Anastasia Hayes: Some Thoughts on Our Stroll through Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village, emphatically called “The Village,” is one of New York’s most iconic neighborhoods. Its meanings rub up against each other, sometimes uncomfortable as they stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Long a site of difference, this Otherness has radically shifted as the neighborhood has developed. A one-time refuge for those just arrived in the United States, it later blossomed into an American Bohemia. Walking around, you can read these changes in the scenery, even as their presence is threatened by gentrification. Caffè Dante, or “Dante” as it has now been re-dubbed, speaks to these changes, transitioning from a hub of Italian immigrant life to one of the Village’s trendiest bars. You are torn between admiration for this successful reinvention even as you ask yourself if its origins can really be traced to 1915. An institution bound up in Italian American history no longer has any direct connection to the community that birthed it. We are left to ask, what is in a name? Like the cafe, can we continue to call the Village as such if its makeup has completely changed? What should and does define the neighborhood?