It was the city’s worst workplace disaster before 9/11. When it was over, corpses littered the sidewalk, some too badly burned or mangled from the impact to identify. One girl’s brother identified her by the buttons on her shoes. Seven bodies were never identified. Funeral processions for individual women and girls clogged the streets of the Lower East Side for days. On April 5 the ILGWU organized a massive funeral procession for those seven unidentified workers. The city of New York, fearing an open workers’ revolt, would not permit release of the bodies from the morgue, so seven empty hearses led the solemn procession in a cold rain, with an estimated 120,000 silent marchers and another 300,000 viewers lining the streets. Marching up from Rutgers Street on the Lower East Side and down from East Twenty-second Street, two large columns under black umbrellas converged in Washington Square Park, then filed through the arch and up Fifth Avenue to Madison Square Park.
This huge demonstration, as much as the fire itself, startled the public, which had not been much moved by previous, frequent industrial deaths. Soon Village radicals would be deeply, passionately involved in labor organizing and the women’s movement. The city and the state passed a number of new fire safety laws over the next few years. Blanck and Harris, meanwhile, were found not guilty of manslaughter in the deaths caused by the locked exit door. They later paid seventy-five dollars per death to settle civil suits. The Asch Building itself turned out to be fireproof, as advertised. Firemen found the eighth through tenth floors essentially unharmed except for smoke damage. The building was easily refurbished, and in 1929 it was donated to NYU. It is now the Brown Building.
On March 23–27, 2011, for the hundredth anniversary of the fire, Judson Memorial Church hosted the premiere of From the Fire, a dramatic oratorio with music by Elizabeth Swados, produced by the New School and performed by a cast of students. Seated in the auditorium, one was acutely aware that the Brown Building was just a block away. Before the performance, a greeter wryly pointed out the four fire exits.
6
The “Golden Age” Begins
THERE WAS A GREENWICH VILLAGE THEN—
A REFUGE FOR TORMENTED MEN
WHOSE HEADS WERE FULL OF DREAMS, WHOSE HANDS
WERE WEAK TO DO THE WORLD’S COMMANDS:
BUILDERS OF PALACES ON SANDS—
THESE, NEEDFUL OF A PLACE TO SLEEP,
CAME HERE, BECAUSE THE RENTS WERE CHEAP.
—Floyd Dell
BY THE EARLY 1900S THE VILLAGE HAD BEEN ATTRACTING ARTISTS, writers, actors, intellectuals (a term coined around this time), and assorted bohemian types for decades. They had come together in small clusters at Pfaff’s or the Grapevine or other popular saloons, in the French cafés and Italian restaurants, in private salons and clubs. In the 1910s certain people and institutions acted as magnets, drawing these disparate individuals and small groups together for the first time into a larger, bona fide Village scene. It’s in this period, roughly 1912 through 1917, that the old Ninth and Fifteenth Wards become widely known as Greenwich Village; its artists, writers, bohemians, and political radicals become known (derisively to their Italian and Irish neighbors) as Villagers, and Greenwich Village becomes recognized around the world as the Left Bank of America. By the 1920s participants and chroniclers would already look back on this period, with premature nostalgia, as the Village’s “golden age,” a brief but shining time of intense social, cultural, and political radicalism and experimentation.
Malcolm Cowley didn’t get to the Village until the golden age was over and many of its key figures had left, but he understood the bygone era well. “Greenwich Village was not only a place, a mood, a way of life: like all bohemians, it was also a doctrine,” he writes in Exile’s Return. That doctrine was a set of core values and beliefs carried over from the nineteenth century’s liberal and radical movements, including, he thought, beliefs in self-expression (“Each man’s, each woman’s, purpose in life is to express himself, to realize his full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings.”), personal liberty (“Every law, convention or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished. Puritanism is the great enemy.”), what he called paganism (“The body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love.”), and “living for the moment.” In his time, the Greenwich Village of the Prohibition era, many of the behaviors associated with those beliefs—the drinking, smoking, eccentricities, and sex—would continue, but he felt the underpinning ideals had dropped away.
One of the magnets of the golden age who helped draw the scene together around these ideals was Henrietta Rodman, a New York City schoolteacher with militantly progressive ideas. Her pointedly new woman dress—bobbed hair, sandals, and loose shifts that looked to others like meal sacks—suited her blunt, confrontational personality. In 1912 she protested a Board of Education requirement that female teachers, but not males, report any change in their marital status. “The fight hit the newspapers,” Stansell writes, “which were ever alert to controversies involving New Women.” Breathless rumors circulated that Rodman’s own marital status was a free-love ménage.
Rodman was a member of the genteel Liberal Club that met near Gramercy Park. Floyd Dell, one of the Village’s most enthusiastic boosters, quipped that it was “a respectable, well-meaning up-town club, composed mainly of polite old-fashioned believers in the gradual improvement of mankind by going to lectures.” Rodman’s strident advocacy of free love split the Liberal Club in half in 1913, with scandalized older members staying uptown and the younger, “ultra-liberal” ones following her en masse to a new location—in the Village, of course, at 137 MacDougal Street, between West Third and Fourth Streets. Where lectures and polite conversation had marked the old club, the new one, promoting itself as “A Meeting Place for Those Interested in New Ideas,” was far more youthful and convivial. There were still lectures and talks; although Freud apparently never visited the Village, his pupil Carl Jung spoke at the Liberal Club. But along with talk it featured readings of the new free-verse poetry, “obscene” ragtime piano music, the racy new dances the shimmy and the turkey trot, and much drinking.
After events in the club the group would descend the stairs from their second-floor space to Polly’s restaurant, well loved for its cheap meals, casual atmosphere, and a famous waiter named Hyppolyte Havel. Havel was a small, snarling anarchist who amused the bohemians by slapping their plates in front of them while growling, “Bourgeois pigs!” A genuine political radical, Havel considered many of his customers dilettantes. According to one Villager, he “was in a perpetual state of vituperative excitement.” He was from the actual land of Bohemia where, he claimed, his anarchist rants got him confined to an insane asylum until the eminent psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing pronounced him sane, whereupon he was moved to a prison instead. The bohemians also loved the Washington Square Book Shop, next door, which they treated more like a lending library than a bookstore. The Liberal Club, Polly’s, and the bookshop formed a symbiotic triumvirate and together became a neighborhood social magnet, with a continual flow from the poetry readings and dances upstairs to the eats and drinks below and on into the shop to thumb through that new book on psychoanalysis or the latest anarcho-syndicalist tract.
Another of the scene-coalescing magnets, Mabel Dodge, arrived in the Village in 1912. She was not herself an artist or intellectual and became political only through her radical Village friends, especially her lover John Reed. But as a patron of the arts, a kind of collector of artists and intellectuals, and a catalyst—what the cultural historian Martin Green calls “a carrier of ideas, a Kultuträger”—she was hugely important to the cultural flowering of the Village and embodied its spirit as well as anyone on the scene.
She was born Mabel Ganson in 1879. The Gansons were a wealthy, stolid family in Buffalo, and Mabel spent much of her life escaping that heritage—not the wealth but the stolidity. “I felt I was made for no
ble love,” she writes in her candid and garrulous memoirs (sixteen hundred pages published in four volumes in the 1920s, then handily edited down to some 260 pages in the 1999 edition entitled Intimate Memories). She was made “not for art, not for work, not for the life of the worldly world, but for the fire of love in the body, for the great furnace of love in the flesh, lighted in the eyes and flowing, volatile, between the poles.” She admits she was no great beauty and had to exercise all her feminine wiles to distract the men she desired from her stumpy figure and plain face.
She was an innocent girl when she secretly married Karl Evans, from another wealthy Buffalo family, “and for the first time I experienced the amazing explosion of the internal fireworks.” Their son, John, was two and a half when Karl was killed in a hunting accident in 1903. The following year her parents packed the distraught young widow and her son on a steamer bound for Europe. On the weeklong voyage she met Edwin Dodge of Boston, a wealthy architect, whom she soon married in France. “Between Edwin and me there was never a deep marriage relationship, although there was a great friendship,” she writes.
From France they proceeded to Italy in 1905 and took a baronial Medici estate, the Villa Curonia, near Florence. With Edwin relegated more to friend and companion than husband and lover—he was “only the figurehead on my ship”—Mabel set about two great projects. On the one hand, she sought to stoke the great furnace of love with a succession of men, from handsome, tragically fallen nobles to handsome, earthy chauffeurs, and with women as well. Her memoirs leave the impression that the passion was often more on her side than on theirs, and that there was more panting, overwrought Victorian melodrama in these relationships than explosions of fireworks. She writes that in one moment of despair over a failed romance she tried to commit suicide by eating figs packed with broken glass, which “for some miraculous reason” had no effect.
Meanwhile, she went to work on her aesthetic and intellectual improvement with equal verve. In Italy the vast storehouse of the Renaissance was at her fingertips. To educate herself about contemporary art, however, there was only one place to go: Paris. Art capital of the Western world, Paris in the early 1900s was where you went to learn about all the recent and exciting new trends—Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism. She frequented the Montparnasse apartment of the brother and sister expatriates Leo and Gertrude Stein. Leo, the connoisseur and intense advocate of new art, introduced her to Picasso and Matisse and taught her to appreciate their work—work few people in America, still a fine art backwater, had seen. At the same time, the magnitude of Gertrude’s life force fascinated and attracted Mabel, as though Mabel were a satellite held in the gravitational pull of a massive planet. “Gertrude Stein was prodigious. Pounds and pounds and pounds piled up on her skeleton—not the billowing kind, but massive, heavy fat . . . She had a laugh like a beefsteak.”
Leo, Gertrude, and Gertrude’s nearly silent partner Alice B. Toklas later visited Mabel at the villa. Mabel reports that Gertrude flirted with her so heavily that Alice began, in her quiet fashion, to engineer ways of keeping them apart. Edwin, the affable but boring Bostonian, faded further and further into the background of her life.
In 1912, wondering where to send John to school, Mabel boldly wrote to H. G. Wells in England, asking his advice. In today’s pop culture Wells is remembered only as a kind of British Jules Verne, but in his lifetime he was highly respected as a public intellectual, a philosopher of science, politics, education, religion, and general civilization. She took his advice that the best place to educate an American boy was America, and as their ship pulled into New York Harbor she warned John, “Remember, it is ugly in America.” He gazed at Manhattan’s spiked skyline and replied, “I don’t think it’s so ugly.”
If Mabel had to be back in America, she wanted to be in the place that most reminded her of Europe: Greenwich Village. They took an apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue, on the northeast corner at Ninth Street, a short stroll from the Washington Square Arch. The house, which no longer stands, was a four-story brick box painted brown, the very image of stolid respectability, if somewhat gone to seed. The Dodges were on the second floor, a young lawyer’s family was on the third floor, and on the fourth lived William “Plain Bill” Sulzer, a gaunt, sepulchral man who in photographs bears an unsettling resemblance to Lon Chaney unmasked in Phantom of the Opera. He’d just given up his seat in Congress in his quest to become New York’s thirty-ninth governor, an office he would hold for less than a year before being impeached. On the ground floor was the owner, a grouchy one-legged Civil War relic, General Daniel Sickles, who once sent Mabel a thank-you note that ended with “Written in the 93rd year of my life without the aid of spectacles.”
Mabel soon convinced Edwin to remove himself to rooms in the Brevoort House hotel just down the block. Built in 1854 and named for one of the oldest families in the city, who had owned a large tract of land north of Washington Square, the Brevoort was considered the best place to stay, short or long term, near the Square. Edwin’s moving there seems to have been a relief to both him and Mabel and was a step toward their eventual divorce. She meanwhile did the apartment all in white, like an art gallery. What she exhibited there was not so much paintings as people. At a dinner party she met Carl Van Vechten, a music critic, author, photographer, voracious gourmand of the arts, and cultural provocateur. “He had nice brown eyes, full of twinkling, good-natured malice,” she notes. He was already displaying a fascination with black culture that in the 1920s would make him one of the white aesthetes most involved in promoting the Harlem Renaissance—a “Negrotarian,” in Zora Neale Hurston’s memorable coinage. He would be instrumental in finding white publishers for Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes, with whom he may have had an affair. In 1926 he would see the publication of his own very successful and controversial novel about Harlem, Nigger Heaven. (The unfortunate title has since doomed the novel to obscurity, but it was less scandalous in its time, when it was common slang for the racially segregated balconies in theaters. In the book it’s a metaphor for light-skinned blacks trying to pass in white society.)
Soon Dodge also met Lincoln Steffens and Hutchins Hapgood, two of the older figures on the scene. Originally from San Francisco, Steffens was fleeing a wealthy family background of his own when he came to New York in 1892. He became the country’s premiere muckraking journalist, exposing urban blight and municipal corruption in a series of articles collected in 1904 as the book The Shame of the Cities. As editor of the newspaper Commercial Advertiser and then McClure’s magazine, he recruited so many reform-minded Ivy Leaguers to New York journalism that the zone of cheap rooming houses along the south side of Washington Square where they lived was referred to as a second Harvard Yard. When Dodge met him he was in his mid-forties and had recently moved there himself to be near the energetic and idealistic young people he liked to encourage and mentor. Hapgood was born in Chicago in 1869, son of a prosperous industrialist. He had gotten his master’s degree and taught English at Harvard before moving to Manhattan in the late 1890s to take a job under Steffens at the Advertiser. He and his wife, Neith Boyce, who also wrote for Steffens, had lived on Washington Square for a while, but by the time Dodge came they’d long since moved up the Hudson River to Dobbs Ferry to find room to raise their growing family. Still, they had many friends in the Village and stayed active in its affairs. Hapgood was by his own admission a conventional man drawn to unconventional people; he titled his 1939 autobiography A Victorian in the Modern World. “I preferred for many years the society of outcasts, men and women, and the dreamshops of life to the respectable people and their social resorts,” he writes. “I don’t know why it was, entirely, but even from the beginning I felt something limited and repressive in morality as it is ordinarily conceived. It seemed to say, ‘Thou shalt not,’ but only rarely, ‘Thou shalt,’ and then faintheartedly.”
Hapgood writes that when he met Dodge “she was completely innocent of the world of labor and
of revolutions in politics, art, and industry.” She couldn’t have been quite so culturally ignorant as all that, but Hapgood’s condescending tone was not unusual when Dodge’s male friends wrote about her. She records that it was Steffens who suggested she should host salons, because “men like to sit with you and talk to themselves! You make them think more fluently, and they feel enhanced.”
She began to host regular Wednesday “Evenings.” It was not the only salon in Manhattan at the time, but it became the most famous, and it was agreed she drew together the most interesting range of characters, whom she summed up as “Socialists, Trade Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, ‘Old Friends,’ Psychoanalysts, IWWs [Industrial Workers of the World], Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern Artists, Clubwomen, Woman’s-place-is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men.” As many as a hundred of them would pack her bright-walled parlor. Some Evenings were organized, with a guest speaker followed by general discussion. Most of the topics, intensely interesting to Villagers, were of a type not openly broached in many other parlor rooms in 1913: trade unionism, socialism versus anarchism, “sex antagonism,” birth control, free love, women’s suffrage, psychoanalysis, eugenics. Poets read, often to the disgust of the other poets in the room, and one evening two editors of the magazine Metropolitan were rudely received by the crowd. Metropolitan was a very successful monthly that stood out on the newsstands with its pretty cover girls. It was the sort of well-heeled publication all struggling young Village writers professed to despise and any would give an arm to be seen in. As a result of this Evening, some would get the chance.
The Village Page 10