By Alan Wexler
Last month we published the first half of this article, covering the earlier authors. The article continues this month with 20th century authors.
A passerby today would be amazed at the sheer number of 20th century literary luminaries who once called the West Village their home.
Sinclair Lewis, author of Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry, resided at an address known now as 69 Charles Street, off Greenwich Avenue. Eighteen years before he won the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature, Lewis was a journalist writing for what would be today called “left wing” magazines. In 1912, his first published novel, Hike and the Aeroplane, an adventure story for younger readers, appeared while he was living at what was then 10 Van Nest Place. At that time, the street we know today as Charles Street had a split identity. The north side was Van Nest Place, with its own street numbers, and the south side was Charles Street, with street numbers not related to those on the opposite side. By 1936, the north side was renamed Charles Street and house numbers reordered consistently with the original Charles Street addresses across the street. Coincidentally, for his debut novel, Lewis also used a different name: Tom Graham. In 1917, Lewis also penned a Saturday Evening Post short story, entitled Hobohemia, poking fun at the lifestyle of the artists and writer types of Greenwich Village of that time. It was later staged as a play.
In 1917, a recent Vassar College graduate named Edna St. Vincent Millay moved to Greenwich Village where she embarked on a literary career that would make her one of the most widely read poets in America. At one time she lived at 75 1/2 Bedford Street, a house so tiny it was not only typical of the small buildings of Greenwich Village but also still stands today as the narrowest house in Manhattan. Nearby, stood a former brewery and one-time tobacco warehouse which, in 1924, Millay and some of her literary friends turned into the Cherry Lane Theatre. The Cherry Lane staged the early works of writers like Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill, as well as the New York premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and spawned dozens of other playhouses that flourished during the early years of the Off-Broadway theater scene.
Millay’s Greenwich Village roots extend back to before her birth. Just before that 1892 event in Rockland, Maine, her uncle’s life had been saved at a Greenwich Village hospital, St. Vincent’s, and in gratitude her parents bestowed that middle name upon her.
Not only are the former homes of well-known writers to be found on many of the quaint and narrow streets of Greenwich Village, but also there are a fair number of bars and other hangouts to be found, some of which can still be visited today. A 1880s era bar over in the West Village, once habituated by seafarers and longshoremen from a once-active nearby waterfront, the White Horse Tavern, can boast some literary luminaries among its now departed clientele. Among the most well-known was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who, on his last tour of America,
embarked on his final drinking spree at the White Horse, and died soon after at St. Vincent’s Hospital due to complications of what doctors termed “an alcoholic insult to the brain.”
The novelist most identified with the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, was a White Horse regular during his days in Greenwich Village, and reportedly was expelled from the establishment on several occasions for becoming excessively drunk. He memorializes the experience with a mention in his 1965 novel, Desolation Angels, of seeing the graffiti scrawl: “Go Home Kerouac” on the wall of the toilet.
History and real estate are inseparably linked in understanding any New York City neighborhood. By the 1970s, Greenwich Village, although largely protected from wholesale demolition by landmark preservation laws, could not be protected by the rising tide of gentrification that has inundated other once less than fashionable areas.
Although many buildings and streets look about the same as they did more than a century ago, Greenwich Village rents and real estate prices have soared so that once again, as it had been in the early decades of the 19th century, it has become an enclave for the upper class. For the most part, the artists and writers who live in Greenwich Village tend to be only the most successful and affluent. But stroll through its byways, visit some of the bars and other haunts of Village writers of days gone by, and you still get a palpable sense of what was once here and the literary visions it inspired.
Alan Wexler is the author of The Encyclopedia of Exploration and The Atlas of Westward Expansion, both published by Facts On File. Mr. Wexler has also
written hundreds of historical entries for Microsoft’s online encyclopedia, Encarta, as well as several joke books for Zebra Press.
This article is reprinted with the permission of The Greenwich Village Literary Review, an online literary publication, whose writers and editor meet once a month at the Jefferson Market Library.
