(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Buddy Holly was born in 1936, in Lubbock, Texas. As many music fans know, Holly formed the band that would ultimately become the Crickets in 1956, after […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) We don’t usually associate Aaron Burr with the Village. (I personally always associate him with New Jersey, where he was born, where he killed Alexander Hamilton, and […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Dave Van Ronk came to the Village in the 1950s, after twice shipping out with the Merchant Marine. He lived at 15 Sheridan Square, a section of […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Crystal Eastman was born to two Congregationalist ministers in Massachusetts, before the family moved to the ‘burned-over district’ of New York (from where the Shaker and Mormon […]
(This post is the first of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) 453 6th Avenue is an apparently unremarkable building, now home to a noodle shop. Before being renumbered in the 1920s, this was 145 Sixth Avenue. Murray […]
On Sunday 9 April 1961, Washington Square Park was full of folk musicians and their friends. The park had become a gathering place for them starting in the 1940s, when the likes of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie began singing and socializing there. A permit was required at this time, but was considered a formality […]
There are some that mark the beginning Greenwich Village’s involvement with the revival of American Folk music as 9 April 1961, with the ‘Beatnik Riot’ in Washington Square Park. But folk music was thriving in the Village long before, with folk musicians holding ‘hootenannies’ and gathering in the park to play and socialize from the […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Pete Seeger was a New York native, born on the Lower East Side on May 3, 1919. He was born to a very musical family: his father […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Djuna Barnes was born in 1892, to a polygamist family at Storm King Mountain, New York. Her father made little effort to support his children, and Djuna’s grandmother […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) We all know Allen Ginsberg. He lived in the East Village for more than thirty years, with his partner, Peter Orlovsky. He met Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was a prominent art collector, born into the Vanderbilt family, and married into the Whitney family, whose fortune had been amassed beginning with Eli […]
Christopher Street is the place most of us look to when it comes to LGBTQ history in New York. It is the site of the Stonewall Uprising, with the second Stonewall Inn, the Gay Liberation Monument, and the Gay Street photo-op all within a few steps of each other. However, there are also a number […]
The exact date is impossible to confirm. But it is widely accepted that Bob Dylan arrived in New York City on 24 January 1961, in the midst of the coldest winter New York had seen in 28 years. He’d dropped out of the University of Minnesota, and spent the last twenty-four hours driving east with […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) During the Great Depression, Jane Jacobs moved with her sister to Brooklyn, and then to Greenwich Village, to which she took an immediate liking. She studied at […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Frederic Church, born in Hartford, CT in 1826, became a central figure of the Hudson River School, and a great American landscape painter. He studied under Thomas […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Isadora Duncan was the creator of what is now called ‘Duncan Dance,’ and an incredibly important figure in modern dance. She was born in California in 1877, […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Henrietta Rodman was born in Queens, in 1877. In 1904, she graduated from Teachers College, Columbia University. She began her career teaching English and working as a […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) 20 East 11th Street now bears a plaque, which tells us that Eleanor Roosevelt lived here while she was First Lady. It says nothing, however, about the […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Paul Clayton was a mentor and friend to Dave Van Ronk, a friend to Liam Clancy, and later a mentor to Bob Dylan. (It is said that […]
In the 1890s, the Bowery, like Bleecker Street, was a center of ‘gay’ nightlife in New York City. On Bleecker Street, the Black Rabbit and the Slide did business, offering live sex shows and male prostitutes. On the Bowery, Manilla Hall and Little Bucks, like the Slide, served as ‘fairy resorts,’ where male prostitutes waited […]
An early twentieth-century song entitled ‘The Greenwich Village Epic’ declares: ‘Fairyland’s not far from Washington Square.’ By this time, park police had arrested men for having sex with male partners multiple times in Washington Square Park, as they had in Central Park, Battery Park, Tomkins Square Park, and seemingly just about every other park in […]
(This post is the first of a series on the history of the LGBTQ community in Greenwich Village.) It is easy to assume, in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, that Greenwich Village’s LGBTQ history happened entirely on Christopher Street. Of course, there’s a lot more to LGBTQ history in the Village than Stonewall, just […]
