In The Village

I was shocked to read in the news recently that Adrienne Shelly, the actress known mostly for work in independent films like The Unbelievable Truth, was murdered in her Greenwich Village apartment last week. I thought she was adorable. She was killed senselessly, the outcome of an arguement between she and a teenage day laborer (she complained about the noise; the young man, afraid of being deported, punched her and knocked her out, and thinking she was dead, staged her suicide as a cover-up).

Her apartment was in the West Village. For those who don't know it, the West Village is of course the westerly part of Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, as opposed to the funkier, artier East Village. The West Village, really the heart of what was once considered to be a boucolic New York City suburb, has had several metamorphoses over the years. Adrienne Shelley, as well as her attacker, both epitomize two divergent yet characteristic types to inhabit the Village today, either through work or through residence: the wealthy, some in creative fields, and the very poor. In many respects, this is no great change from the makeup of Village neighborhoods that existed during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when it was filled not only with well-to-do New Yorkers fleeing crowded lower Manhattan (increasingly plagued by crime and infectious diseases as immigrants poured in) but also with marginalized groups - African-Americans, the Irish, Germans - seeking to claim a niche in the city.

I lived in the West Village off and on for almost a year, from 1997 to 1998. It was the first New York City neighborhood I lived in. A few years later, after I had moved to the Upper East Side, I entered graduate studies at the New School for Social Research, located just south of Union Square at 14th street and 5th Avenue, in northern most Greenwich Village. I spend many hours at the graduate studies building there and also at NYU's Bobst Library at Washington Square. Suffice to say, I think I have spent enough time there to know it a little, having the perspective of neither a tourist or a resident but of one somewhere in between.

I, like many people, knew of Greenwich Village first by reputation and its cultural history. It was once the capital of Beatneat culture, gestating with the rise of Beatnick writers like Alan Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and culminating with the advent of free love and folk rock, a rendezvous of 60s musicians like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan that played in small clubs on Bleeker Street.But even before that, the Village was the epicenter for dissedent American cultural. In the early 1900s and up through the 1920s, artists, writers and radicals flocked to the bohemia of Greenwich Village, taking up residence in spacious flats converted from tenements and frequenting the many coffee houses, theaters, and dinner clubs along tree lined streets near Washington Square: Macdougal, West 12th, Washington Mews.

The latter part of the 20th century brought to Greenwich village both boon and bust, as it did the city itself. During the 1970s, the city suffered a serious economic decline. The Village lost some of its luster in those decades, as did most of NYC. But this all changed during the economic revival of the city during the 1990s, when people flowed into the city for jobs and other economic opportunities, catalyzing a vital housing marking. Since then, the neighborhood has transformed into something much more glamourous, an oasis for movie stars and investment bankers, chock full of fashionable restaurants and bars like Pastis and Butter, and peppered with expensive boutiques and designer showrooms.

When I arrived in NYC in 1997, I went to stay with a friend of my mother's who owned a condominium on West 11th Street, just off of the West Side Highway. The condo had cost her less than $200,000 in the early 1990s. Nowadays, a comparable unit would cost probably close to $800,000. I hope for her sake she managed to hold onto the place; she was a hair's breath away from foreclosure back then. The West Village eight or nine years ago wasn't so different than it is now. The snootiness was palpable and it wasn't unusual for me to pass Rupert Graves or Blythe Danner on the street on my way to the Christopher Street subway station.

My mother's friend, we'll call her Leona, was gay. I say that because her identity, or orientation, informed her experience of the West Village, which to some degree caters to the gay community, and more specifically to gay women. (Gay men and women have being making a haven of Greenwich Village since the beginning of the 19th century). Her favorite bar was Rubyfruit, a lesbian bar, and she loved to eat at Cowgirls, a western themed eatery on Hudson street, that more time than not, was occupied with a bevy of lesbian couples. I have never since felt my sexuality as a straight woman so obtrusive, for better or for worse.

My view of Greenwich Village, spefically the West Village, expanded only after I moved out. I stayed with my mother's friend for four months. From there, I moved to a women's residence where I rented a room, but returned to the Village later that year after having gotten a sublet from a friend of mine at work. My new apartment was a world away from Leona's highrise: it was on the ground floor, a street facing studio in 100 plus year old walk up (for those who don't know it, a walk up is New York speak for a multi-story residential building with stairs not an elevator). The building was on Horatio Street between Hudson and Greenwich streets across from a basketball court. Figuratively, my situation oozed charm, yet the reality of it was less so.

Aside from the usual New York problems I encounterd and struggled to adapt to (it's expensive, people are often taciturn or rude, always rush rush rush, crowds everywhere) I now had to deal with problems married to the apartment. First, I met with the rodents and water bugs (no roaches thank goodness), then I came to know the bums and transvestite hookers passing by on the street until wee hours of the morning, sometimes stopping to take a nap on our stoop. I kept books during the day for two sour tempered gay guys who ran a design firm, but at night, I would return to my studio with take-out and watch TV on its 12" screen, listening to the passersby. The weekend of Wigstock, the annual transvestite/drag queen festival, was especially fun for me, if you can imagine.

Without the insulatory quality of height (highrises add layers between the dangers of the street and its inhabitants) or a convivial West Indian doorman watching me coming and going, I felt acutely vunerable and unsafe. Yes, being on the first floor was weird - my walls merely thin skins - but compounded was the fact that the West Village, far from its bucoulic or bohemian posteriety, was beleagured by episodes of both petty and violent crime stemming to some degree from the drug and prostitution trades flourishing at its perimeters (this was before the meatpacking district was in vogue), an influx of non-residents that were both targets and perpetrators, the usual tourists, but also the bands of young people from the boroughs flocking to Christopher Street to express themselves, their sexuality, in ways they couldn't in their own neighborhoods.

Needless to say, I didn't last long. I gave the sublet up not three months into my lease to move in with a friend in Brooklyn, and after that, a rental on the Upper East Side that coincidentally, was located in Police Pricinct 19, the safest one in all of Manhattan. When I had lived with Leona, I was able to enjoy the West Village in a way that more affluent people enjoy it, in their expensive co-ops, condos, and townhomes off the river. I went to many of the quiant restaurants and bars along Hudson and Bleeker Streets. I ate cupcakes at the Magnolia Bakery. I shopped for groceries at D'Agostino on Washington Street or at the Chelsea Market off 14th. I still did these things when I had the sublet on Horatio but my uncomfortableness with my living arrangements overshadowed any pleasure I might have previously gotten from such activities. I was glad to leave.


I was shocked to hear about the murder of Adrienne Shelley. But in a way, not suprised. I lived for a very brief time in the two different, polarized worlds of Greenwich Village, that of those with money and those without. I don't think a whole lot exists in between. I feel terribly sorry for Adrienne Shelley and disgust and anger towards the young Equadorian man that killed her. Yet, because such a disparity exists between people living or working there who have money and those living or working there that don't, calamities are bound to happen, economic tension predicts it. But as sure as there is a West Village, there is change, and hopefully the texture of the neighborhood, will through time, be less polarized and embrace economic heterogeny.