The Village

New Yorkers find Greenwich Village* the one attraction in the city to visit as tourists. And there are the hundreds of people who, on Saturday night or Sunday morning, enjoy immersing themselves in what one visitor described as the “sensuousness’’ of the Village — the exotic foods, the European flavor, the pretty girls, the sense of life lived boldly and ireely.

Underneath all the flim-flam and exhibitionism, the Village is authentically a cultural reservation for people from all over the city. Off-Broadway,* it is generally acknowledged, has more theatrical vitality than Broadway. Almost any season, one can see good Chekhov or Ibsen — with not a line excised.* “I go to the Village because I like jazz and folk music,’? an 18-year-old boy observed. “Uptown jazz is too expensive.’’

There is a greater concentration of bookshops in the Village than anywhere else in the city. The level of literacy in the Village may well be higher than anywhere else in the country. “And where else in this city can you go to a bar,”’ a Village partisan asked, “and find an intelligent conversation going?’

Recently, the Village has assumed a new role — a center for show biz.* The coffee-houses, which earlier offered only poets-in-residence,* have emerged as entertainment mills (“Olf-Off-Broadway’’). Revues, plays, singers and even stand-up comics are provided by them. The talent ranges from the superb to the outrageous. At a time when Broadway is a species of high-powered merchandising, there is a virtue in providing a stage for the young, untried and experimental.

But Greenwich Village is far more thar an entertainment center, or a covey of bookstores. The Village is the holy city of Bohemia. lt is, assertedly, a haven for creativity, the seed-bed for new ideas, the place of break-out from the constrictions of city neighborhood, suburb or small town. But more than anything else, the Village is a dream of self-realisation which is forever fugitive but forever poetically compelling. It is this persistent fantasy that has generated the lamentation that “the Village has changed,”’ that it has become too commercial. There is the feeling that there has been a falling off from the glory days of the past. The artists and writers have taken to the hills,* and those who are still faithful to their vows of poverty have had to move to the Lower East Side where cold water flats are still available.

Oddly enough, the cultural ferment which attracted people to the Village in the first place may prove to be its undoing. It set in motion the cycle of high rents and redevelopment programs which may,ultimately transform Greenwich Village into another middle-class enclave.