A CHANGING GREENWICH VILLAGE—BEFORE 1968.

A CHANGING GREENWICH VILLAGE —BEFORE 1968. I was well aware of the changes in Greenwich Village and New York City after I moved there in 1968. Benjamin Schwartz has an article in the Atlantic (June 2010) which made me realize how much Greenwich Village had changed in the years just before I arrived. I was conscious when I moved to New York that there was a garment center, but it was concentrated in a few blocks in the mid-thirties. Otherwise, I thought of New York as almost entirely a financial center. Schwartz makes the point that even as late as 1950, New York had been the world’s largest industrial center. Schwartz adds that at one time New York City made one fifth of the world’s beer. (My first reaction was to dispute this fact because beer didn’t travel far from the brewery in those days, but upon reflection, I accept the percentage because the Eastern United States probably had a large chunk of the world’s beer drinkers. Kids, one of the breweries was for Schaefer Beer). New York was the largest port in the world, and the far West Village had a working waterfront where many of the men who lived in the Village worked. Schwartz says that his mother, who lived on Charles Street from the 1940’s to the 1960’s, thought that the waterfront gave an exotic glamor to the Village. The White Horse Tavern, which I went to on occasion, had been “a favorite of Anais Nin, James Baldwin, Dylan Thomas, and countless longshoremen.” With the exception of one Legal Aid client who had a dispute with the landlord at his roominghouse in Chelsea, I was unaware of the port of New York during the years I lived there.