Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village, a neighborhood on Manhattan's lower West Side, was a separate community until New York City's northern outskirts reached and passed the district in the early national period.Through much of the late nineteenth century, Greenwich Village was a mixed‐class neighborhood. Mansions of elite families were situated around Washington Square; middle‐ and working‐class homes lined the irregular streets west and south of the square.

During the Progressive Era, Greenwich Village achieved fame as America's Bohemia. By the early 1910s, a modernist mood was challenging all artistic and political orthodoxies. Greenwich Village, long home to well‐known American intellectuals, attracted many of the era's leading cultural radicals: artists, writers, poets, feminists, and anarchists (often overlapping categories). Between 1912 and 1917, these counterculturalists sponsored the Armory Show; organized a pageant in support of striking workers in Paterson, New Jersey; founded and participated in the avante‐garde Provincetown Players, Mabel Dodge's radical salon, and Heterodoxy (a feminist club); published the socialist magazine Masses; and held bacchanalian costume balls in the tradition of Paris's Left Bank. By 1917, Greenwich Village's association with free thought and free love had made the district a prime tourist attraction.

Greenwich Village's iconic status as a center of cultural radicalism endured through the years in part because its residents repeatedly updated the “Village” style in response to the latest assault on orthodoxy. This ever‐evolving rebellion is exemplified by the Beat Village of the 1950s, the Hippie Village of the 1960s, and the high visibility of gay and lesbian rights activists following the so‐called Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, when police raided a Village club popular with homosexuals.
See also Fifties, The; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Modernist Culture; Socialism; Sixties, The; Socialist Party of America.

Bibliography

Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, eds., 1915: The Cultural Moment, 1991.
Rick Beard and Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, eds., Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture, 1993.
Christine Stansell , American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, 2000.
Gerald W. McFarland , Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898-1918, 2001.

Gerald W. McFarland