Remembering Vincent Livelli

Greenwich Village resident Vincent Livelli was a music and dance director who helped helped revolutionize the cruise ship industry. He was born on April 10, 1919 and died at age 104 on June 21st, 2024.

Born in Brooklyn to Sicilian and Genovese immigrant parents, Livelli moved to Greenwich Village at three months old where he lived for the next hundred+ years.

In 2016 we conducted an oral history with Livelli. In this three-and-a-half-hour interview, he tells vivid stories of his early years growing up in the South Village, his career as a musician, and crossing paths with industry legends such as Al Jolson, Charlie Parker, and Anatole Broyard. Livelli also discusses his friendships with many famous Village residents, including Anaïs Nin.

Despite hearing loss resulting from childhood lead poisoning, language and music played a tremendous role in Livelli’s life. He learned five languages and felt touched by the sounds of drums over the radio, which helped him develop into a successful dancer. He became a professional dancer in 1938. In 1940 he achieved some local fame for being the person to introduce Cubans to the New York-style rumba. In his oral history interview, he recounts that upon returning to America, he then introduced the Havana-style, Afro-Cuban rumba to the Harlem nightclubs.

After World War II, Vincent became the cruise director of a steamship company (he initially wanted to teach dance on the ships). “I put entertainment on cruise ships,” he explains during his oral history interview. “Made it a 30,000,000,000 dollar industry. Nobody did that except yours truly.”

Vincent’s memories of Greenwich Village are inextricable from his memories of the dear
friendship he had with one of the Village’s most famous mid-20th century residents: the writer Anatole Broyard, with whom he opened a bookstore in the Village in the late 1940s.

Of course to each his own, as Lavelli also lamented the eventual takeover of the Village’s literary scene by the Beats, who, according to Livelli, introduced drugs, sloppy dress, and Communist politics into the neighborhood.

Vincent refers to this time in the history of Greenwich Village as the era of “the Jack Kerouac bullshit” and “the William Burroughs sickness.” This cultural shift is part of the reason why Vincent spent the majority of the 1950s and 1960s aboard the cruise ships that employed him. He traveled around the world for twenty years, learning about different cultures and histories which he would then disseminate to his passengers in the form of lectures.

Click here to access the Vincent Livelli Oral History and read many more fascinating stories. Click here to access our full Oral History Collection.