You are currently browsing the stories about the Greenwich Village neighborhood
Tenements and Tribulations
by Eve Zanni 05/14/2023Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
We moved to Greenwich Village in the mid-1980s, and at every landing of our fifth-floor tenement walk up there was a nose-full of tantalizing smells. This was in the very Italian section of the West Village, full of tenements that we called “V.I.V’s” or “Vertical Italian Villages.” The older folks, who sat out in front, chatting […]
Washington Square, A Place Apart
by Peter Wortsman 12/03/2022Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, West Village
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 […]
Dead Weight
by Raphael Lasar 10/14/2022Neighborhood: East Village, Greenwich Village
When I was a teenager, during the second half of the 1970s, I pretty much lived in Washington Square Park during the summer. I sometimes joke that in some ways I was raised there. In some ways that is not so funny. Yippies, Jesus Freaks, drug addicts, tourists, and street performers were my friends and […]
Advanced Poetry
by Tayler Bakotic 07/03/2022Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Midtown
Joel had told me his mother was in town for the week visiting, as parents often will when their children are going to expensive colleges in the heart of New York City. But I didn’t think his mother’s visit was going to be relevant to me, until he invited me to go to the MoMa […]
Selected Observations on Urban Fauna
by Peter Wortsman 05/15/2022Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Manhattan
Insects The following is a contemporary take on the medieval bestiary, featuring descriptions and characterizations of the actual and apocryphal creatures that share our constricted urban space. This second installment is devoted to insects. Stomped, smoked out, asphyxiated, and trampled underfoot, they elicit a degree of fear and disgust disproportionate to their size. Quietly going […]
Joanie and Luddy in Greenwich Village, 1967
by Sharon Watts 05/23/2021Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Massapequa
Joanie finished bending over the ironing board, her freshly-washed hair nice and flat. She pulled the plug out of the socket, wrapped up the cord, and looked in the mirror and smiled. Her own natural curls would be given free rein in a few years, but right now she wanted to match the long, straight […]
How is Your Mother?
by Jennifer Marcus 09/06/2020Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, West Village
“How is your mother?” they’d ask with a friendly smile. The stationery store manager with the club foot from whom she bought her cigarettes, the Eurotrash guy at the shoe store with whom she spoke German, everyone at the Jefferson Market. The shopkeepers up and down Sixth Avenue loved her. She made them feel special, […]
Nostalgia for the Norm
by Peter Wortsman 05/10/2020Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
Observations in the Vale and Vector of the Virus It’s late. And again, I survey the silence, inverting wakefulness and sleep. Again, in place of dreaming, I listen to the refrigerator humming. The construction site that had been growing like a giant metal bean stalk outside my window, down the block, has suspended activity, its […]
A Simple Procedure
by Mai Tran 01/13/2019Neighborhood: East Village, Greenwich Village
I am 21 and in the heat of my first New York summer, when I decide to have a four-centimeter rod inserted into the meat of my inner bicep. About the size of a matchstick and made of a material I can’t pronounce, it will release progestin directly into my bloodstream, preventing eggs from leaving the womb and […]
Dancing in the Dark
by Helen Mandlin 10/13/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Upper West Side
In 1974 I was twenty-five. I’d just left my secure job as a kindergarten teacher. The job: compliments of my, Bubbie, who was always yelling, “Get security. Be a teacher!” Deciding to leave the job? That was compliments of my Women’s Consciousness Raising Group. Every woman in the group encouraged me to leave my job […]
Kings
by Andre-Naquian Wheeler 08/31/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
The blaring music is only background noise to my mumbled senses. Effie slaps a card down on the cheap plastic table N.Y.U. has inside every dorm room’s kitchen. Effie says some number and the four of us (Effie, Eleanor, Duke, and I) have to take a drink. It seems like for every card Duke and […]
Kant’s (Revised) Critique of Judgement
by Kaila Allison 05/16/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
I’m quite sure I could have killed the whole lot of them. I’ve drawn too many skull and crossbones on the margins of my handouts. It’s difficult for me to concentrate on the enthralling discourse on Lacan because I am too disturbed by that Babushka girl and her heinous turtle-neck (not artistic, just embarrassing). Does […]