Factual History of Greenwich Village

The Dutch bought Manhattan Island from the Indians in 1626; and at that time the area which we know as Greenwich Village was primarily a woodland in which deer, elk, woodchuck and other creatures roamed. The Village soon became known as the best tobacco plantation in the colony, and under the direction of the Dutch West India Company, tobacco plantations flourished.

After the British captured Nieuw Amsterdam in 1664, a commander of the fleet of English warships named Sir Peter Warren in 1731 purchased a large portion of the Village plantation, where he lived with his family in a beautiful mansion overlooking the Hudson River where Perry and West 4th now meet. He named this farm Greenwich. In the 1750's and 60's the verdant "Greenwich" area attracted well-to-do families who built grand country-style homes.

During the smallpox and yellow fever epidemics which ravaged the population of New York City (still miles south of Greenwich Village borders) in 1822, families fled north to the Village, settling this country village which is now Greenwich Village. Businesses and banks quickly were built. By 1850 the Washington Square area in the Village became the place successful merchants built their grand townhouses. This gentrification changed the area from a small country village into a thriving town unto itself.

By the end of the nineteenth century however, the wealthier residents began moving uptown to more "fashionable" areas, while at the same time residential buildings in the Village were left to run down by some absentee landlords. Eventually the rents for this dilapidated housing came down, attracting artists, radical and intellectual rebels who saw The Village as an adjunct to Paris.

In the early decades of the 20th century the word got around that The Village was the place to live "the free life" as it was then called. During the First World War the Village became a symbol of the repudiation of traditional values.

The 1940's, 1950's and 1960's in the Village is now seen as the tail-end of Bohemian life. In the 1950's Beat poets and coffee house existentialists intermingled with a new breed of intellectually oriented rebel actors who studied the "Method" with Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio.

The counter-culture of off-off Broadway and angry coffee house poetry continued in The Village and elsewhere into the 1970's, but in that decade the furor was labled a "sexual revolution". Out of this emerged women's liberation as well as gay liberation.

Many artists, writers and actors who could indulge in free experiences and artistic experimentation from the 1900's through the 1970's could, by the 1980's, no longer afford to live in the city because of escalating real estate costs and the Yuppie invasion of the 1980's. Many moved into the East Village and Alphabet City. In the East Village a storefront gallery movement in the 1980's seemed to nurture new artists. In the 1990's, some of the original Bohemian atmosphere and youth-culture that was so inherent in Village life shifted eastward with the new rock-clubs like the Pyramid, the Continental and C.B.G.B.'s and including East Village style oddball shops like Little Ricky's and Atomic Passion. Small bookstores, inexpensive thrift shops and restaurants also thrive in the East Village.

Under thirty, Gen-X types abound in the East Village alongside rebellious get-back-at-your-parents skinheads, some with shaved heads or others with purple or fuchsia dyed hair stiffed straight-up into points with gel and hair spray who also sport nose, eyebrow and cheek rings. Meanwhile the West Village has become more stylish with jazz clubs and sparkling new coffee shop emporiums opening all the time.