Washington Square, A Place Apart
On January 23, 1917, artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan, poet Gertrude Dick, and three actors from the Provincetown Playhouse broke into a hidden spiral staircase in the Washington Square Arch and ascended to the summit. They dangled Chinese lanterns and red balloons, fired off toy cap pistols, and galivanted until dawn, whereupon, with Bohemian pomp and circumstance, they declared “a free and independent Greenwich Village.” A frivolous declaration no doubt, given the fact that World War I was raging, and it was only a matter of months before the U.S. would enter the fray. Frivolity has long been a hallmark of the Village. Having migrated here in 1976 from the outer borough of Queens, I have witnessed a gradual makeover of the dominant mood from whimsy to wariness, a... Read more...
