In 1955, the city dismantled the massive Third Avenue El. For decades, Greenwich Village had been the city’s hippest neighborhood, home to eccentrics and social experimentation. Now artists streamed east along Eighth Street, and onto St. Marks Place. “The walls of Jericho came tumbling down . . . extending New York’s Bohemia from river to river,” said the New York Times. In June 1956, the Greenwich Village Merchants Association took out a full-page ad in a Village paper that read, “Visit the Booming East Village!”—one of the first uses of the term “East Village” in print.
The neighborhood blinked in the brightness. “The old Italian, Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian neighborhoods began experiencing new sights and sounds—art galleries, espresso cafes and the throb of bongo drums,” the Times said. Two blocks north of St. Marks Place on Tenth Street, painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning took up residence. The influx turned the diverse, industrious community into a debauched, anarchic scene. To the extent that they were aware of them at all, the bohemians displayed flashes of contempt for the old residents’ staid sensibilities.
A radio star named Jean Shepherd served as the self-appointed voice for this growing underground. In 1956, Shepherd, a World War II veteran from Indiana, began broadcasting for WOR AM 710, a major New York City news, talk, and music station. From midnight to 5:30 a.m., Shepherd provided “a slow, casual, laid-back, free-floating association of ideas, philosophy, and bemused commentary.” He was speaking, he said, exclusively to the “Night People,” those who had “that wild tossing in the soul that makes them stay up till three o’clock in the morning and brood.”
For youths who had grown up on Howdy Doody, Shepherd’s trippy intellectualism was a revelation. In one classic show, he took ten minutes to describe the act of buying a cup of coffee. With high-low references to writers like Jack Kerouac and Nathanael West and to the uniform slacks of workingmen, he painted colorful portraits of characters in the café, and then told the story of the fights that broke out among them. In the process, he made societal observations like “College kids today are always on the side of drunks.”
Too many Americans were followers and phonies, Shepherd said. To prove his point, he asked listeners to go to their local bookstore and ask for a nonexistent book called I, Libertine by one Frederick R. Ewing. When asked for the publisher’s name, they were to respond, “Excelsior, you fathead!”
Soon, his listeners reported, those silly day people were banning the book or raving about it, though no such book existed. Because of the hubbub, Ballantine Books rushed out a trashy novel with that title, thrown together by Shepherd and science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon.
One night in mid-August 1956, as a gag, Shepherd started doing commercials for Sweetheart Soap, which was not actually a sponsor of the show. His boss did not appreciate the prank and fired Shepherd mid-broadcast. But before he went off the air, Shepherd told his listeners to meet for a “mill”—a proto–flash mob—at the recently burned-out Wanamaker Building near Astor Place. The once-bustling store, built in 1862 by A. T. Stewart—whose body was stolen from St. Mark’s churchyard in 1876—was now an empty shell.
A St. Marks Place resident named Ernie Hurwitz arrived at the Wanamaker Building at the appointed time. “Many, many people went,” says Hurwitz. “So many people showed up that the soap company called and asked the radio if they could actually be a sponsor and if they would hire him [Shepherd] back.”
Hurwitz had moved to the ground floor of no. 51 in 1951, splitting the monthly eighty-five-dollar rent with two friends from Far Rockaway High School. One went to NYU and one to Cooper Union. Hurwitz worked as an office boy in Queens during the day and took engineering classes at NYU in the evening. On top of their TV, the young men propped a sign: “Television is chewing gum for the eyeballs.” They played softball in an empty lot and sometimes drank coffee all night at the Limelight Coffee House. “When you’re young,” Hurwitz says, “sleep just gets in the way.”
The Night People’s soundtrack was jazz. The hot Second Avenue nightclub Stuyvesant Casino, where Dopey Benny Fein and other gangsters had spent late nights in the 1910s, had hosted Dixieland bands throughout the 1940s, and now was where the Night People went to see new forms of jazz. Hurwitz and his friends called the neighborhood the East Bank, but their slang term never caught on. They invited a drummer from another nearby jazz club, Cooper Square’s the Five Spot, to practice in the basement, and they let friends serving in the Korean War store their belongings next to the drum kit.
When these friends returned from war, they came to St. Marks to pick up their things and often stayed to party. Whenever the Hurwitz house ran low on booze, the roommates would invite over everyone they knew: “Everyone would walk in with wine or beer, and whatever the fourth person brought would go into the oven, which was our private stock.” When the cops were called to the scene to tell them to quiet down, Hurwitz would invite the officers to come over after work for a drink. Sometimes they did.
On Friday nights, the Polish National Home, or Dom (nos. 19–23), hosted dances. This community hall, once the site of German reveling and then of gangster warfare, was now home to mazurka music and buffets of stuffed cabbage. “The mothers of the young ladies would stand on the stoop,” recalls Hurwitz. “If they saw a young man walking down the street, they would say, ‘Come in! We have good food and dancing!’ Every time anyone said ‘good food,’ we were there in a minute. The downside was the chubby young ladies we then had to dance with. So we only did that a couple of times.”
A music student named Jerome Schwartz lived a few doors down from Hurwitz on the second floor of no. 73, and he too listened to Jean Shepard’s show. He frequented the Sagamore Cafeteria on the corner of Third Avenue, a Night People hangout. “People just sat there all day, twenty-four hours,” says Schwartz. “It was like that Hopper painting.”
Poet Ron Padgett writes about the Sagamore in his memoir of poet Ted Berrigan: “Nobody bothered anybody, so it was a good place to sit if you wanted to talk for hours, which we usually did. Good, that is, if you could ignore so much human misery around you.” Jack Kerouac referred to it as “the respectable bums’ cafeteria.”
Schwartz shared a floor and bathroom with a dentist. Upstairs lived the building’s owner with his son. “[The son] played this scary, dynamic piano music right through the night,” says Schwartz. “He was slightly psychotic. He’d play these arpeggios and real serious, gruesome, ghost-story music.”
Downstairs lived a pair of Martha Graham dancers. Two doors down lived a couple Schwartz always marveled at: “These two gentlemen with long coats and hats walking arm in arm around the block—such a picturesque couple. It was like they stepped out of the nineteenth century.”
The men were poet W. H. Auden and his partner Chester Kallman. By that point Auden had been famous for some twenty years. Born in York, England, in 1907, he studied Old English verse at Christ Church, Oxford. Wise and playful, he wrote in a huge variety of poetic forms and in a singular voice simultaneously funny and profound. His 1930 book Poems was hailed as the voice of a new generation.
Notoriously slobby, the great poet had moved into the roach-infested second floor of no. 77, a former abortion clinic, in 1952 and hung a Blake watercolor over the green-marble fireplace. When neighbors dropped by the filthy apartment for drinks, Auden served martinis in jelly jars.
Down the block, Slavic immigrants opted for vodka and beer, and lots of it. “Upstairs and all around it the older and younger guys would get falling-down drunk and come out swinging and taking their shirts off,” says Schwartz. “It was an entertainment zone. We’d go watch the fights. They’d have these massive feasts [at no. 57]. They’d all get very, very happy. They’d fall down the stairs. They never had any hot water. These heavy, greasy dishes—twenty, sixty people at a party—they’d have to wash them in cold water.”
To the Night People, the older residents registered as no more than colorful, anonymous people to rent from, to walk by, and to replace. When the Night People were sleeping off their hangovers, the day people were sweeping the stoops, taking out the trash, and heading off to their full-time jobs. In the Night People’s movie, the day people were extras.
And yet, the day people had many-layered memories of the street. At no. 57, for example, where the Poles had their hilarious parties, a fire had broken out just a few years earlier. On a warm June day in 1935, an orchestra was playing by the front windows as preparations were made for a wedding. About 250 people were milling around waiting for the ceremony to start. Some children were dancing and others were racing up and down the stairs. Someone flicked colored lights on and off. A spark shot out, and the chuppah, under which sat the bride-to-be, Miss Pearl Sokolower of Houston Street, went up in flames.
Northeast corner of St. Marks Place and the Bowery one midnight in 1942. Photograph by Marjory Collins for the WPA. Library of Congress.
Pandemonium ensued. Mothers ran to find their children. The bridegroom made a mad dash for the bride and carried her to safety. The orchestra threw their instruments out the window in an attempt to save them, and a fleeing bridesmaid was hit by a falling bass drum. Several people jumped out the second-floor window. Those lucky enough to land on the first-floor awning were not seriously injured. A twenty-one-year-old guest from Brooklyn rushed in and out of the building through the flames saving children. He died from injuries sustained during his rescues.
The Night People saw no. 57 as a clown car—a place of lighthearted drunkenness and chaos. The day people looked at the same building and remembered that gruesome day in 1935. When the day people passed by no. 82, they recalled how in 1938, emergency workers carried eighty-seven-year-old resident Toney Scavoni out of his collapsing home and into the Men’s Emergency Shelter at no. 63. When they looked at no. 102, they remembered it in 1946, when the police caught three hold-up men with eight robbery victims lined up in the back of a candy shop, a stolen car idling out front.
The Night People knew none of this history. To them, the buildings represented only cheap, raw space for poetry readings and art galleries, plenty of room in which to be young.
Nor did the Night People take particular notice of the children they passed on the street. Now seventy-one, Bert Zackim moved to no. 126 in 1944 and as a boy attended P.S. 122 on First Avenue. He kept the apartment, which originally rented for $37.15 a month, for fifty years. During his childhood the block was full of bars, along with assorted small businesses like a fur shop, candy store, plumber’s, and a grocery store at no. 99. Once, Zackim and his father were hired to evict a tenant from no. 13. The tenant’s apartment was like nothing Zackim had ever seen. It had a four-poster bed with a red canopy and huge candlesticks. In the kitchen were two huge Afghan dogs, finches—“bird shit all over the place”—and a religious calendar showing Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. The neighborhood, Zackim says, was “Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Italian, some Puerto Ricans or blacks. . . . They all had something in common: poverty.”
Arnold Feinblatt, of Romanian and Russian Jewish heritage, now a senior citizen and history teacher who has come out of retirement to teach immigrants, also attended P.S. 122 in the forties. His parents had moved from Brooklyn to Sixth Street after he was born. After the death of his father, Feinblatt landed in a children’s home until he moved in with his grandmother on Seventh Street. When his mother was able to care for him again, she rented an apartment at no. 10, in 1944, for twenty-three dollars a month. The family went on public assistance, and she eventually got a job working as a secretary for the health department. Once in a while Feinblatt’s mother would drop him off at a synagogue to say a prayer for his dead father. Mary’s Grocery, between Second and Third Avenue on the south side of the street, would cash their welfare checks and keep a tab when they went to pick up butter or bread.
“I remember the terrible smells in the summertime,” Feinblatt says.
On Third, there would be alcoholics stumbling along the avenue throwing up. There were no real parks nearby. Tompkins was about it. As a little boy I would go to Cooper Union. There was grass and trees there and a statue of Peter Cooper. I was reluctant to eat, maybe because of the children’s home. But for some reason if my grandmother took me to the statue I would eat. There was open space and I could chase the pigeons. One day, while we were there, a policeman came by. He was drunk. He took the crate my grandmother had brought to sit on and threw it into the street and chased us out of the park.
Polish boys on St. Marks Place read about world events, probably in front of no. 104, 1939. Collection of the author.
Walking home from school, Feinblatt says, “I had a choice between getting beaten up by the Italian kids or the Polish kids”:
You’d just run like crazy. Once my brother came home from a fight with a kid named Walter covered in bruises. Because I was the big brother, I went and found Walter and beat him up. I remember I was pounding his head into the sidewalk when he said to me, “You dirty Jew.” I froze. I didn’t even know until that moment what religion Walter was. That kind of anti-Semitism came out every once in a while. After Christmas, my grandmother would tell me not to go near the Christmas trees. The other kids would start them on fire, and she was afraid I’d be pushed in.
Another P.S. 122 boy, Joey Dick, was born in 1941 at no. 54 to Manny and Bea Dick. He remembers Gypsy knife fights in the middle of the street, and constant danger. “I was the short fat kid,” says Dick. “I took my life in my hands to walk to Sixth Street for Hebrew School.” Classmates at Junior High School 60 made zip guns out of antennas they’d break off parked cars. The aerial would be bent around a wooden frame, to which would be added a thumbtack, a rubber band, and a .22 bullet. The zip guns had to be fired from a distance using a trip wire, because otherwise they had a tendency to explode in the shooter’s hand. The young militias of J.H.S. 60 would bring their homemade weapons over to Stuyvesant, the elite math and science high school on Fifteenth Street, to hold up its students for their lunch money.
Dick’s parents had started their sewing factory at no. 27 but moved a block over around the time he was born. They expanded into fabricating coffee filters and other products, like the “lemon wedge bag” for tea. The company, called the Royal Urn Bag Company (today, Urnex), lasted at no. 54 into the 1970s. Dick shopped at Chester’s grocery store at no. 40, went to Dr. Silverman at no. 57, and played stickball in the empty lot at the corner, where a Chase Bank now stands. “When the police came, you’d hide the bat in the sewer,” he says. “Otherwise they’d hit you with it and break it. Same with playing cards on the stoop—if they caught you, they’d smack you with a billy club. And your parents thought that was perfectly okay. It was a different time.”
Children ran through the streets without supervision, peeking through the windows at the local bars and pool halls. “We played in the street all the time,” says Feinblatt. “One winter, maybe ’48, a blizzard buried the cars in snow. We walked the length of the street on top of the cars, because the snow had filled in the space between them.”
If they got injured, the kids would visit Estroff Pharmacy on Second Avenue, where the pharmacist, with his big, bushy, white mustache, white hair, and long white coat, would patch up the child and then make a note to charge the parents for the cost of the bandages the next time they shopped there.
Thanks to the underground tunnels dug by gangsters in the twenties, the children of the forties had caves to explore. Feinblatt remembers: “Many buildings were connected underground. You could go from one basement to another.” And from one roof to another, too: “The Polish National Home had fire escapes. Once when I was ten or eleven we climbed up the fire escapes and in through the window to the bar. We drank beer. But it was warm, and so not as much fun as we thought it would be.”
Movies at the St. Mark’s Cinema cost sixteen cents. Feinblatt and his brother went there to watch hours of Westerns, cartoons, and Abbott and Costello movies. His mother called St. Mark’s “The Itch,” because there were vermin in the seats. Nicer was the Loews Commodore (later the Fillmore East), where patrons watched twenty-five-cent second-run movies like King Kong.
Al Jolson even performed there. Feinblatt and his family waited in line for hours. “We sat down in the orchestra,” Feinblatt recalls. “Al Jolson came out. I said, in too loud a voice, ‘But he’s not black!’ People around me laughed. I didn’t know why they were laughing. To me, Al Jolson was a black man. I didn’t know about blackface.”
The Feinblatts ate waffles at the Second Avenue Griddle diner on the corner of St. Marks and Second Avenue, and on summer days they killed hours at the Sagamore over a single piece of watermelon because the eatery had air conditioning, advertised in giant letters on a banner out front.
A few doors down, the Aesthetic Press printing shop at no. 10 would sometimes throw out boxes of irregular paper. “We’d grab piles of this stuff,” says Feinblatt.
You could make airplanes or draw on it. But I decided we should sell it. So we’d take stacks and approach people on St. Marks: “Do you want to buy some paper?” we’d ask, holding out these ragged stacks of ill-shaped paper. They would look at us, these little urchins, and they would give us a nickel or a penny. We thought we were entrepreneurs, but of course we were really begging. When we’d made enough, we would buy a Spaldeen ball on Second Avenue, and we would play until we lost it down the sewer. Kids can make a playground anywhere.
Between the Day and Night people, there were endless resentments and fights over who deserved to be there. “The city has never been so uncomfortable, so crowded, so tense,” wrote E. B. White in 1949. Schwartz says control of the neighborhood started shifting more rapidly in the fifties, as the old working-class Slavs lost ground to the poets and artists. Counterculture groups of the East Village and the pretenders who arrived daily to join the party jockeyed for space. “They all ended up on that blanket on the corner of St. Marks Place,” Schwartz says. “We called them all ‘Beatniks.’”
