In the heart of bustling Manhattan Island hides Greenwich Village, which for over a century has been home to many artistic and social revolutions that have changed the face of America and the world. Although most of the creators have been driven from its territory in recent decades by the explosion in the price of rents, it is still possible to visit important places that have marked the neighborhood and made Village one of the most influential and fascinating places in the West.
The walker who ends up in this area of New York immediately sees that the decor and atmosphere around him have just changed radically. The incessant sounds of sirens, canvassers and horns echoing elsewhere on the island fade away to make way for birds and conversations. The huge skyscrapers are replaced by small red brick buildings of three, four or five floors. The department stores on the boulevards are replaced by a multitude of independent shops, cafes, restaurants, bars and theaters.
New York’s famous checkerboard streets suddenly contort to form a small enclave that seems closed in on itself, where walkers sink into their thoughts at the same time as they do. In short, a few strides away from the fury of one of the most intense megalopolises on the planet, you will suddenly have the impression of having found a refuge where a certain tranquility reigns, conducive to reflection and creation.
This is probably what all these artists and activists who settled there from the mid-19th century felt.e century and which made it, until the end of the 1960s, the most lively and imaginative district of the first city of the United States.
From Edgar Allan Poe to Bob Dylan
Greenwich Village, confined by 14th Street to the north, Broadway Avenue to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west, has long drawn geniuses and great minds to it. Writers Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, EE Cummings and Walt Whitman, to name a few, all resided there, but it was especially in the 1950s and 1960s that The Village experienced its golden age and built its formidable legend.
Designers from across the country then converged on New York to brew and question the triumphant, conservative and consuming postwar America. This is how, in a few years, new and radical artistic movements emerged in the city that would forever change their disciplines: bebop in jazz,action painting in painting, the Beat Generation in literature and the method acting of the Actors Studio in theater. These avant-garde currents had in common to deconstruct old centuries-old traditions and explore new ways of doing things. They have also transformed New York, and more specifically Greenwich Village, into a powerful global creative epicenter.
These artists, scattered over just a few blocks, frequented the same exhibitions, shows, readings, parties, bars and cafes where they exchanged views on their practices and the world, thus stimulating a formidable emulation that did not arise. often produced in the history of art.
The beatniks, for example, led by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, were regulars in jazz clubs, where bebop masters Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell were unleashed. , Max Roach and their friends. One of these rooms, the Village Vanguard (178, 7th Avenue), still exists and it is possible to attend excellent jazz concerts in an ethereal atmosphere that has not changed in the good years. The supercharged rhythms of jazzmen thus strongly influenced the writing of this new generation of novelists and poets, whose literary musicality was at times akin to that of a beat from drum or a saxophone solo.
In the early 1960s, it was the turn of the prophetic songwriters to come to the neighborhood and declaim their radical vision of America in the smoky little theaters and overcrowded cafes of MacDougal and Bleecker streets. Inspired by beatniks and folk singers who came before them, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary and dozens of others sang about the right to equality, freedom and revolt. Their voices, which would soon be heard across America, first resonated in venues like The Bitter End (147, Bleecker Street), founded in 1961, or Cafe Wha? (115 MacDougal Street), where Dylan first sang on a New York stage and where other important musicians like Jimmy Hendrix, Ritchie Havens, Jerry Lee Lewis and The Velvet Underground performed. These two legendary clubs are always open and offer shows almost every evening in a unique atmosphere.
A little last one for the road
You can also go for a drink at the White Horse Tavern (567 Hudson Street), which for decades has been considered a booze writer’s paradise. The place, which alters the spirits since 1880, was assiduously frequented by great thirsty ones such as James Baldwin, Anaïs Nin, Norman Mailer, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, as well as by Jack Kerouac, who in was dismissed so often by the boss that he decided to write in pencil ” Go home, Jack! »In the toilets of the establishment, exclamation that it is still possible to observe.
The most famous client of the place is probably the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who, according to legend, swallowed no less than 18 shots of whiskey on his very last trip, before collapsing and then being returned to his home. hotel room. He died just a few days later at St. Vincent’s Hospital on November 9, 1953. A plaque in his honor sits atop the bar, so his spirit will reign forever.
Even after all his years, the heart of Village , Washington Square, has remained intact and unchanged. Easily recognizable by its spectacular triumphal arch which constitutes its entrance, it still attracts today the many students of the NYU and the New School, located nearby, as well as the street artists who perform their most beautiful pirouettes there. , test their latest songs or develop theirflowpersonalized, in front of curious crowds, in the same way that jazzmen once gathered there to perform their spectacular flights, as beatniks declaimed their rhythmic poetry or even as folks singers sang the arrival of a new generation who was going to turn everything upside down.
This is how, as you walk in this timeless square, you may have the impression of meeting the ghosts of yesterday and the stars of tomorrow, who have in common to draw their inspiration and their energy. in the bowels of this city that never sleeps, where the whole world seems to have come together to create and dream.
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