Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood 1898-1918

About this book

In the popular imagination New York Citys Greenwich Village has long been known as a center of bohemianism home to avant-garde artists political radicals and other nonconformists who challenged the reigning orthodoxies of their time. Yet a century ago the Village was a much different kind of place: a mixed-class multiethnic neighborhood teeming with the energy and social tensions of a rapidly changing America. Gerald W. McFarland reconstructs this world with vivid descriptions of the major groups that resided within its boundaries -- the Italian immigrants and African Americans to the south the Irish Americans to the west the well-to-do Protestants to the north and the New York University students middle-class professionals and artists and writers who lived in apartment buildings and boarding houses on or near Washington Square. McFarland examines how these Villagers so divided along class and ethnic lines interacted with one another. He shows how clashing expectations about what constituted proper behavior in the neighborhoods public spaces -- especially streets parks and saloons -- often led to intergroup conflict political rivalries and campaigns by the more privileged Villagers to impose middle-class mores on their working-class neighbors. Occasionally however a crisis or common problem led residents to overlook their differences and cooperate across class and ethnic lines. Throughout the book McFarland connects the evolution of Village life to the profound transformations taking place in American society at large during the same years.