History

Pre-Revolutionary War

It’s hard to picture modern-day Greenwich Village, with its constant hum of construction and pedestrian foot traffic, as a swampy marshland. Prior to European settlement, however, the area was indeed a swampland and Lenape fishing ground ¹. The Lenape named the area Saponikan, or “land where tobacco grows”. Aside from serving as a fishing ground, the area also served as a trading post and docking point for nomadic tribes due to its proximity to a stream ².

The stream that the Lenape fished in later became known as Minetta Brook. The brook ran from Union Square to the Hudson River, but was rerouted by to allow for further development in the area. Interestingly, water from the stream can still be seen running underground when some of the manhole covers in Greenwich Village are lifted ³.

Greenwich Village’s days as a marshland came to an end when the Dutch, the first immigrant group to arrive in what would later become New York City, settled the area in the 1630s. They cleared the land in order to make it usable for farming and pasture, renaming the area Noortwyck, meaning “north of the city” since it was north of the New Amsterdam settlement. The Dutch settlers, however, were not solely rich white Protestants. The Dutch West Indies Company also sold farm lots in the area to freed African slaves, the first African landholders in the New World ⁴.

In 1664, the English took over New Amsterdam, renaming it New York City. The British refashioned Noortwyck into a country haven for wealthy citizens, filled with idyllic mansions ⁵. In the 1670s, a British citizen, Yellis Mandeville, moved into the area and renamed it Greenwijck, or Pine District, after the village in Long Island he previously resided. Thus, Greenwich Village was born ⁶.

Post-Revolution and Nineteenth Century

Greenwich Village emerged from the Revolutionary War relatively unscathed due to being a suburb of the city. After the war, it primarily remained the haven for the wealthy it was before the war. In April 1797, the New York Common Council purchased eight acres of land near Minetta Brook for use as a potter’s field, land that would eventually become present-day Washington Square Park ⁷.

Throughout the early nineteenth century, cholera and yellow fever epidemics caused Greenwich Village’s population to boom, as people escaped the disease and filth of the city center for the seclusion of Greenwich Village. Between 1825 and 1840, the population of the neighborhood increased by 400 percent due to the epidemics, as well as due to the area becoming increasingly fashionable ⁸. Farms were divided into smaller and smaller plots of land, hills were flattened, and Minetta Brook was rerouted and buried underground to make way for further development. Most notably, the neighborhood’s famous row houses were built during this time, many of which still exist as landmarks today ⁹.

In 1825, the potter’s field was closed, and then in 1826, it was leveled to create the Washington Military Parade Ground, a training space for local volunteer militias. The Parade Ground made the area surrounding the square even more desirable, and during this period, the houses along Washington Square North known as “The Row” were built as residences for the city’s elite. In 1849 and 1850, the Parade Ground underwent renovations, rendering its design closer to that of modern-day Washington Square Park. In the early 1870s, the land was taken over by the New York City Parks Department and further redesigned. In 1892, the park’s famous arch was erected and modern-day Washington Square Park was officially born ¹⁰.

In 1836, the neighborhood also began to grow due to the founding of New York University, which still owns much of the neighborhood today. The students at the university contributed to the cultural development of the neighborhood, as literary salons, libraries, theaters, and art galleries popped up around the area. This further attracted the wealthy, cultured elite to the neighborhood. These elite were immortalized in novels such as Henry James’ Washington Square and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence ¹¹.

By the latter quarter of the 19th century, Greenwich Village began to transform with the arrival of immigrants. Immigrants from France, Italy, Ireland, and Germany arrived in New York City and found work in breweries, warehouses, and coal and lumber yards along the Hudson River, as well as manufacturing lofts and warehouses on the outskirts of the neighborhood. Larger homes and buildings were divided up to form lodging homes, or demolished altogether to build tenements. Factories, such as the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, were being constructed along the waterfront. This transformation led property values to drastically drop as the wealthier denizens of the neighborhood moved uptown to the area surrounding Central Park ¹².

With the arrival of immigrants came the arrival of one of the most important cultural movements in Greenwich Village’s history: Bohemianism. The Bohemian movement originally began in 1850s Paris amongst the poets, artists, and musicians of the city. Bohemianism was essentially a rebellion against European bourgeois conventions. Rather than chasing wealth, monetary success, and marriage, Bohemians claimed to chase meaning and spiritual awakening through living simple lives focused on creative pursuits. Bohemians tended to be radical, liberal thinkers, which made the movement especially popular amongst immigrant communities because many immigrants left their homelands due to oppressive governments and thus despised any conventional or conservative thought ¹³.

The Twentieth Century

As mentioned above, by the start of the twentieth century, Greenwich Village had become a center of Bohemianism. Due to its low rent prices, diverse, tolerant community, and relative seclusion of its winding side streets, the neighborhood became attractive to those on the fringes of society. Artists and writers flooded into the neighborhood, while art galleries and small presses displayed and published their work. Experimental theaters put on plays too shocking and cutting-edge to play on Broadway. Row houses were further divided into artists’ studios and flats to make room for all these Bohemians, while during the 1920s, speakeasies and nightclubs popped up to entertain and inspire these artists. ¹⁴.

The Tenth Street Studio, opened in 1857, housed the first architecture school in the United States as well as the studios of artists such as Winslow Homer and Richard William Hubbard. Meanwhile, the Hotel Albert, opened in the 1880s, housed everyone from literary greats Mark Twain and Walt Whitman to artistic geniuses Pollock, Warhol, and Dali. The Provincetown Players and the Living Theatre were theatre groups based in the Village. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O’Neill were both notable members of the Provincetown Players ¹⁵. Millay famously resided at the narrowest house in New York City, 75 and 1/2 Bedford Street, from fall 1923 to spring 1925. As an openly bisexual woman, Millay also contributed to the Village’s early reputation as a haven for LGBTQ people ¹⁶. On West 8th Street, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened the Whitney Museum for modern American art, while The New School for Social Research, known as the “University in Exile,” was founded by immigrant thinkers such as Einstein and Arendt on West 12th Street ¹⁷.

In 1938, the Village was once again at the forefront of progress when the nation’s first desegregated nightclub, Cafe Society, opened in the neighborhood, featuring famous black artists like Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole ¹⁸. The neighborhood underwent a relatively low period during World War II, but was revived soon after with the arrival of the Beat Generation, or as they were often called, beatniks. The beatniks, much like the Bohemians, felt alienated and detached from conventional society and its mores. To demonstrate their detachment, they dressed scruffily and used unique slang. They also believed that heightened awareness and self-knowledge could be achieved via music, drug use, and alternative religious beliefs and practices such as Zen Buddhism. Famous figures such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were influenced by the culture in Greenwich Village during this period, and wrote stream of consciousness poetry and novels about taboo subjects, shocking the “establishment” ¹⁹. Kerouac was so often seen at neighborhood watering hole Whitehorse Tavern that “GO HOME JACK!” was written on the wall ²⁰.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Village also became a center for music and other performances. The Gaslight Cafe opened in 1958 and hosted poetry readings and later folk music performances. Cafe Wha?, opened in 1959, hosted performances from everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Springsteen to Woody Allen and Joan Rivers. Nearby, Electric Lady Studios, located on West 8th Street, was where these famous musicians, including Hendrix and Stevie Wonder, recorded ²¹.

But the 1950s and 1960s were not without their tumult. In the mid-1950s, Robert Moses proposed the building of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would cut through Washington Square Park. Residents, led by journalist Jane Jacobs, protested vehemently, and in June 1958, Washington Square Park was closed to traffic. A decade later, on June 28, 1969, as a large LGBT community began to grow around Christopher Street, local bar Stonewall Inn was raided by police, leading to days of rioting and the formation of the modern gay rights movement. Two years later, the first Gay Pride March was held in Greenwich Village, establishing the Village as a tolerant haven for the LGBT community ²².

During the 1980s, local hospital St. Vincent’s Hospital, as home to the first largest AIDS ward on the east coast, was considered “Ground Zero” for the AIDS epidemic. Thousands were treated at the hospital, and thousands died throughout the 1980s and 1990s from the virus. Next door to the hospital was the LGBT Community Center, where the first AIDS advocacy groups were founded. Despite its historic role in treating the AIDs epidemic, the hospital was bought up by developers in 2010 ²³.

Greenwich Village Today

The development and buying up of property in Greenwich Village continues to this day, as older buildings are bought up to be converted into luxury condos, with many selling for, according to a local business owner, roughly $20 million dollars. Many buildings have also been bought by NYU, as they continue to attempt to expand their campus to attract more students. One resident interviewed discussed how she was forced to move after NYU bought the building on Sullivan Street she had been living in for 40 years, since she arrived in America from England at age 29. This leads to increasing tension between the older residents and new residents that populate the new developments, as the older residents view the new residents as usurpers trying to uproot the neighborhood’s local character and turn it into a luxury playground.

Yet NYU also contributes to the Village’s eclectic, multi-cultural feel, as students come from across the country and even across the world to attend the university. Those students often remain in the area, opening businesses after graduation. Thus, NYU also contributes to the Village’s present day immigration story.

Despite the development, many Village institutions such as Cafe Wha? still remain popular today, and the neighborhood still has an eclectic, artsy feel. But the artsiness is a far cry from the Bohemianism of the late nineteenth century immigrants, as the neighborhood is primarily populated by native-born Americans today, though ethnic food abounds. Overall, as one resident said, today’s Greenwich Village can be described as “mixed” between new developments and old historic buildings, new residents and older people who remember the neighborhood’s heyday, and between everyday modern life and the whisperings of the neighborhood’s vast history.