What Have They Done to Greenwich Village, Ma?*

What Have They Done to Greenwich Village, Ma*

*With a nod to Melanie.

The trip down to Greenwich Village in Manhattan as the heat wave began was remarkable. I parked in the Bronx and we walked down to the 1 train on Broadway. This is where the fun began, as there had been something wrong with the tracks below 242nd Street and the south-bound entrances at several subway stations were blocked. I had a conversation with one subway worker who directed us to the nearest bus stop so we could take a downtown bus to the subway where it was working. Once there, we picked a better, faster subway line, and got out of the subway at West Fourth Street near the basketball courts. For those who are acquainted with Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City,” the line: “Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty,” might be an accurate description of the heat at the beginning of this unusual, but not atypical, June heatwave.

Thankfully, or perhaps mercifully, the humidity was low. We walked across West Fourth to Washington Square Park and sat on a bench in the shade near the playground close to the Washington Arch.

Washington Square Park brings a flood of memories from decades ago in the middle to late 1960s through the early 1970s. The park was the epicenter of the youth movement then and the generation of baby boomers populated the park with music, the odor of marijuana, friendship, wine flasks, countless guitars, and the feeling of the camaraderie that the 60s brought. Writing about that epoch never does justice to those times, which will never come again with a nod and low bow to  the late Abbie Hoffman. Kids from all over the city and from nearby New Jersey and Connecticut literally flooded the park. The park was like a tremendous affirmation of what it meant to be young in a world full of hopefulness. The Vietnam War raged on.

The Village had long been the center of bohemian culture and the avant guard before the youth culture. The beatniks of the 1950s with the young women’s long, straight hair and the men’s goatees were quickly followed by the folk music scene in the park and throughout the West Village centered around MacDougal and Bleecker Streets.

By the time I moved out of the Village in 1971, gentrification had already taken away much of the flavor of the West Village and the East Village was only briefly a space and place of the youth culture’s respite for a time.

The quaint clothing, shoe, tobacco, and book shops disappeared, as did the head shops with marijuana paraphernalia and every kind of political button imaginable. I remember a head shop on MacDougal with a “Save the Panther 21” button in particular since a friend of mine knew one of the Black Panthers who was on trial. The businesses and the kids of the youth movement also exited the Village until it was unrecognizable from many other places in the city. It still is trendy, but only a faint, if even that, shadow of itself.

New York University, where I had been a graduate student, began buying up property in the Village as if a fire sale was on, although the price of real estate in the Village was never at the level of a fire sale. Today, the university is almost everywhere in the Village and shops are no longer distinctive or marginally interesting. Most record shops and bookstores have disappeared and many small kiosk-type businesses are gone, too. Small businesses come and go now with the tides and the rents in the Village are beyond astronomical.

The Village was the scene of the spectacular. One late afternoon after returning to the Village from teaching in Brooklyn, we sat at Sutters Cafe on Greenwich Avenue. Suddenly, the street across from where we sat at the Women’s House of Detention was filled with marked and unmarked police cars, lights flashing. The scene was one of pandemonium and we could not see all that was taking place. We learned on the news later that Angela Davis had been arrested in Manhattan and brought to the jail.

History kept being made in the Village and now it is not even that shadow of itself as the repository of the counterculture and alternative lifestyles over several generations.