Village Memories: How A New Tradition Was Born

Village Memories…

By Les Aaron


We were talking about it just the other day.

I came out with it. “The Village is dead,” I proclaimed.

And they looked at me and asked why I thought so.

And I said, “How could this melting pot ever hope to stay the same when one bedrooms go for $2000 a month?

“How could the artists, poets, writers, and all the rest live here when most don’t know where their next meal is coming from?.... And that was the whole beauty of the Village, the ability to get by from one meal to another through the kindness of strangers, the excitement of living from day to day but knowing that somehow you will survive….”

They said, “If that’s the case, whose renting those places?...”

I said, “The rich, the outsides, the Yuppies, all of them who don’t have a clue…”

At this point, I don’t think they believed me.

They said, “But it will still be the Village.”

And I said, “in name only…”

And they asked, “What did I mean by that.”

I said, “Simple, my friend, because the Village will be a village of appearances; there will be no core, nothing to give the place meaning any longer. The Village was always about the inhabitants. It was the people who made the place.”

They asked, “How can you be sure of that.”

I said, “I saw it happen before.”

And they asked, “where?”

And I answered, “I saw it happen in Brooklyn. The Yuppies moved into real ethnic neighborhoods, driving the prices up, and then lecturing us about how our behavior, such as sitting on the stoops, and how it was affecting property values… And that was quite enough for me.

“Some of us spoke out; Pete Hammil’s brother spoke out; but many of us moved.

“And what did they do?”

“They ignored all of their neighbors, retreated behind their ten foot walls and million dollar building extensions and then wondered why they felt so alone.. So it became possible to ride down the street and see no one. It had morphed almost overnight into a dessert of expensive homes without any center.

“Of course, almost immediately, crime shot up. Homes and cars were vandalized.
This was something unheard of in the old neighborhood. And then the small shopkeepers got frustrated with their pettiness and pulled up stakes. And the big chains moved in. The entire neighborhood changed. And then went dead.”

“That’s sad,” they said.

“No sadder than what the Village will become. I remember in the good old days in the 50’s and 60’s between the jazz clubs and the folk movement, the Village was the place to be. The restaurants were open all hours…and you’d never know who or what you might see.

Where I lived, near Hudson, the people tended to stay up all night long talking, painting, writing, visiting each other in an endless chain from apartment to apartment. We’d sit around, listen to WBAI, read the Realist or the Voice, discuss the issues and drink Turkish coffee that bent your spoon. Everything was okay. And people really enjoyed each other’s company. The jazz musicians, the bit actors, the heavy-weight folk singers, the artists who were willing to make a statement, the poets, the radicals, the politically restless, the socialists, the flotsam and jetsom that make any place worthwhile loved the freedom that was so much part of our days there…and there were wonderful interactions that helped create a life of its own…

Those were the good old days when folk was making its comeback and the great recording artists were being discovered singing in little cafes and pubs…and the famous events like Woodstock were still years away… How many remember the Weavers and “Goodnight Irene” and “Shenandoah” and their other great music stilled by the blacklisting that seemed to descend mainly on the artists and writers and musicians…Yet, after McCarthy was a pitiful dream, the Village was coming back and with it, all of the new talents were emerging to bring us into a new era, an era of hope and possibilities. Yes, those were the days, my friend.

“Those were the days when you could get by with thirty five cent bowls of stew and stash a bowl of unshelled peanuts in your jeans to last you til pay-day. And nobody cared!

“We’d hang out on the street, drink demi-tasse, go down to Folk City to see who was emerging as a talent worth following, slip into Chumleys or the Lion for a brew, walk down to Lafayettes for a French pastry, cross over into McDougals to find an old LP or do any of a hundred things which our successors will never get the hang of.

“At $2,000 a month, you wont find much of that. The owners will squeeze the juice out of the neighborhood, the major chains with their four hundred dollar sweat suits will move in and the Yuppies won’t notice that anything is wrong…but it will be dead. The Village will be dead as sure as I’m writing this…

“So, the joke’s on all of those types who always wanted to live in the Village and now that space has become available, the authentic people have moved to places like Flatbush, Greenpoint and Red Hook. These artist types who made the Hamptons, So-Ho and the Village what they have become the extinct species, driven out by the materialism of the land lords and the high rents.

“But those who just moved in still don’t realize that the Village they inherited is an empty shell. And they probably won’t realize it as long as they can continue to mythologize a place that has lost its heart and its soul.”

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon