The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  On April 30, President Nixon went on national television to announce that he had sent troops into Cambodia, Vietnam’s neighbor. The purpose was to cut off North Vietnamese supply routes through the country. Just ten days earlier Nixon had announced that 150,000 American troops would be pulled out in the coming year. Now he suddenly seemed to be expanding the war again. In the following days, protests erupted at hundreds of colleges around the country, while Nixon groused about “bums blowing up campuses.” Protest rallies were practically everyday occurrences by the spring of 1970—the giant march on Washington in 1969 had drawn an estimated quarter of a million protesters—but this time things turned deadly. On May 4, National Guardsmen opened fire at Kent State in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine others. Reacting to this “massacre,” students went on strike around the country, and there was another huge march on Washington. Beginning on May 4, NYU students occupied the Loeb Student Center on the south side of Washington Square Park (torn down in the 2000s and replaced by the much bigger Kimmel Center), Warren Weaver Hall on Broadway, and Kimball Hall near the Asch Building. They were especially interested in the university’s print shop in Kimball, which they used to crank out strike pamphlets and revolutionary literature, and in the Atomic Energy Commission’s multimillion-dollar computer center in Weaver. The university’s administration was particularly anxious to coax them out of Weaver before they vandalized or destroyed those computers. When the students voluntarily left the building after two days, cops and university workers entered it and immediately smelled smoke. Racing up to the second-floor computer center they found jug-sized Molotov cocktails with long rag fuses burning, which they stamped out. It took two weeks of negotiations to pry the students out of Loeb and Kimball. While all this was going on, a few thousand college and high school students, including some of the NYU strikers, gathered outside Federal Hall down on Wall Street for a rally on May 8. Cops and a few hundred construction workers, organized by local union bosses, attacked the kids, chasing them through the streets of the financial district in what came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot. For the Old Left it was a terrible vision, the workers rising up to attack kids.

  The turmoil continued. From the underground Dohrn issued a tape-recorded “declaration of war.” Three weeks later a bomb went off at NYPD headquarters. The organization followed it with a number of actions over the next few years, bombing military buildings, corporate headquarters, courthouses, even the U.S. Capitol building and the Pentagon. They also helped Timothy Leary break out of a California prison where he was serving time on a pot bust, smuggling him and his wife out of the country to Algeria, where they met up with the self-exiled Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.

  Wilkerson remained in hiding through it all, changing her locations and using assumed identities, lying low, working as a waitress, a secretary, a nurse’s aide. When Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974 and the last American troops left Vietnam in 1975, the revolutionary moment passed. The Weather Underground dissolved amid doctrinal squabbles in 1976 and members began turning themselves in to the authorities. Dohrn and Wilkerson remained in hiding until 1980. After giving herself up, Wilkerson served a year for illegal possession of explosives. On her release she moved to Brooklyn and became a public school math teacher.

  Boudin was arrested in 1981. After the breakup of the Weather Underground she’d become involved with a radical black organization, the Family, which included Doc Shakur, Tupac’s stepfather. She participated with them in a botched holdup of a Brinks truck in Rockland County, New York, in which they shot and killed a Brinks guard and two policemen before being apprehended. The Family’s motive wasn’t political; they wanted the money to score drugs. Boudin became a poet in prison and won a PEN prize. She was paroled in 2003.

  The 1970 explosions and fire had completely gutted the Wilkersons’ home. It stood an abandoned and boarded-up husk for eight years. Someone scrawled the graffito Weatherman Park on the plywood. Some neighbors thought the house should be reconstructed to match the original design, but when it was finally rebuilt in 1978 an architect gave it a new facade, which stands at a sharp, punched-out angle to the flat fronts of its stately neighbors, a silent but striking visual reference to the explosion.

  James Merrill wrote a poem about it all, “18 West 11th Street,” which includes the lines, “The point / Was anger, brother? Love? Dear premises / Vainly exploded, vainly dwelt upon.”

  IN OCTOBER 1970 ANGELA DAVIS WAS ARRESTED IN THE HOWARD Johnson Motor Lodge at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-first Street and taken to the House of Detention. It was not her first time in Greenwich Village. She was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, where her father was a car mechanic and her mother was a teacher and a civil rights activist. They lived in a black neighborhood called Dynamite Hill, so named because the Klan often firebombed homes there. With help from the American Friends, she and her mother moved to New York, where her mother studied for her master’s at NYU while Angela attended Elisabeth Irwin High School in the Village. She went on to study philosophy at Brandeis, the Sorbonne, and at the University of California, earning her PhD. One of her teachers was the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse, whose book One-Dimensional Man was a must-read for the New Left. By the late 1960s she was an avowed Communist, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and affiliated with the Panthers. She lectured in philosophy at UCLA until 1969, when her Communist and radical affiliations got her fired.

  In August 1970 a black teen named Jonathan Jackson took over a Marin County courtroom with a machine gun and demanded the release of his older brother, Panther member George Jackson, from nearby Soledad prison. He took the judge, the district attorney, and three jurors hostage. In the attempted getaway Jackson, the judge, and one other person were shot and killed. When police discovered that Davis, who knew George Jackson, was the registered owner of Jonathan’s weapon she was charged as an accomplice to murder, a capital crime in California. She fled the state, which put her on the FBI’s most wanted list. A beautiful twenty-six-year-old with a huge and magnificent Afro, she became a global pop star of the revolution à la Che Guevara. Before the FBI arrested her she’d spent a few days walking openly in Times Square, unrecognized because she’d slicked down the Afro and dressed like an office worker.

  Within thirty minutes of her being locked up in the House of D a crowd of protesters began to gather outside the monolith, chanting; prisoners stood in their windows and chanted along, their fists raised. The NYPD sent a Tactical Defense Force—riot police—and House of D officials turned off all the lights inside, hoping to quiet things down. Women set small fires in their cells and demonstrators cheered the flickering in the windows. They eventually dispersed without major incident. Placed in isolation, Davis went on a ten-day hunger strike. She spent nine weeks in the facility while fighting extradition to California, where, she was quite convinced, she’d be convicted and put to death. In fact she would be acquitted of all charges in a San Francisco courtroom in 1972, after spending eighteen months behind bars. She went on to write about the terrible conditions in the House of D for the Village Voice.

  Davis was the facility’s last celebrity tenant. Through the 1950s and ’60s Village civic and neighborhood groups had continually called for the facility to be removed to some location more appropriate, which is to say far away from where they lived and walked their children to school. More liberal souls in the neighborhood thought it should stay, fearing that if the women were shifted to some more isolated location they might be all the more easily mistreated. Jerry Herman satirized the controversy in “Save the Village”:

  Don’t tear down the House of Detention

  Keep her and shield her from all who wish her harm

  Don’t tear down the House of Detention

  Cornerstone of Greenwich Village charm . . .

  So I say fie, fie to the cynic

  Know that there’s love in these hallowed walls of brown

  There’s love in the laundry, there’s love in
the showers,

  There’s love in the clinic

  ’Twas built with love, my lovely house in town

  Save the tramp, the pusher and the souse

  Would you trade love for an apartment house?

  Dworkin and Goldrosen’s testimony before a commission studying conditions at the House of D helped lead to its being shut down altogether in 1971. Inmates were moved to a new facility on Rikers Island. After some debate about possible new uses for the Village monolith it was simply torn down in 1973. The site is now a small, fenced-in garden. In 1975 Tom Eyen’s spoofy play Women Behind Bars, set in the House of D in the 1950s, premiered. The John Waters star Divine performed in a later production.

  29

  The Lion’s Head

  IT WAS NOON ON A FALL WEEKDAY AND THE WHITE HORSE WAS very quiet. A few gray-haired topers at the bar, no lunch crowd yet at the tables or booths in the back room. A photograph of Dylan Thomas with the postmodern novelist David Markson (Wittgenstein’s Mistress) gazed down at Dermot McEvoy. McEvoy was an infant when Thomas drank his last at the White Horse, but Dermot and Markson, who died in 2010, were longtime pals and drinking buddies. Not at the White Horse but at another Village writers’ bar, the Lion’s Head. Compact and gray-haired, a bit on the high side of sixty, McEvoy had worked in publishing for twenty-five years. He’d written two novels set in Greenwich Village, Terrible Angel and Our Lady of Greenwich Village, and was working on a third. Though born in Dublin he’d lived in the Village most of his life. He had the very slightest hint of an Irish accent, saying “em” when an American would say “um,” an Irish love of funny stories, and the passing storms of an Irish temper.

  “My family came to this country in 1954. I was three and a half. My parents were in their forties. We were poverty-stricken in Ireland, so we came here to be poverty-stricken. The only thing that saved us was a rent-controlled apartment.” The family first lived at West Tenth and Bleecker Streets. “My father was the super there, and he used to get in arguments with the owners all the time, very hot-headed Irishman, with red hair. So we moved almost every year until we finally settled at 25 Charles Street.

  “My father being a super and a plumber, I’ve been inside most of the buildings in the Village. He was a super originally on Horatio Street, and he was a plumber in almost every building in the Village, putting in boilers and doing stuff like that. I got to see a lot. He had four buildings on West Eleventh between Fifth and Sixth, one of the most beautiful blocks in the Village.” McEvoy’s father and mother both worked for Osmond and Helene Fraenkel, who had the town house at 25 West Eleventh Street. Osmond was a civil rights lawyer who helped found the ACLU and was on the defense teams for Sacco and Vanzetti and for the Scottsboro Boys. Helene had been one of the screenwriters for the 1944 Dick Powell movie It Happened Tomorrow. She had a writing cabin in the backyard. “A wonderful woman, and even in her eighties and blind, she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with brilliant white hair. Her battles with my hot-tempered father still bring a smile. My father would be cursin’ and swearin’ and Mrs. Fraenkel would calmly say, ‘Nevertheless, Mr. McEvoy!’ I used to type her manuscripts and read the Times to her each day.” In March 1970 he was relieved to hear that the Fraenkels were unharmed when Cathy Wilkerson and her friends blew up the town house across the street at 18.

  Dermot went to the elementary school at St. Bernard’s on West Thirteenth Street, now closed. “It was great. It was a real neighborhood. The three ethnic groups that made up St. Bernard’s parish were Irish, number one, maybe Spanish number two at that point—they lived in the projects up on Fifteenth Street—and maybe Italian was the third one. But it seemed like it was mostly Irish. You played in the street. I just marvel at guys who make playdates for their kids. We came home, we put on our dungarees, and went out and played ball until five-thirty or whenever. I never understood why you have to worry about your kids so much. There were probably just as many perverts wandering then as there are now.” He remembered playing stickball between St. Luke’s, the beautiful Episcopal church at Hudson and Christopher Streets, and the Archive Building, a massive redbrick warehouse on Greenwich Street, near the site of the old Newgate Prison, which stored documents for federal archives until it was converted into apartments in 1988. “That block of Greenwich, between Christopher and Morton, we used to play football there in the winter because it was empty at the weekends, you never get a truck. They were all bays down there for the post office, which was located on Christopher Street then. So that was empty, no traffic, and that’s where we all played ball.”

  As a kid he encountered some of the Village’s bohemians. His mother cleaned a rooming house at the corner of West Fourth and West Twelfth Streets that “was full of artists. I remember one fellow used to be sketching there, and to keep me quiet he’d give me a pad and some crayons. This is ’54 maybe, ’55? There were still guys with the dream. What was he renting for, maybe ten bucks, with the bathroom in the hall. Every time I pass that building I remember that fellow.”

  McEvoy’s working-class Irish neighbors began to flee the Village in the mid-1960s with the dockworkers exodus. “St. Veronica’s school closed, so half the kids went to St. Bernard’s, half went to St. Joseph’s. That was the beginning of the end of the Village as a working-class neighborhood. The Italians were leaving to go to the suburbs, which is an Italian instinct, not too much of an Irish instinct. There were tenements on Thirteenth Street which were torn down and replaced by apartment buildings. One of my playmates’ father was a fireman, another was a detective, another drove a truck. Things like this. So you had blue-collar stuff, and people worked very hard.” The death of the waterfront had a ripple effect through the community. “It slowly began to die off as the kids grew up, went away, went to college, whatever. So that’s when the Village started changing, in ’64, ’65.” The mom-and-pop shops that served the community—the grocer’s, the butcher’s, the shoe repair and barbershop and candy store—began to vanish one by one as well.

  McEvoy’s family, not dependent on the waterfront, stayed. He went to high school at La Salle Academy over on Cooper Square. From there he went up to Hunter College, and from there he went into publishing, rising to a senior editor position at Publishers Weekly. And as he got old enough he began to go into the neighborhood bars.

  “We used to drink at a place called the Cookie Bar,” now Dublin 6, on Hudson Street. “A great place. A lot of guys from the HB Studio went in there.” He remembered William Hickey, the Brooklyn-born character actor who played Don Corrado Prizzi in Prizzi’s Honor. “Guys you would see on TV all the time, they used to go in the Cookie Bar.”

  As a young Villager and aspiring writer, McEvoy read the Voice religiously. His favorite Voice writer, no surprise, was Irish: Joe Flaherty. Born in Brooklyn, Flaherty was seven when “the body of his murdered dockworker father [was] fished out of the Gowanus Canal,” Kevin McAuliffe writes in The Great American Newspaper, a history of the Voice. No doubt Mr. Flaherty had gotten on the wrong side of the mobsters who ran the Brooklyn waterfront. Joe was trying to be a writer while working as a longshoreman himself when the Voice ran his first piece in 1966. Dan Wolf soon had him writing regularly and wittily on sports and politics, and he was one of the stars of the paper into the mid-1970s. He also contributed to the Times and all the other New York papers, as well as to magazines, including Penthouse. He never lost his big, burly longshoreman’s appearance or his habit of drinking like one.

  “Joe always used to mention going into the Lion’s Head,” McEvoy recalled. Opened in 1966, it was a few steps down from the sidewalk at 59 Christopher Street near Sheridan Square. Like a lot of bars mythologized by those who drank away their youths or lives in them, there was nothing special about the Lion’s Head space. The bar ran down the right side of the narrow front room. Small windows in the front let in sunlight and views of pedestrians’ ankles for the afternoon drinkers. Over time the wood-paneled wall to the left as you entered was covered with the dust jack
ets of books written by the regulars. In the back, to the right, was a larger room with tables where food was served. There was no jukebox early on—it was a serious drinkers’ and talkers’ bar.

  Because it was a few steps away from the offices at the time, it was a Voice hangout. For thirty years it would be the destination Village watering hole for journalists from the other papers and magazines in the city as well, and for a sizable literary crowd, and for local politicians, and for assorted neighborhood characters. Along with Flaherty, Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, Frank McCourt, and Pete Hamill were regulars. When Hamill was dating Shirley MacLaine, he’d sometimes bring her there. Jessica Lange waited tables there; she quit to go star in King Kong. David Markson, who’d come to the Village in the mid-1940s, had switched from the White Horse to the Lion’s Head by the time McEvoy started drinking there. “Markson was a heavy drinker. He would drink a couple bottles of vodka a day. His first shift would be at noon. At noontime in the Lion’s Head in the old days, noon to two or three, there’d be a lot of writers in there, you’d have five or six guys at the bar, steady drinkers. Then David would come back at cocktail hour, and he’d come back at around eleven o’clock at night and drink for an hour or two, and then he’d pick up a bottle of vodka on his way home to put on his cornflakes in the morning. And this guy lived to be eighty-two and had all his faculties at the end.”