NEW: South Village Landmark proposal highlights cultural histories
From Gay City News
01/25/2007
Preservation Bid Eyes Gay History
By: PAUL SCHINDLER
“Witness the Scenes in ‘the Slide’ as the Herald Describes Them to You, and Straightway Begin Your Work of Reform.”
So read a sub-headline in a crusading piece of New York Herald reporting on January 5, 1892, as reported in George Chauncey’s acclaimed 1994 history, “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.”
The Herald exposé called readers’ attention to what it described as a “depravity unknown in the lowest slums of London or Paris”-a basement club located at 157 Bleecker Street near Thompson, two blocks below Washington Square Park, in the heart of the South Village. The establishment catered to “pansies”-effeminate men whose faces were often “rouged up” and who counted on more butch types, mostly single men, many of them working class, to buy them drinks and perhaps even pay them for sex. In a reversal of the way in which the commerce runs in today’s gay slang, the macho partner was sometimes known as “trade.”
The Slide, dubbed by the Press, another Gotham newspaper of the day, as the “wickedest place in New York,” was probably indeed the most disreputable of the turn-of-the century establishments we would now call gay, but it was not the only one. In the area that runs up from Bleecker to West Third, from Sixth Avenue to as far east as Broadway, historians as well as tales passed down from one generation to the next document a vibrant outcropping of establishments that served men and women who enjoyed same-sex desire-including cheap restaurants, saloons, and tea rooms-and sat close by brothels of a more traditional kind as well as Catholic churches that served the neighborhood’s emerging working class Italian-American community.
By 1925, at the northwest corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, the neighborhood supported a tonier watering hole, the San Remo, that for decades to come drew what cultural historian Steven Watson has called “the younger generation of bohemians,” a group that could also be thought of as perhaps proto-metrosexuals-including Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Day, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollack, James Agee, and Jack Kerouac.
This-and more-is part of the rich cultural stew brought together and to light in an 82-page report released two weeks ago by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Presentation and authored by Columbia University architectural historian Andrew S. Dolkart.
The report was presented to Robert Tierney, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), the city agency that oversees the designation of buildings, blocks, and neighborhoods worthy of protection against adverse development. The commission has created more than 80 such districts citywide, and GVSHP is seeking approval for a South Village Historic District comprised of 40 blocks and roughly 800 buildings.
If approved, the district would run from the West Fourth Street southern boundary of Washington Square Park as far south as Watts Street, and from Sixth Avenue, and in places Seventh, east to West Broadway/ LaGuardia Place.
In his introduction to the report, Andrew Berman, GVSHP’s executive director, after noting that “Greenwich Village, one of New York and the world’s most venerable and beloved neighborhoods, owes much of its continuing appeal to its well-preserved architecture, its palpable sense of history, its charm, and its human scale,” warns that the South Village’s “historic buildings could be lost at any time.”
Major portions of Greenwich Village have been protected since 1969, when the LPC created the city’s first “truly large-scale neighborhood historic district,” in Berman’s words. Since then, additional portions of the Village have also won protection, most recently last year, when the Weehawken Street Historic District was created in a relatively compact area running north and east from the corner of Christopher and West Streets, another area of critical historical significance for the LGBT community.
Berman takes note in his introduction of the seeming incongruity of the area immediately south of Washington Square Park, the West Village’s only significant parkland except for the Hudson Riverfront, not having been earlier included in any preservation district.
“I have long had my suspicions about why this may have been so,” he writes.
The South Village, he notes, “is a neighborhood whose built form and history were utterly shaped and transformed by working-class immigrants, most prominently, but not exclusively, Italian-Americans.” Berman attributes no ethnic animosity to the oversight, nor any related to class, at least in conscious form. But it does clearly relate, he argues, to something inextricably tied to class-the architectural splendor that a neighborhood can afford.
“While the genteel townhouses and picturesque cul-de-sacs of the West Village were considered the stuff of historic preservation in the 1960s,” Berman continues, “working-class architecture, consisting of tenements and converted rowhouses, were not considered by most to be worthy of preservation, nor was immigrant and ethnic history yet deemed worthy of recognition.”
After more than a generation of gentrification spreading in every direction across the five boroughs, the neglect of a neighborhood with narrow, tree-lined, yet nonetheless bustling thoroughfares-still full of small-scale businesses at street level and with an endless variety of ornamental cornices and pedimented cast-iron window lintels on the upper floors of modest rowhouses and walk-ups-seems almost the behavior of an extraterrestrial race of beings.
Dolkart’s report is full of painstaking architectural commentary, informed by spot-on social history and illustrated by diagrams and photos, both current-day and, to document what has already been lost, those found in archival collections. A discussion of “old law” dumbbell tenements located at 170-178 Thompson, accompanied by a drawing, makes abundantly clear why Progressive Era urban reformers battled to change building codes, not only to afford dwellers better access to fresh air, but more importantly to avoid the narrow flues that sucked hot flames from floor to floor during deadly fires.
A schematic of the block bounded by Jones, West Fourth, Cornelia, and Bleecker shows a remarkable collection of “back buildings” behind those abutting the streets, suggesting the social congestion of the neighborhood and the demand for land and space already overwhelming the metropolis a century or more ago.
The LGBT community benefits from the fact that both Berman and Dolkart are out gay men. The report sensitively addresses the neighborhood’s significance in the history of New York’s gay community and draws wisely on the work of scholars such as Chauncey and Watson in framing its discussion.
Like so many other New York neighborhoods, the South Village has accommodated an almost breathtaking variety of cultural traditions in the past century and a half. Before it became primarily an Italian enclave at the end of the 19th century, it was one of the first concentrated settlement areas-by the 1860s-for African-Americans, many of them post-Civil War migrants from the South. For a time, “Little Africa” as it was called was home to as many as 5,000 black residents, a population that gradually declined as Italian immigrants came to predominate and Harlem first became a magnet for African-American newcomers.
Even allowing for New York’s tradition of tolerating differences, however, it may seem surprising that early gay and lesbian establishments, of high and low brow, as well as other rowdy and transgressive locales, coexisted with a thriving Italian-American Catholic commun
ity. Indeed, Dolkart’s survey discusses a series of “dives where men and women of the lowest order are received as welcome guests,” one of which was next door to St. Benedict’s Roman Catholic Church.
Chauncey’s scholarship, in particular, helps illuminate this seeming contradiction. Working class communities of that era were often stubbornly resistant to middle class, Victorian attitudes about public propriety. Locales that permitted gay expression throughout the city, whether the Tenderloin district that ran up Sixth and Seventh Avenues from 23rd Street to 40th or the Bowery, were located in working class neighborhoods, and many of the “trade” who frequented pansy bars came from a working class background, often young men without the means to marry yet or in many cases immigrants who arrived in New York alone.
Historians of Italian immigration have long noted that this ethnic group had a more pronounced tendency than others to come to the U.S. in boatloads of primarily young single, or at least temporarily unattached, men. Some returned money to their families back home, returning at some point to bring their wives to America, or perhaps, having either made enough money here or soured on the dream, to stay put in Italy.
Chauncey also makes a persuasive case that butch men who enjoyed the sexual attentions of pansies, never seeing themselves as homosexual, were more likely to come from a working class background. Middle class men, by this point, had come to view such behavior as a vice. It is no accident that the Herald reporter alarmed by the Slide issued a call to reformers. Gilded Age and Progressive goo-goos aimed not only to rid the city of brothels and pansies but also hoped to cure the more garden-variety social maladies of the vast immigrant working class.
But Bohemia proved resilient in the South Village, and by the early 20th century the dives of the 1900s were supplemented by a more varied array of establishments probably more recognizable to the modern gay eye. Gay speakeasies arose and in many cases survived for decades, and institutions that would grow to have important influence in the development of modern gay culture-such as the Provincetown Playhouse, on MacDougal Street-emerged. For all we know, at the San Remo, Merce Cunningham and Gore Vidal may have argued bitterly over whether they were a pair of gay men, or merely “homosexualists,” to borrow the iconoclastic author’s preferred formulation.
And by 1958, a new generation of gay New Yorkers was at it, this time at 31 Carmine Street, with the establishment of Café Cino, a coffee house that Dolkart writes “became the birthplace of the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement.” There young gay dramatists, including William Hoffman, Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson, and Lanford Wilson first won attention, along with what Patrick, in an interview with On the Purple Circuit’s Michael Dale, described as “the odd straight playwrights like John Guare [and] Sam Shepard.”
These details, and many more, both cultural and architectural, comprise the report that GVSHP submitted for Landmarks’ review. According to Berman, the process is of indeterminate duration with the LPC free to respond as it chooses. If an historic preservation designation is in the cards, public hearings will be held, at which time both supporters and critics will have their time to make a case.
Berman noted that the timeline on the approval of the Gansevoort Market Historic District, in the Village’s northwest corner, which is considerably smaller than what is proposed for the South Village, was roughly two years from the time GVSHP filed its report in 2001 to the LPC’s formal designation. “By everyone’s acknowledgement that was the fastest district designation in recent memory,” he conceded.
By way of predicting what, if any significant opposition might develop, Berman noted that current zoning regulations in the neighborhood already bar unusually large-scale developments, so the proposal is not necessarily taking any projects being planned “off the table.” He also pointed to an advisory board that includes scholars, block association leaders, co-op boards and other individual property owners, business proprietors, and major community institutions from the Greenwich Village Community Task Force and the SoHo Alliance to the Film Forum.
Perhaps, most significant, however, is the posture of what Berman called “the elephant in the room.” NYU, arguably the single most influential developer in the Village in recent decades, has “pledged to support this,” he said.
©GayCityNews 2007