Harlem (New York, N.Y.); New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs
Greenwich Village got an extra shove during Prohibition. The factors
which put Harlem on the night-life map also worked out for the Village.
It was off the beaten track. Its streets were dark and narrow. Its
buildings were old and dingy. A perfect set-up for speakeasies.
The village had once been a ritzy residential section. The Rhinelanders
and Wanamakers lived at Washington Square. The Brevoort Hotel was one
of the world's most noted. Edward VII, while Prince of Wales, was
entertained there in the last century.
Mark Twain lived in a red brick house at Ninth Street.
The city moved northward. Instead of succumbing to the tidal wave of
business, the Village became a backwash.
Skyscrapers stayed away. Stables and tumbling shacks remained. But into
them came new residents. The district soon became the culture center
of New York, and until quite recently, many famed artists, composers,
literary lights and show people continued to live there. A few still do.
But a bohemian section always attracts the freaky fringe; those who
would live the life of genius without having its admirable attributes,
but all its faults and sins.
These, in turn, displaced most of the true intellectuals. In recent
years there has been a return to the Village, as modern apartment
houses have been run up, especially in lower Fifth Avenue and around
Washington Square.
The Village's new "better class" has no more accent on art than on
business and politics.
Greenwich Village night life mainly centers around three districts:
Sheridan Square, where Fourth Street crosses Seventh Avenue; Eighth
Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and Third Street from Sixth
Avenue to West Broadway.
Little bistros and boites, and even a few nationally famed clubs nest
at sporadic intervals in almost every byway of the Village.
The best-known resorts of Greenwich Village are no more bohemian than
any of the better uptown spots. Jimmy Kelly's, a beaut of a room
specializing in fan wielders and dancing gals, is patronized chiefly
by merchants and Wall Streeters.
The Village Barn, dubbed the Kathedral of Korn, features entertainment
like Omaha and is the favorite haunt of jays from Brooklyn, the Bronx
and Weehawken. El Chico is a rumba hangout.
On another plane completely are the joints patronized by the Village
variants, where the customers are so mixed up the habitues don't know
whether to use the boys' room or the other one.
There are floor shows in which most entertainers are fairies, men
playing the female roles.
Many of these are in Third Street, though on Eighth Street, a few
feet from the women's prison, is the city's most publicized "queer"
joint--the Moroccan Village.
Most female homos' hangouts are in Third Street, and here, in a small,
smoky and raucous saloon every Friday night is held a "Lesbian soiree,"
at which young girls, eager to become converts, meet the initiates.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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