist, an editor of The Masses magazine and its successor, The Liberator. He was an enemy of Communists for most of his life, and he organized the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage and spoke all over the state about a woman’s right to vote. He married Ida Rauh (see Greenwich Village I Tour) in 1911 and, after they divorced in 1914, returned to this apartment where he paid $55 per month in rent.
The repression against the Left during WWI resulted in The Masses’ staff being brought up twice on charges of conspiring to obstruct the draft under the Espionage Act. Both trials resulted in hung juries, though the magazine was forced out of business after its mailing license was taken away. The Liberator was started by Max and Crystal Eastman in 1918, and for some reason was not attacked, though the Palmer Raids of 1920 led to four thousand arrests in thirty-three cities and one thousand deportations nationwide. Eastman wrote many books during his lifetime; he died in 1969 at the age of eighty-six.
⓫ BOB DYLAN (161 West “Positively” Fourth Street, west of Sixth Avenue)—Bob Dylan lived in a one-bedroom apartment here in 1961 (third floor in the rear), paying $80 per month for his very first New York City residence. He could finally afford his own place thanks to his new record deal with CBS Records, though his first album did not sell and he was almost dropped from the record label. In 1962 his girlfriend Suze Rotolo moved in with him, waiting until she turned 18 years-old so it would be legal and her family couldn’t interfere (they didn’t like or trust this scruffy-looking kid from Minnesota). They had met in 1961 at a 12-hour folk marathon at Riverside Church where Dylan had performed. Suze came from a left-wing family and was very active politically, always urging Dylan to be more political in his songwriting, something he generally avoided. They would have an on-again, offagain contentious relationship as Suze felt she became lost as Dylan’s fame and image grew to superstar status. They reunited and moved back in together in this apartment in 1963 but when Dylan went on tour with Joan Baez, leaving her behind, she attempted suicide here. They would break up for good in 1964 and Dylan would move out of this apartment that same year.
Around the corner on Jones Street is where Suze and Dylan would film the cover of his breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963). The image of the two young lovers walking arm in arm on a snow-covered street became a symbol of youth, the 1960s counter-culture, and Greenwich Village all rolled up in one. To match up the album cover with the street, just look for the distinctive Nine Jones Street building (blue on the album cover, and today still sporting the four squares on their sides above the second floor). The building went up in 1926. Songs on the album included Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. The last song includes some bitter lyrics about an earlier breakup with Suze and ironically, the couple would be temporarily broken-up when the album debuted. Suze Rotolo died of lung cancer in 2011 at the age of 67.In 1969 Dylan moved into a nearby townhouse at 92-94 Sullivan Street with his wife, Sara. They were married for a total of twelve years until 1977 and the song Sara on the Desire album is his unsuccessful attempt to win her back before she divorced him.
Jones Street itself has a very interesting working-class history. The settlement house Greenwich House was founded in 1902 at 26 Jones Street. It would eventually take over numbers 16, 18, 20, 22, and 24. Sixteen Jones Street still has a pottery store run by Greenwich House, though most of their operations are now on Barrow and Mercer Streets. Greenwich House was founded by Mary Simkhovitch to serve the neighborhood and the group of original founders included photographer Jacob Riis and Felix Adler (founder of the New York Society for Ethical Culture). Max Eastman’s sister, Crystal, while a law student at New York University, used to take her meals here.
At the turn of the twentieth century this was one of the most densely populated blocks in New York City, with a population of 1,400 (Irish, Italian and African-American). The street included five saloons, nine boardinghouses, and tenements with railroad apartments. The beautiful building at 32 Jones Street housed a factory. Needless to say, “the times they are a-changin’” and this is far from an affordable working-class neighborhood anymore.
⓬ THE LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY CENTER (208 West Thirteenth Street)—This building has been serving the LBGT community since 1983, offering everything you could think of from healthcare services to youth and senior citizen programs as well as a library/archives. An especially rich resource, it served as the founding location for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), ACT-UP, and Queer Nation. ACT-UP had many lively meetings here until outgrowing the center and moving to Cooper Union in the 1990s to accommodate over 1,000 people per week. The famous Keith Haring mural in the second-floor men’s room has been restored in what is now a second-floor meeting room after the building underwent a recent $9.2 million renovation. The building itself was erected (no pun intended) in stages from 1844 (center) to 1899 and previously served as a public school.
⓭ THE SITE OF THE MASSES MAGAZINE OFFICE (91 Greenwich Avenue)—The Masses was the bohemian magazine of the Village in the 1910s, ending its run in a building previous to the one now on the site. The Masses was a noncommercial publication that represented artists, Freudians, Marxists, free-love advocates, and all-around rebels. Though its circulation never rose above fourteen thousand, it had worldwide influence and featured the likes of John Reed writing about the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913, poet Claude McKay, still-relevant one-panel cartoons, and the works of artists like John Sloan and Art Young.
Two trials by the government and the suspension of mailing privileges shut it down. Its successor, however, The Liberator, grew to a circulation of sixty thousand. It featured,for instance, the articles that became John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. In a major error made by editor Floyd Dell, The Liberator is now famous for rejecting early works of soon-to-be-famous poet Langston Hughes. The Liberator had offices at 138 West Thirteenth Street.
⓮ GOLDEN STAIR PRESS (23 Bank Street)—This small publishing company was founded by Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, and Prentiss Taylor in 1931. It published Hughes’s poetry as well as a booklet on the Scottsboro Boys case. This 1850s building is now residential and in 2008 writer Malcolm Gladwell purchased a fourth-floor condominium for $1.5 million.
⓯ CONDOMANIA (351 Bleecker Street)—From 1991 through 2007 the store at this site sold over 200 varieties of condoms, many in humorous packages. They also had stores in California and if you study the history of birth control in this country, especially in Margaret Sanger’s era, you would never believe a store like this would ever exist. Condoms go back hundreds of years, originally made out of sheepskin and designed not for birth control but for protection against venereal disease.
Condoms became widespread in the U.S. after WWI, because American troops were coming down with syphilis at such high rates. The armed forces gave out millions of condoms during the war and, ironically, distributed a previously government-censored article by Margaret Sanger on birth control, after conveniently deleting her byline. The development of vulcanized rubber in the late nineteenth century made condoms more effective and convenient. By the 1930s, the fifteen chief makers of condoms were producing 1.5 million per day.
Condoms have been a big part of the gay rights movement. ACT-UP organized condom distribution at high schools in the early 90s, through its group YELL (Youth Education Life Line).
⓰ ABBIE HOFFMAN’S LIBERTY HOUSE (343 and 345 Bleecker Street)—In 1966, Abbie Hoffman came to New York for the second time to establish Liberty House, a crafts cooperative, set up by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of Mississippi. It sold crafts made by African Americans in the South, and split the money between those who made the crafts (imagine that happening under capitalism!) and the local SNCC branch. Abbie met his second wife, Anita, here; she volunteered to help with the store while she was a graduate student at Yeshiva University. They married in Central Park, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, popularizing a tradition of park weddings that continues to this day.
⓱ FORMER POLICE PRECINCT (135 Charles Street)—This building went up in the mid-1890s, and still bears remnants from its days as the Ninth, and then Sixth, Precinct. However, its most important history involves a police raid on a gay bar called the Snake Pit, at 211 West Tenth Street. More than 160 men were rounded up and brought to this precinct in 1970, eight months after the Stonewall riots.
They were not told what they were charged with, and not allowed to make phone calls. They did sing and chant, in solidarity, We Shall Overcome and Gay Power, Gay Power.
One man, Diego Vinales, was so frightened over his arrest that he jumped out the second-floor window of the precinct, impaling himself on the iron fence outside. Firemen used a blowtorch to take apart the fence to transport him to St. Vincent’s Hospital, the spikes still in his body. Initially in a coma, he was in the hospital for three months, where the NYC Police Department charged him with attempted escape.
The Gay Activists Alliance organized a march and vigil of five hundred people from the precinct to the hospital and finally to Sheridan Square. All charges were ultimately dropped against the men and the resulting publicity and protest caused the police department to transfer two hundred plainclothes officers from persecution of gay men to the Narcotics Division. Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, of the “Public Morals Section,” ordered both this raid and the Stonewall raid of 1969.
Across the street, 144 Charles Street, was the site of The Catholic Worker newspaper, the radical Catholic newspaper founded by Dorothy Day in 1933. It was here from 1935 to 1936, at which time it had a circulation of sixty-five thousand. (See the East Village II Tour.)
I used to take my tours to 681 Washington Street, the home of Judith’s Room bookstore from 1989 to 1995. Unfortunately Judith’s Room, one of the last women’s bookstores in NYC, closed. It had great books, t-shirts, magazines and readings, but was in a poor location. Also, thanks to the women’s movement of the 1960s, most bookstores now have a women’s section. But the sections are usually not as good as in an independent bookstore. Through the years, I was always saddened when, upon talking about this bookstore, I was asked by a woman, “What’s a women’s bookstore?” Were the 1960s that long ago?