FTLGTP: The House of a Poet

Stop #3: 75 1/2 Bedford Street

I mentioned Edna St. Vincent Millay in my last post about Chumley’s and just down the street at 75 ½ Bedford Street is a very small townhouse where Millay lived for several years. It is also one of the smallest townhouses in the city. It is only 9 1/2 feet wide, about half the width of a normal townhouse. It was originally a carriage lane.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was famous even before she got to the Village because of a dispute over a poetry prize, but her poetry was significant during the earlier bohemian movement because she presented a woman who was not sensitive but sexually driven. As Melissa Bradshaw points out in her essay “Performing Greenwich Village bohemianism” for the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, “No one exemplified this spirit of daring New Womanhood, as sexually driven as any man and just as wary of entrapment, like the Village golden girl, Edna St. Vincent Millay” (153).

In many ways, she was a precursor to the more explicit questioning of sexuality and sexual norms that would come from the Village, through the Beat Poets with pieces like “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg, The New York Dolls and their performances in Drag, and Patti Smith’s poetry and music which questioned gender and pushed its boundaries.

Millay was also able to capture the carefree attitude of the Village in her poem “Recuerdo,” “We were very tired, we were very merry–/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry” (155). As Bradshaw points out, it argues doing something for fun is worthwhile, a common theme in the Village.

Up Next: Minetta Tavern and MacDougal Street

FTLGTP: Book-jackets on the walls

Stop #2: Chumley’s

The next stop on our walk takes us farther east and a little bit earlier in time.  Chumley’s, at 86 Bedford Street, now closed because of a chimney collapse, was a popular watering hole for members of the literary community in the early part of the 20^th century. It was originally a speakeasy, established in 1926. For this reason, it never had a sign. The walls were covered with the book jackets from books that were written or worked on at Chumley’s.

This was particularly a popular spot with the Lost Generation and the Bohemians of the early part of the century such as E.E. Cummings, Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. But it also became a popular spot for the Beats later on in the century along with the White Horse Tavern.

Next Up: The Smallest Townhouse in the City

From the Lost Generation to the Punks: An Introduction

For my final writing assignment of college, I recently finished writing a walking tour of the East and West Villages for one of my favorite courses of my college career. It was a course called “Writing New York,” which was listed under the English Department and was taught by Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell, both English professors.

The walking tour I wrote tours some of the vital locations for counter culture in the West Village and East Village while discussing the collaborative nature of counter culture creation in New York City in the middle of the 20th century.

I focused primarily on the path from the Lost Generation and the Bohemians in Greenwich Village, to the Beat Poets hanging out all over the place, to the Folk Artists around MacDougal Street, and finally to the new New York School poets and punk rock musicians of the East Village.

Because I am very proud of this piece and because I love the landscape that New York provides for creative minds, I have decided to post the walking tour in increments on Nebraskan Thoughts. And thus begins my exploration, “From the Lost Generation to the Punks.” Enjoy!

Introduction:

Most of you probably know about the rich literary history of Greenwich Village. Many famous authors throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries lived in this neighborhood. Names like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Willa Cather and more are associated with these crooked streets. However, there is also a strong link between this literary culture and the music scene that also formed in the East and West Villages in the 1960s and 1970s.

Many of the popular folk and punk artists that performed regularly in Greenwich Village were greatly influenced by the writers and poets who had lived and were currently living in the area. In fact, in the case of several of the punk artists of the 1970s, they were actively part of the poetry scene as well as the music scene.

In order to understand how Punk music being played in the Village in the 1970s is linked to earlier literary movements, it is first important that we understand the culture of the earlier literary generations.

The café and club culture of the writers, artists, and musicians allowed for a collaborative atmosphere, with everyone being influenced by everyone else and borrowing ideas from each other. In particular, the music scene collaborated with and borrowed from the literary and poetry movements.

Stop #1: The White Horse Tavern

We start our tour on Hudson Street, deep in the West Village at the White Horse Tavern, at the corner of 11^th Street. This bar was a favorite spot for many members of the literary community during the early 1950s. It is particularly famous for being one of Dylan Thomas’s favorite haunts and the story is that he drank himself to death here, however, although he drank at the Tavern often, he did not drink himself to death and died of unrelated causes.

Later on, this bar became an important spot for writers like Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. Musicians such as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison also began to spend time in this establishment in the 1960s. It is also worth noting that Bob Dylan, originally Robert Zimmerman, supposedly took his name from Dylan Thomas.

Next Up: Chumley’s