By Catherine Revland
How do you write a story about an icon in 800 words? Author Michael D. Minichiello explains how he does it in the introduction to West Village Originals: An Oral History of New York City’s Most Unique Neighborhood. His challenge is “To find the ‘hook,’ a defining theme, and present each person to be as interesting as they are; in other words, to do them justice.” The Originals then turn around and do justice to the quality of their neighborhood. When he asks community activist Ethel Paley about what it’s been like to be a resident of the Village for sixty years, she tells him, “It’s probably the second-best place to live in the whole wide world.”
“What’s first?” he asks.
“That would be Paris.”
Paris on the Hudson
“There was something about that curve of Commerce Street that brought me to my knees.” —Nancy Weber, writer
What is it about the West Village that makes it so desirable? The character of its streets is one of many irresistible draws. Claiming that “disordered streets cause disordered minds,” in 1811 the City fathers passed a law that leveled every hill and valley in Manhattan, drained its waterways, and instituted a rigid, right-angled grid of numbered streets. To this day that parallel grid above 14th Street draws the eye out to the chill of infinity, but the streets of the Village still meander as they were and as they please, providing a feeling of enclosure that Weber calls “this little pocket of coziness and warmth.”
Small-Town Scale
“We envisioned a mile-long, theatrical extravaganza snaking through the Village”
—Ralph Lee, mask-maker and puppeteer
In the mid 1970s, a newcomer to the West Village looked out of her window one night and saw an extraordinary scene—dancing puppets seven feet high, music and revelry, a crowd hooting from a horse-drawn wagon leaving a trail of hay down the street. It was like walking out a door and finding yourself in the Middle Ages.
“Things were more open then,” says Lee, founder of the Village Halloween Parade. “So many residents along the route would open their doors, let us set up lights, and put our ‘creatures’ on their roof tops. It was wonderful.” But when the size of the parade grew to thousands, then millions, the route was moved to Sixth Avenue. Crushed by its massive scale, the magic of the original vision was gone.
Compatible Souls
“I always thought I couldn’t really have made it uptown.
—Calvin Trillin, humorist and writer
Many residents of New York City have arrived from small towns, drawn to a place they’d never been that, somehow, they knew was home. “I think the Village is full of people like me,” says Trillin, who left his hometown of Kansas City and eventually gravitated to Grove Street. “It’s more like where we came from than the rest of Manhattan because it’s mostly low-rise. You can actually see the sun and have a next-door neighbor instead of someone you just see in the elevator.”
But the small-town folks who settle the West Village are rarely small-minded. They are the “irregulars”—artists, independent thinkers, justice-seekers, movement-makers—who march to a different drummer or to no drummer at all. What binds these diverse people is their fortitude, compelled to follow their own path. “I worked tremendously hard to honor the people and the streets of a fantastic neighborhood,” says musician David Amram about his composition, Greenwich Village Portraits. “And not as an ego trip but as a thank-you note for being alive and to all the people who are no longer here.”
“Tremendously hard.” That pretty much sums up the lives of artists in every medium, and they also will tell you it never gets easier. “If it was easy,” says an Original, “everybody would want to be one.”
The author ends each interview with a question: “How has the neighborhood changed?” Many of them express disappointment over the vast changes that have occurred over the years, which is natural. But they also confess that there isn’t any other place they would want to be, or any other place that would let them be who they are. As playwright and actor Charles Busch admits, “The changes are a small price to pay to live in heaven.” But the most colorful example of then-versus-now comes from Westbeth photographer David Plakke:
“When I first moved here, I’d come home at three in the morning and there would be transvestite hookers on the corner, beautiful seven-foot guys in high heels and short skirts. They would ask me, ‘Hey, baby, how you doing? Are you lonely yet?’ Where did they go? Now I come home at three a.m. and it’s screaming drunks from New Jersey. It just ain’t the same!”
If you love this neighborhood and the captivating, big-hearted people who live here, you will love this book.
“I REGRET PROFOUNDLY THAT I WAS NOT BORN IN GREENWICH VILAGE.” Author Michael Minichiello pays homage to John Lennon’s love of the neighborhood. Credit: MDM Graphic Design, Inc.
