Greenwich Village Quotes

Everybody is waiting for cooler weather--and I am just waiting for you--. (Bob Dylan in a letter)

I couldn't help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village café.

Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

Gertrude’s remedy for her mood swings was to print up hundreds of black-bordered calling cards embossed with the single word “Woe,” which she handed out gaily declaring, “Woe is me.

Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only knew the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.

Finally, when someone asked [Pollack] how he knew when a painting was finished, he replied, “How do you know when you’ve finished making love?

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

He stilled my room, for sure.

Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.

That night a bomb exploded in the Corleone Family mall in Long Beach, thrown from a car that pulled up to the chain, then roared away. That night also two button men of the Corleone Family were killed as they peaceably ate their dinner in a small Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. The Five Families War of 1946 had begun.

People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people -- as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped.

Don’t seem to matter much where you are, but folks are always saying you shoulda been here long, long ago, the scene has all dried up. Georgie Harrison said it about Haight–Ashbury, and Sid and Nancy said it about the Chelsea Hotel. The only place they could never really say that about was MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. There was a crackle in the air that just let you know you were alive. As Bobby sang it, later there was music in the cafes and revolution wafting in the wind.

It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.

When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.

In his Greenwich Village apartment, Jose Garcia Villa fords his fiords of books and papers on his way to the bar of the anchored angel. In a boxcar to Bakersfield stars beam on Carlos Bulosan papaya blossoms of Mangusmana.

I first saw Bob Dylan in 1961 at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. He was not overly impressive. He looked like an urban hillbilly, with hair short around the ears and curly on top.

There is a certain type of person who just won't be happy unless she lives in New York at least once in her life.

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars...The upside was that the city was inexpensive…

There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

Time heals, after all- although the clock that marks that kind of time has no hands.

That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village.

Remember where you come from, and you will know who you are.

I read because the women that I liked when I was a teenager lived down in Greenwich Village and they all had those black clothes. The Jules Feiffer women with the black leather bags and the blonde hair and the silver earrings and they all had read Proust and Kafka and Nietzche. And so when I said, ‘No, the only thing I’ve ever read were two books by Mickey Spillane,’ they would look at their watch and I was out. So in order to be able to carry on a conversation with these women who I thought were so beautiful and fascinating, I had to read. So I read. But it wasn’t something I did out of love. I did it out of lust.

This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite in excusable: not only did she stand unncessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face." (“Snowing in Greenwich Village")

Exhausted after a full day of treating patients, William Carlos Williams angrily answered the phone. “Doctor,” said a woman’s voice, “my child has swallowed a mouse.” “Then get him to swallow a cat,” he replied, and slammed down the receiver.

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I’m talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties. They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity.

As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.

Inside an old man is always a young man, a young man shaped by his friends.

Sometimes, despite everything, enchantment still revealed itself slyly through cracks in the everyday.

The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist luster to the party.

Feminists in Greenwich Village had begun bobbing their hair in 1912. In 1915, it was still radical. “The idea, it seems, came from Russia,” the New York Times reported. “The intellectual women of that country were revolutionaries. For convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them, they cropped their hair.”2 Holloway was something of a revolutionary, too.

As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed. Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.

Dr. Spencer Eth, who ran the psychiatry department at the now-defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, was curious where survivors had turned for help, and early in 2002, together with some medical students, he conducted a survey of 225 people who had escaped from the Twin Towers. Asked what had been most helpful in overcoming the effects of their experience, the survivors credited acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR, in that order.1 Among rescue workers, massages were particularly popular.

I had conceived of lovemaking as a sort of asking and answering of questions, but with us it only led to further questions, until we seemed to be locked in a philosophical debate. Instead of the proverbial sadness after sex, I felt something like a semantic despair.

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.

At a friend’s house in Greenwich Village I remember talking of the frustration of trying to find the precise word for one’s thoughts, saying that the ordinary dictionary was inadequate. ‘Surely a system could be devised,’ I said, ‘of lexicographically charting ideas, from abstract words to concrete ones, and by deductive and inductive processes arriving at the right word for one’s thought.’ ‘There is such a book,’ said a Negro truck-driver: ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’ A waiter working at the Alexandria Hotel used to quote his Karl Marx and William Blake with every course he served me. A comedy acrobat with a Brooklyn ‘dis’, ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ accent recommended Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, saying that Shakespeare was influenced by him and so was Sam Johnson. ‘But you can skip the Latin.’ With the rest of them I was intellectually a fellow-traveller.

The opening scene is easy. Exterior: Greenwich Village. The beginning of a new decade. A gust of wind, a lucky taxi, a question. Will you come? And then the rest will unfold in mysterious and surprising ways. But there will be no happy ending, because there will be no ending at all. The movie will last forever.

I poked fun at rich friends growling about the unfairness of the Electoral College over a dinner at Spago that cost thousands of dollars, and took Meryl Streep to task for her outraged anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globes the same week she’d put her Greenwich Village townhouse on the market for thirty million dollars.

Ultimately, the salon, Steffens noted, helped change the public perception of Greenwich Village, although hardly in the manner Dodge had hoped. What had been a neighborhood better known for cheap rents and no shortage of decrepit apartments was becoming almost chic, a kind of Latin Quarter in Manhattan. Small theaters and art galleries sprang up, and midtown shoppers and tourists took the time to cruise through the Village for a look at the new trendsetters. Steffens did not recall it as being exceptionally fashionable back in 1911, judging his own lifestyle to be “Bohemian, but not the fake sort.” If it was not fake, it was hardly genuine, either. Steffens was not about to starve in Greenwich Village.

After a week's worth of failed fairy tales—stories that made my eyelids flutter open and not shut—my father tried telling me stories that belonged only to him. Thomas told me of an island off the coast of a different world. On this island, there stood a city whose buildings were made of glass. He told me that at the heart of this city was a forest with trees, ponds and a lake, swans and horses, and even a small castle. He told me that the streets of the city were filled with bright yellow cars that you hopped in and out of at will and that would take you wherever you wanted to go. In this city, there were sidewalks overflowing with people from the whole world over who wanted so much to be there. He told me of its neighborhoods, with names like Greenwich Village and Harlem and Chinatown. At the nucleus of these stories was my father, and spinning around him was the city of New York. Long before I would see them in photographs or in real life, my father had given me the white crown lights of the Chrysler Building and the shining needle of the Empire State.

Hans then asked him about painting from nature; Jackson...bluntly offered a phrase that entered Village lore, “I am nature.

As we age—and you can’t know this yet. But as we age, we start to care about too many things.” He took a sip of wine. “It all seems so precious. Every little thing. That tiny purple flower there, bending over the brick.

Long ago, when New York City was affordable, people who felt they didn’t fit into the mainstream could take a chance and head there from wherever they were. Bob Dylan came east from Minnesota in the winter of 1961 and made his way downtown to Greenwich Village. Like countless others before him, he came to shed the constricted definition of his birthplace and the confinement of his past. I first saw Bob at Gerde’s Folk City, the Italian bar and restaurant cum music venue on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Streets, one block west of Broadway and a few blocks east of Washington Square Park. Bob was playing back-up harmonica for various musicians and as a duo with another folksinger, Mark Spoelstra, before he played sets by himself. Mark played the twelve string guitar and had a melodious singing voice. Bob’s raspy voice and harmonica added a little dimension to the act. Their repertoire consisted of traditional folk songs and the songs of Woody Guthrie. They weren’t half bad. Bob was developing his image into his own version of a rambling troubadour, in the Guthrie mode.

The walls between people are thin here, and if I listen quietly, I hear what is going on. Greenwich Village is like that too. Not just being close—because I don’t feel it in a crowded elevator or on the subway during the rush—but on a hot night when everyone is out walking, or sitting in the theater, there is a rustling, and for a moment I brush against someone and sense the connection between the branch and trunk and the deep root. At such moments my flesh is thin and tight, and the unbearable hunger to be part of it drives me out to search in the dark corners and blind alleys of the night.

PF: I’m not an optimist.  Am I a pessimist?  When I look out it’s bleak, I’m not sure where we’re heading.  I’ve never conceived of a worldwide antagonism between Muslims and other religions.  That was something that happened in the Middle Ages.  I never foresaw that.  I never could conceive of that.  The number of kids that don’t finish high school and don’t want to go to college or don’t finish college—those are all bad signs.  I started acting about twelve years after I graduated from high school.  What I was doing in the interval, I don’t know!  Oh, I was posing as an efficiency expert.  But I do know this.  Even I, as an off-Broadway actor in Greenwich Village, New York who was not a big

Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood Boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the Boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance – a declaration that America yearns to be something other than American here. . . . Yet, in spite of the artists, writers and aspiring film stars, the sensibility of a real Montmartre, Soho, or even Greenwich Village, cannot be felt here. The automobile mitigates against such a feeling, and so do the new houses. Hollywood lacks the patina of age.75

If you’re under 35, and not passionately interested in health food, this one may go over your head. If so, count your blessings: Until very recently, a tribe of killer monkeys lived undetected beneath Greenwich village. To some extent it was not surprising that they escaped notice for so long. They had extremely odd sleeping habits, hibernating for 364 days out of every year (365 in Leap Years) and emerging from the caverns of the Village sewers only on Christmas Day. Even so, one might have thought they could hardly help but cause talk, since they tended when awake to be enormous, ferocious, carnivorous, and extremely hungry. Yet in Greenwich Village of all places on Earth they went unnoticed until last year, when they were finally destroyed. Everyone knows that Yule Gibbons ate only nuts and fruits…

Good writing is always a breaking of the soil, clearing away prejudices, pulling up of sour weeds of crooked thinking, stripping the turf so as to get at what is fertile beneath. It would be amusing to carry the simile further. Those bulbs that flower in the sand and wither! The gay fiction annual that has to be planted again every year! Those experimental plants from Russia, France, and Greenwich Village that are always getting winter killed—confound 'em!—is it worth while planting them again? The stocky perennial that keeps coming up and coming up—so easy to grow and so ugly. Scarlet sage that gives a touch of fiery sin to the edge of the suburbanite's concrete walk! And then the good flowers—as honest as they are beautiful! The well-ordered gar den! The climbing rose that escapes and is the most beautiful of all!

History abounds in and around New York City, however much of it is buried in the concrete of newer construction. The downtown financial district from Battery Park to Wall Street is such a historical district. Trinity Church at Wall Street and Broadway and the Churchyard surrounding it is where Alexander Hamilton and his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton along with other notables are buried. The story of Alexander Hamilton is an important part of New York City’s history and has become a Broadway musical. At the top of the Palisades in Weehawken is a small park known as the Dueling Grounds. This Revolutionary War site, overlooking New York City to the east, and what had been Half Moon Bay to the north and directly beneath it, is where Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, was mortally wounded by a single shot from Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol. He died the following day in Greenwich Village at the home of his friend William Bayard Jr.

Nor was her support for the urban realists a one-off affair. In 1907 she set up an apartment and studio in Greenwich Village, remodeling a stable at 19 MacDougal Alley, just north of Washington Square, and made it available for informal exhibitions. In 1914 she bought the adjacent building (8 West 8th Street) and established therein a professional gallery, the Whitney Studio,

A city is different things to us at different times - of the day, of the year, of our life. Many years have passed since I was in the backseat of the car, taken with the razzle-dazzle. Today, I'm more drawn to the neighborhood coffee shops, or modest old parks like Abingdon Square in Greenwich Village, where farmers come to sell cheese and eggs under the London Plane trees. I have a soft spot for the little urban island like McCarthy Square, with its birdhouses - some with simple peak roofs; others with multiple stories and decks, made of miniature wood logs, like ski chalets - that poke out from shrubs and evergreens. I like the quiet of the West Village in the morning, where sidewalk chalkboards outside restaurants and coffee shops promise caffeine and better days, and streets paved with setts - Jane, West 12th, Bethune, Bank - feed into Washington Street like streams emptying into a river.

It seemed to me that a penis was a very primitive instrument for dealing with life.

Painting will help your photography,” she said. “It will put you in touch with your feelings.

all its occupants had left without her. This troubled Frances not in the least. She already seemed to have made a lot of new friends, she was rich, twice-married, without roots. San Antonio suited her down to the ground. It was filled with painters, expatriates, writers and beatniks, and Frances, who had once lived for several months with an unsuccessful artist in Greenwich Village, felt entirely at home. Before long she had found this house, and when the initial occupations of settling-in were over, cast about for some way of filling in her time. She decided upon an art gallery. In a place where you had both resident painters and visiting tourists, an art gallery was surely a blue-chip investment. She bought

A Greenwich Village corner comedienne, trying to drum-up business for one of the many local comedy clubs, hailed the wife and me as we walked past. The young lady asked, "Hey, you two...do you know that humor is a wonderful aphrodisiac?" I said, "You are obviously single young lady, because, believe us, marriage is no laughing matter." The comedienne then said, "Oh, come on now, you'll have fun; the club is just around the corner on Bleeker St!" I replied, "We've been married for over 30 years...life couldn't possibly get any bleaker." As we continued on our walk, the young lady yelled, "Hey, I'm using that one!

...it was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, who released the most issues. Appearing in two of the top five most prolific comics (Jumbo Comics as well as her own title) Sheena was also Queen of the Comics. (...) The publisher of Sheena, Fiction House, was a fascinating company. Because of a shortage of male creatives caused by World War II, Fiction House hired women for all creative roles. Artist Murphy Anderson (Superman, Hawkman), who worked for Fiction House as a teenager, remembered that only a few men were present in the office. Notable artists in the company’s bullpen include Lily Renée, who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria, and Marcia Snyder, a queer artist who lived with her girlfriend in Greenwich Village. Perhaps hiring so many women explains why Fiction House produced an abundance of female-centric stories.

Greenwich Village was a mix of laughter and furious discussion, of immigrants and dilettantes who drank champagne and talked gaily of anarchy.

The creative writing program would replicate the spirit of communal endeavor and mutual influence found in the Paris and Greenwich Village café scenes of an earlier era, but Nabokov was not one for that sort of esprit de corps.

What I brought to Dr. Schachtel was not a condition or a situation but a poetics. I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel. Of course, that’s what all patients want, but the irony was that with me it might have worked. It might have been the shortest, or the only, way through my defenses, because I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

In a stroke of genius, the mayor found a solution. He asked the Common Council to annex the Greenwich Village potter’s field as a new military parade ground, which he would also use as the site for his party. The graveyard, which had closed the year before, had outlived its usefulness. And this wasn’t just a short-term fix. Hone was playing a long game, and this new “Washington Parade-Ground” was just the opening gambit.

Another young actor in Charlie’s class with me was a guy by the name of Martin Sheen. In one session Marty did a monologue from The Iceman Cometh, and he blew the roof off—I said, this is it, this is a great actor we are witnessing. He was the next James Dean as far as I was concerned. I got to be friends with Marty Sheen, and one day he said to me, “You know what my real name is, don’t you? Estevez.” He was half Spanish and he came from Ohio, out there in the Midwest, where he had a tough upbringing. He was one of ten kids in a working-class family that was always struggling for money. He had tenacity and grit and I could tell he was one of the best people I’d ever know, all grace and humility. I loved him. I still do. Marty Sheen moved in with me in the South Bronx so we could split the rent. We worked together at the Living Theatre in Greenwich Village, where we cleaned toilets and laid down rugs for the sets of the plays they put on.

Minetta Lane is an L-shaped street, one block long, in the heart of Greenwich Village.

In 1913, Mabel Nassau, a Columbia University graduate student, conducted a neighborhood study of the living conditions of one hundred elderly people in Greenwich Village—sixty-five women and thirty-five men. In this era before pensions and Social Security, all were poor. Only twenty-seven were able to support themselves—living off savings, taking in lodgers, or doing odd jobs like selling newspapers, cleaning homes, mending umbrellas. Most were too ill or debilitated to work.

So whether the woman is breast- or bottle-feeding, food and mother tend to be one." Abby, a thirty-two-year-old Vassar graduate and recovering anorexic, feels very strongly that family dynamics rather than idealized images of women contributed to her eating disorder. "I grew up in Greenwich Village," she explained. "I was the child of a single mother who was a devout feminist. I wasn't allowed to watch TV until I was thirteen because my mother believed that its patriarchal stereotypes would have a bad influence on the way I identified myself as a woman. Instead, I was given Sisterhood Is Powerful and Ms. magazine. My mother hated Barbie and what she represented. I wasn't allowed to have a Barbie, much less a Skipper or a Midge. And the irony is that I was severely anorexic as a teenager. When I was fifteen, I stopped eating. I'm five foot nine and at my lowest weight, I was just under a hundred pounds. I lost my period for three years. Today, I have come to realize that my anorexia was a reaction to a very controlled and crazy family situation. I became obsessed with being thin because it wasn't something my mother valued. I think overreacting to Barbie—setting her up as the ultimate negative example—can be just as damaging as positing her as an ideal.

Tom and Esperanza exchanged vows in a quaint church. White poppies lined the pews. Tom’s side of the aisle was dressed in black and white—a sea of penguins. Esperanza’s side had so many colors, Crayola sent a scout. It looked like the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. The organ played beautiful hymns. The choir sang like angels. The setting could not have been more serene. For

Literary friendship is impossible, it seems; at least, it is impossible for me. Indeed, all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we’re wasting our time, we have nothing to say, we’re not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can’t flirt, we feel like dummies discussing movies or books, we aren’t in some moral bind with a woman that we need to confess, we’ve each said the other is a genius several times already, and the whole thing is depressing and the tone is false and we might as well go home to our wives and children and rent buddy movies like Midnight Run or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles or The Pope of Greenwich Village> when we need a shot of the old camaraderie.

When Daddy didn’t answer, I knew that something was wrong. Mariah thought back to that seemingly endless drive from Greenwich Village as she had rushed to New Jersey that night.

the time I watched a knife fight outside the window of the studio in Greenwich Village, the time I got an HIV test at a Department of Health free clinic in order to prove some kind of point to myself (other than that I didn’t have HIV, which I already knew).

You know I’m mad about you and you’re the most fabulous daughter a mother could want. When you call me Mommy, it pushes my buttons and makes me feel older than I really am. Plus, you’re a precocious child. Why don’t you call me Anjoli?” We weren’t like mother and daughter. It was more like two single women sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village in the seventies. Except I was five.

At the top of the Palisades in Weehawken, New Jersey is a small park known as the Dueling Grounds. This Revolutionary War site, overlooking New York City to the east, and what had been Half Moon Bay to the north is where Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, was mortally wounded by a single shot from Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol on the morning of July 11, 1804. He died the following day in Greenwich Village, across the river in New York City. The duel was because Hamilton, the former secretary of the treasury, interfered with Aaron Burr’s bid for the presidency of the United States and again, by successfully opposing his candidacy for governor of New York. Burr’s vindictive retaliation cost Hamilton his life.

There I was living my Chapter Two dream of being a resident of the famed Greenwich Village in west, lower Manhattan. I had an eight-hundred-seventy-five square foot studio apartment for a mere five thousand dollars a month. I figured it out. That’s forty-seven cents per square inch.

I And I" Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams. I and I In creation where one's nature neither honors nor forgives I and I One say to the other, no man sees my face and lives. Think I'll go out and go for a walk Not much happening here, nothing ever does Besides, if she wakes up now, she'll just want me to talk I got nothing to say, 'specially about whatever was. I and I In creation where one's nature neither honors nor forgives I and I One say to the other, no man sees my face and lives. Took an untrodden path once, where the swift don't win the race It goes to the worthy, who can divide the word of truth Took a stranger to teach me, to look into justice's beautiful face And to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I and I In creation where one's nature neither honors nor forgives I and I One say to the other, no man sees my face and lives. Outside of two men on a train platform there's nobody in sight They're waiting for spring to come, smoking down the track The world could come to an end tonight, but that's all right She could still be there sleeping when I get back. I and I In creation where one's nature neither honors nor forgives I and I One say to the other, no man sees my face and lives. Noontime, and I'm still pushing myself along the road, the darkest part Into the narrow lanes, I can't stumble or stay put Someone else is speaking with my mouth, but I'm listening only to my heart I've made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot. I and I In creation where one's nature neither honors nor forgives I and I One say to the other, no man sees my face and lives. Bob Dylan, Infidels (1983)

It wasn’t until she arrived in New York that she experienced the sense of homecoming she hadn’t known she was missing. The first time she saw the city, it was as if something exploded in her chest—it was that visceral, that immediate a falling in love. New York didn’t feel like a city to her; it felt like a country. The nation-state of New York, where the world’s restless and ambitious gathered, where the misfits and the misunderstood arrived—and the city didn’t so much welcome them as shift just a tiny bit to accommodate them, to test them, to see if they had the right stuff. And if you passed the test, then all of it was there for the taking—the joyful riot of color and smells of Jackson Heights, the eclectic streets of Greenwich Village, the elusive tranquility of Prospect Park, the benches at the Battery, where one could sit undisturbed and stare at the “lady of the harbor.” Smita remembered what Shannon had once said: “This city is like some giant social experiment conducted every single day. This place should be a fucking powder keg—but somehow, it’s not.

At the Artists Club in 1950 he rhythmically intoned his “Lecture on Nothing” for the first time. It was a seemingly rambling, remorselessly monotone meditation on being and nothingness, stillness and action. He began, “I am here, and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” It went on that way for a long time. In his book Silence he recalls that the artist Jeanne Reynal, best known for the painstaking and repetitious art of the mosaic, “stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, ‘John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.’ She then walked out.” When the “lecture” finally ended Cage invited questions; however, to illustrate his feelings about the pointlessness of discussion, he responded only with prewritten answers such as “That is a very good question. I should not want to

In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan. Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.

Nobody in the Village has a job; everyone has a calling.

There are many paths through my spiritual and emotional landscape, and I walk them wordlessly, communing with those like-minded souls of history who walked where I walk now, and I too intend to walk here after I am gone.

In an age of cities, there is just one village that is known by people the world over: Greenwich Village. It got there by being small. Let's keep it that way.

The Village has a wonderful raw energy that mixes with its history. I love the expanse of sky that can be seen from nearly anywhere.

As there is no constant but change, it's not surprising that my Greenwich Village refuses to stay fixed in any orbit. This is both pleasing to me, and sad, and sometimes confusing.

I like the sound of that word. Public. This is important because, although sometimes it seems as if it is, the Village is not a gated community.

The Village - will we ever really understand it? I ask this not in a figurative, rhetorical, or even existential sense, just in a way that attempts to address how the corner of West 4th Street and 8th Avenue manages to sit nort of the corner of West 12th Street and 8th Avenue without fail every single time I leave my building.

To me, the Village is art, bohemia, beatniks, and freedom. It's like a little European enclave within the city, with everything human-scaled and no skyscrapers in sight.

My mother used to say, 'If you want to be young forever, move to the Village.

Between Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village lay Chelsea, the heart and soul of the Irish waterfront.

Therefore, another one of those times that turned out to be historical, as far as my own soul is concerned, was when Lax and I were walking down Sixth Avenue, one night in the spring. The street was all torn up and trenched and banked high with dirt and marked out with red lanterns where they were digging the subway, and we picked our way along the fronts of the dark little stores, going downtown to Greenwich Village. I forget what we were arguing about, but in the end Lax suddenly turned around and asked me the question: “What do you want to be, anyway?” I could not say, “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,” or “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman-English at the New Life Social Institute for Progress and Culture,” so I put the thing on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged and said: “I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.” “What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?” The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it at all. Lax did not accept it. “What you should say”—he told me—“what you should say is that you want to be a saint.” A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said: “How do you expect me to become a saint?” “By wanting to,” said Lax, simply.

a world soul he believes can resist the deadening assaults of modern corporate conformism.

The Village would remain the center of the black community in Manhattan through the 1800s, home to the first successful black theater and black newspapers in the country.

Almost two thousand New Yorkers died, and a fresh potter’s field was consecrated in what is now Greenwich Village.

Don’t count on getting into NYU just because Big Sis’ did. From back-up school to the hottest place in higher education, NYU’s rise has been breath-taking. The siren song of Greenwich Village has lured applicants by the thousands. Major draws include the arts, media, and business. (Rising Stars - NYU)

Bannon had promised to come to this small dinner arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich Village town house to see Roger Ailes,

Crowley started painting in 1919 while in Greenwich Village, New York, Alesiter had extravagant tastes. By the time, he was a thirty-year-old, he had spent his inheritance. Nevertheless, he purchased the best quality oil paints that money could buy, for his new project, just as he always purchased the most expensive paper on which to write his written works. Crowley's image of Lam appeared as part of the Dead Souls art exhibition show of Crowley's art work in Greenwich Village, New York in 1919".

espadrilles.

Robert Shelton of The New York Times had reviewed a Greenwich Village performance by a young folk singer, Bob Dylan. “His clothes may need a bit of tailoring,” Shelton wrote of Dylan, “but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano, and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.

He opened his laptop and showed me a picture of a “cozy” Greenwich Village apartment he’d found online. My dad, a born New Yorker, had told me stories of the Village, a lively network of cobblestone streets and jazz dives, coffee houses and folk clubs with no cover fee—and I felt a surge of light-headed ambition. “Though it’s kind of strange,” Justin continued, “there is no bathroom inside. Our toilet would be down a public hallway.