Greenwich Village, known simply as “the Village” is located on the lower western side of Manhattan, bordered by 14th Street to the north, Houston Street to the south, Broadway to the east, and the Hudson River to the west. While Greenwich Village started out as a center for Bohemian and avant-garde culture that underwent extreme gentrification (all four zip codes in the Village were ranked among the ten most expensive in the United States in 2014, according to Forbes), the Village is perhaps best known for practically birthing the modern LQBT movement. I was fortunate enough to sit down and interview Eugene, a gay man who lived in the Village from 1973, where a man through a bottle at him for marching in a gay pride march, until 1984, when AIDS ravaged the neighborhood.
Greenwich Village started out as a prosperous residential area during colonial times. During the early 1800’s, Greenwich was housed New York State’s first penitentiary, Newgate Prison, which was located on the Hudson River at West 10th Street. On March fifth, 1911, Greenwich tragically became the site of one of the deadliest and most infamous industrial disasters in the history of New York City: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. 146 people—mostly young girls who were Jewish and Italian immigrants—died either from the fire, smoke inhalation, or by intentionally jumping to their deaths from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. Many of the deaths could have been prevented if the owners had not locked the doors to the stairwell and exists in an attempt to stop workers from stealing. However, the fire did lead to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards, which may have saved countless lives.
Greenwich Village has traditionally been an enclave for avant-garde and alternative culture. Throughout the twenties and thirties The Village became a budding artistic community, aided by the presence of small presses, art galleries and vaudeville theaters. Cherry Lane Theater, located in Greenwich and established in 1924, is New York City’s oldest continuously running theater. The immigration of musicians, poets, writers, and artists during the late forties and fifties contributed to the rise of the Abstract Expressionists and The New York School of Poets. During the fifties many Beatniks, seeking to escape oppressive social conformity, migrated to Greenwich Village (as well as San Francisco), preceding the hippie scene of the next decade and influencing writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Greenwich Village supported a vibrant music scene with clubs like the Village Vanguard, which hosted big-name jazz acts. The folk rock movement has roots in the Village, where the members of The Mamas and the Papas met, and folk icons like Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan lived. Many other popular icons started and/or routinely played in Greenwich Village Nightclubs, such as Jimi Hendrix, Barbra Streisand, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Velvet Underground. Unfortunately and ironically, the cultural impressiveness of the Village has increased the desirability and popularity of the neighborhood, which in turn has contributed to rising rents, leading the types of people who popularized the neighborhood in the first pace to emigrate in search of cheaper places to live.
The influx of artists, writers, musicians and the like created a very progressive culture in Greenwich Village. The Village’s liberal environment paved the way for the immigration of a sizable homosexual population. Greenwich’s liberal environment and the various social movements of the late sixties became catalysts for the Stonewall riots, widely regarded as the most important event leading to the gay liberation movement. On Saturday, June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn. Both the patrons of the Inn and the crowd gathering outside, fed up by the continued police harassment of homosexuals, took a stand and a riot broke out. Protesters, enraged that one of the only places that they could be themselves was raided, began taunting and throwing objects at the police, who eventually beat the crowd away. The next night, even more people gathered outside of Stonewall and rioted, until the police dispatched a riot-control squad to disperse the crowd.
Over the weekend I was fortunate enough to interview Eugene, who lived in The Village from 1973 until 1984. While Eugene was not present for the Stonewall riots, he gave me some insight into the gay culture of Greenwich Village. Gene described the Village as being very liberating, “you could go to Christopher Street and be a human being, and hold your boyfriends hand”. In addition, Gene very frankly mentioned all of the opportunities for anonymous sex. Because of his conservative, catholic, Queens upbringing, this was a very exciting, strange, and intimidating place. Gene characterized the dichotomy between living in Queens and living in the Village as being “like he grew up in Kansas and was now in Oz”. In order to put myself in his shoes, Gene instructed me to “imagine that only place in the whole world that you could meet a girl was in a dark bar in a strange neighborhood,” because outside the Village, there were no open gay relationships. The fact that being openly gay was not accepted anywhere else contributed heavily to the gay culture of “bars, booze and sex,” as Gene put it. “It was liberating,” Gene remembers, “but not terrible healthy”.
The gay culture of the Village during the 70’s, Gene recalls, revolved around bars and restaurants. Jeanne’s Patio, on Greenwich Street, was a “step above a diner,” that served as a gay gathering place with a gay staff and welcoming atmosphere. Gene would also frequent the International Stud, a bar where a whole act of Harvey Firesteins’s Torch Song Trilogy takes place. Gene remembers the Stud, and a number of other bars, had a backroom where people would have sex. Gene also briefly mentioned that he and his friends would often frequent 9th Circle, and Boots and Saddles, both located in the Christopher Street area. In addition to bars and restaurants, gay culture in the Village also revolved around the Gay Activist Association (GAA), a political and social organization of which Gene was a member, that organized protests, harassed politicians at City Hall and at their homes, and pushed for changes in the law.
As our interview progressed, I began to ask Eugene questions about himself in order to get a better idea of who he, a Village resident of twelve years, was. Gene told me that he grew up in a very catholic family in Queens, where he attended catholic school for thirteen years. When he came out of the closet, Gene left the Catholic Church. After ten years of alcoholism, Gene went into Alcoholics Anonymous, which helped him overcome his alcoholism and rekindled his spirituality. After trying once more and failing to find a place in the Catholic Church (because “being gay in the Church was a paranoid existence), Gene found The Church of St. Luke in the Fields, an Episcopal Church located in Greenwich Village. While Gene no longer lives in the Village, he is an active member of St. Luke’s, where he is currently in the process of becoming a deacon. The Episcopalian Church, according to Gene, is one of the most progressive and excepting of all the Christian Churches, and St. Luke’s had the first openly gay bishop of all the mainline churches in New York City. In his professional life, Gene teaches the deaf and blind to travel, works as a sign language interpreter and a low vision specialist, teaches advanced topics of orientation and mobility (an online, graduate level course) at Salus University, and teaches a similar graduate level course once a year in Bangkok. Gene is unmarried, has not had a partner in “a long time”,” after losing the “love of his life” and dating on and off.
As my interview with Eugene winded down, I asked him why he left the Village. Gene responded that his time in the Village ended with the AIDS crisis. In the early 80’s HIV desolated the gay population of the Village. The most emotional part of my interview came when I asked Gene if he had know anyone with AIDS, expecting that he knew a handful of people with the virus. “I have a list of 53 friends that are dead because of AIDS,” he responded, “and that is a relatively small list”. Gene, who “was never one to get laid much,” left the Village when the growing paranoia about sex took a toll on the social activities of the Village.
Demographically, Greenwich Village in general has a population of approximately 22,785, the overwhelming majority of which are white. According to city-data.com, the median rent in Greenwich Village in 2011 was $1,788. The average household size is 1.7 people, and the percent of married couples is 23.4%. The percentage of foreign-born residents is 17.6%, less than half of the New York City average of 37.2%. Compared to the New York average, Villagers tend to have higher education, with a high average of Bachelor’s, Master’s, professional school, and doctorate degrees (Gene, with a doctorate in health administration falls in this category). The village is also, not surprisingly, home to the largest gay and lesbian population in New York City.
The Village remains mostly a residential neighborhood, characterized by historic and attractive brownstones, and some of Manhattan’s best restaurants and bars. The most popular school in the area is P.S. 41; an elementary school founded in 1867 and ranked a perfect ten on Greatschools.org. The New School, located mostly in Greenwich, is known for their “student-directed curriculum,” which does not require general education courses and encourages students to explore before focusing on a major. Also in the neighborhood is NYU, which has been there since the 1830’s, and owns most of the area and buildings around Washington Square Park. The school’s expansion has lead to conflicts with preservationists trying to preserve the Bohemian culture of the neighborhood. Washington Square Park is both the center of the Village, and the largest and most prominent of its various parks, known for the marble arch, modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and the large fountain and wading pool renovated by Robert Moses in 1934. After St. Vincent’s Hospital, the primary admitting hospital for those injured in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, closed down in 2010, Lenox Hill Hospital opened an emergency medical center on 7th Avenue between 12th Street and 13th Street and became the primary healthcare center for the neighborhood. Traveling to and from all of these places in the Village is made possible by extensive public transportation, as Greenwich is serviced by the A C E trains, the B D F M trains, the L train, and the 1 2 3 trains in addition to the M5, M7, M11, M14, and M20 buses.
The very last question I asked Eugene was “how much do you think the world has changed since your time in the Village?” Gene responded by telling me that he “ has changed more than the world,” and asked me to guess how many LQBT people have passed us by during our lengthy interview. “While society has changed and people are more excepting,” he said, “it is still uncomfortable, and even dangerous, in most places for a gay couple to hold hands”. This is the very reason that I was interested in profiling Greenwich Village; for a time, it was the only place where people like my friend Eugene could go to feel they were completely welcome, completely free, and complete human beings.
