• The Village is the first book to cover the whole sweep of Greenwich Village history from the first settlement in the early seventeenth century to the present.

• Written in a warm, anecdotal style with tons of juicy, sometimes shocking, history, this is a lively, engrossing cultural yarn about a “village” that yields enormous dividends in understanding the cultural history of America.

• Along with documentary research, the author has conducted interviews with a number of current or past Villagers, including: filmmaker John Waters, Alfred Leslie, the last of the original Abstract Expressionists; Tish, an 88-year-old female impersonator; rock photographer Bob Gruen, who befriended John Lennon during his Village years; native Villagers who grew up in its now greatly diminished Irish and Italian working-class enclaves in the 1940s and 1950s; veterans of the riots and the gay pride movement; and younger residents who witnessed its transformation in the 1990s and 2000s.
 
 
 

“The most famous neighborhood in the world, ” Greenwich Village has been home to outcasts of diverse persuasions for more than four hundred years, from “half-free” African slaves to working-class immigrants, artistic bohemians to politicians. Illustrated with thirty-two pages of black-and-white photos, The Village is John Strausbaugh’s engaging narrative history of this unique New York neighborhood’s life—a  tapestry that unrolls across four centuries, from its origins as a rural frontier of New Amsterdam in the 1600s through its long reign as the Left Bank of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its current status as an affluent bedroom community and tourist magnet.

Strausbaugh traces the way in which Greenwich Village has been a culture engine, a magnet of tolerance, freedom, creativity, and activism. It has long attracted nonconformists—artists, radicals, visionaries, misfits, and life-adventurers—who have collided, collaborated, fused and feuded, developing ideas and creating art, drama, poetry, literature, filmmaking, and folk music that transformed the world. Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Marcel Duchamp, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, E. E. Cummings, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Upton Sinclair, Anais Nin, Eugene O’Neill, Fiorello La Guardia, Gene Tunney, mobster Vincent “Chin” Gigante, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, Charlie Parker, Woody Guthrie, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Grace Paley, and Edmund White are among the many remarkable individuals who made the Village the pinnacle of culture, politics, and social movements in America and around the world.

From Dutch farmers and Washington Square patricians to slaves and bohemians, Prohibition-era speakeasies to Stonewall, Abstract Expressionism to AIDS, the Triangle Shirt Waist fire to today’s upscale condos and four-star restaurants, the connecting narratives of The Village tell a fresh story of America itself.