Hitchens on the Village
Photo by Fred W. McDarrah, courtesy of Vanity Fair
In this month's (last month's?! Urbanite's snail mail is sloooow) uber-columnist Christopher Hitchens drops in on a local real estate dispute, namely the efforts by St. Vincent's hospital to pave over much of Greenwich Village to build their own 1 million square foot hospital/condo tower complex.
Per Hitch:
Like two huge toads, these ugly and tedious and uninspired structures would impede the view and block the light of one of New York’s historic neighborhoods: a district that in a previous generation survived even Robert Moses and his plan to slam a neo-Brutalist urban highway through Bohemia. (The story of that battle is told by Jane Jacobs in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.)New York is supposed to have learned from that and from similar errors of the past, and to have understood that Brobdingnag is all very well—indeed is very desirable and impressive—in Wall Street and Midtown, whereas a touch of Lilliput is necessary on the Lower East and West Sides.
Hitchens pivots though from that story though to discuss the role of Bohemian quarters in urban life--San Francisco's North Beach, the Left Bank in Paris, etc.
Hitch again:
It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. I
It is nuts when you consider how central the Village has been to American arts and culture ever since the days of Hart Crane and Edna St. Vincent Millay up through Madonna and Basquiat, and how for all intents and purposes those days are basically over.
Sure, people for over a century have been proclaiming the Village dead, but it's hard to imagine any poet or oboe player decamping from their suburban confines to West 4th Street now, not unless they made a fortune in finance.
And yes, they'll just go to Williamsburg or East Williamsburg or Canarsie or wherever, but, much like if the Banks moved out of Wall Street, adding a tombstone to Village bohemia should give all of us, at the very least, pause.
--David Freedlander
