GREENWICH VILLAGE

GREENWICH VILLAGE. Called Sapokanikan by the original native inhabitants who used the area mostly for fishing, Greenwich Village is one of the most vibrant and diverse neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan. During the 1630s, Dutch settlers called this area Noortwyck and used it for farms. It remained sparsely populated until the English conquered it in 1664. By 1713 it had evolved into a small village renamed Grin'wich. Because of its proximity to the commercial activities centered near the Hudson River, it began to take on a more commercial orientation after the American Revolution. A series of epidemics between 1803 and 1822 increased the area's population when residents from more crowded parts of the city fled north. By 1840 the area had been transformed from a small farming hamlet to a thriving business and residential center. Land developers bought up and divided the remaining farmland, and the marshy tracts were filled in.

Fashionable Greek Revival–style townhouses sprang up around Washington Square Park.

During the nineteenth century the Village was transformed not only by its affluent residents but also by the many educational and cultural institutions that flourished there. New York University was founded in 1836 and private galleries, art clubs, and learned societies abounded. The neighborhood began another transformation by the end of the nineteenth century when German, Irish, and Italian immigrants flooded into the area to work in the manufacturing concerns based in the southeastern part of the neighborhood. As these immigrants moved in, many single-family residences were subdivided into smaller units or demolished and replaced by tenements. By World War I, a range of political and cultural radicals and bohemians had moved in, and the neighborhood began to take on the character that has marked it since as a home to and focal point for diverse social, cultural, educational, and countercultural movements.

In the 1950s, the Village provided a forum for the beat generation and produced such literary luminaries as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The 1960s through the early 1970s marked the arrival of an openly gay community, hippies, antiwar activists, and an assortment of countercultural and underground movements. In 1969, police and gay residents met in a violent confrontation known as the Stonewall Rebellion. The next year members of a radical terrorist group, the Weathermen, blew themselves up while building a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. In the 1980s, the Village became a center for the mobilization against the AIDS epidemic. At the start of the twenty-first century, the Village is a major tourist mecca and continues to be one of the most dynamic and diverse neighborhoods in New York City.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Gold, Joyce. From Trout Stream to Bohemia: A Walking Guide to Greenwich Village History. New York: Old Warren Road Press, 1988.

Miller, Terry. Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way. New York: Crown, 1990.

Faren R.Siminoff

See alsoNew York City .

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

Greenwich Village, district of New York City, situated in lower Manhattan, during the colonial period was a separate village and later became an exclusive residential district. Paine wrote The Crisis in Greenwich Village, and Poe later lived there, but it was not until the end of the 19th century that it became famous for its bohemianism as an artistic and literary colony. Among those who lived in the Village, and among those who contributed to its long succession of little magazines, including The Little Review, The Masses, The Seven Arts, the Bohemian, the Pagan, the Quill, and the Playboy, were E.E. Cummings, Floyd Dell, Mabel Dodge, Max Eastman, Donald Evans, Emma Goldman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill, and Carl Van Vechten. The Greenwich Village Theatre was an outgrowth of the Provincetown Players. Authors and artists have continued among the area's residents, including Edward Albee and Gregory Corso, and among its recent playhouses has been the Caffe Cino, where plays of Lanford Wilson were produced. The Village has a lively nightlife, including jazz clubs, and is a great tourist attraction. Students from nearby New York University and other young people live there, but in large part Village residents are now professional people and business executives with some successful writers and artists.

Greenwich Village , residential district of lower Manhattan, New York City, extending S from 14th St. to Houston St. and W from Washington Square to the Hudson River. North of the main settlement of New York City in colonial times, in the 1830s it became an exclusive residential section, described in Henry James's novel Washington Square (1880). An influx of foreign immigrants settled there after 1880. Around 1910, the Village gained renown as the home and workshop of artists and of freethinkers. Barns, stables, and houses along the narrow, crooked streets were converted into studios, eating places, nightclubs, theaters, and shops, and the Village acquired a reputation for bohemianism. Interesting old buildings, many dating from the early and mid-1800s, remain, although there is an increasing number of modern apartment houses. Washington Square Park, with its McKim, Mead, and White arch (1892) is a popular meeting place. New York Univ.'s campus surrounds the park. Outdoor art exhibits are held in the Village.

Bibliography: See J. S. Ramirez, Within Bohemia's Borders (1990); C. Stansell, American Moderns (2000); R. Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams, Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910–1960 (2002); G. W. McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898–1918 (2005).

Greenwich2 Greenwich Village a district of New York City on the lower west side of Manhattan, traditionally associated with writers, artists, and musicians.