Greenwich Village

In this charming fiction debut, a young woman moves to Manhattan in search of romance and excitement—only to find that her apartment is haunted by the ghost of a cantankerous Beat Generation writer in need of a rather huge favor. For Eve Weldon, moving to Greenwich Village is a dream come true. She’s following in the bohemian footsteps of her mother, who lived there during the early sixties among a lively community of Beat artists and writers. But when Eve arrives, the only scribe she meets is a grumpy ghost named Donald, and the only writing she manages to do is for chirpy segments on a morning news program, Smell the Coffee. The hypercompetitive network environment is a far cry from the genial camaraderie of her mother’s literary scene, and Eve begins to wonder if the world she sought has faded from existence. But as she struggles to balance her new job, demands from Donald to help him complete his life’s work, a budding friendship with a legendary fashion designer, and a search for clues to her mother’s past, Eve begins to realize that community comes in many forms—and that the true magic of the Village is very much alive, though it may reveal itself in surprising ways.

A vibrant portrait of a celebrated urban enclave at the turn of the twentieth century.

This book does not aim to document comprehensively the extraordinarily rich activity in New York City in the early 1960's. Instead, the author focuses on one year, 1963. This was the most productive year of the period 1958-64, the transition between the Fifties and Sixties. The author also focuses on one other place---Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan. For it was primarily here, in a place already historically and culturally mythologized as avant-garde terrain, that the emerging generation of vanguard artists lived, worked, socialized, and remade the history of the avant-garde. - from the Introduction.

Treating New York's bohemian enclave, Greenwich Village, as an urban microcosm, the 22 essays in this volume explore its architecture and art, cultural dimensions, political life, and peoples. The editors bring together both astute commentators on American life and culture and a rich collection of visual images from the Museum of the City of New York. 129 illustrations.

"Greenwich Village represents American social science during the interwar years at its best. It remains the best community study of New York, important both for its innovative method and for its substantive findings about intergroup relations in a pluralistic, open, and urban society--during a period of crisis and reform ferment."--Thomas Bender, New York University

A love letter to Greenwich Village, written by artists, writers, musicians, restaurateurs, and other neighborhood habitues who each share a favorite memory of this beloved place. The sixty stories in this collection of Village memories are exuberant, poignant, original, and vivid-perfectly capturing the essence of the Village. Every corner of the Village is represented in the book: recollections of jazz clubs and existentialism on Bleecker Street, rock music at St. Mark's Place, folk singers in Washington Square Park. There are stories of Hans Hofmann teaching modern art on 8th Street and Lotte Lenya performing in The Threepenny Opera on Christopher Street. Decades later, Brooke Shields muses on renovating a brownstone and finding history behind its walls; and Mario Batali lyrically describes a Sunday morning walk through the food markets of Bleecker Street. The stories are complemented by a wide range of photographs by iconic figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Rudy Burckhardt, Berenice Abbott, Saul Leiter, Ruth Orkin, and Weegee. Paintings depict elegant red-brick facades and raffish Hudson River piers, now restored; theater posters spotlight Karen Finley and John Leguizamo. This is a book for those who are already beguiled by the Village as well as those just discovering this fabled place.

Reproduction of the original: Greenwich Village by Anna Alice Chapin

Greenwich Village has always attracted the innovative and independent spirit. What began as the site of an important Lenape Indian settlement has since transformed into a tourist attraction and home to celebrities, fine universities, publishers, art schools, choice restaurants, and famed night spots. The seemingly wayward streets in the West Village follow original Native American footpaths and colonial roads. Historic residences lining the quirky and charming streets reflect the area's strong ties to the past. Greenwich Village shows how the many layers of this community's history have created the sense of place that present-day Greenwich Village is famous for.