On a map of New York City, “downtown” designates the various neighborhoods below Fourteenth Street, all the blocks running east to west, river to river, and southward to the bottom-most tip of Manhattan. In New York City-speak, however, Downtown  designates an artistic sensibility, one that initially emulated European models of Bohemian life and avant-garde ideals before it evolved into a distinctly American belief in the limitless revolutions that can be conducted via culture. It is hard to believe that Downtown has been a place in the artistic psyche for nearly two centuries, and because no one genre defines it—and no single scholarly book has contained it—its story is a living epic that continually illuminates itself through art, music, dance, literature, performance, theater, and more.

The roots of Downtown New York can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century, and to a saloon called the Vault at Pfaff’s, a rousing meeting place for America’s blossoming Bohemian circles, located at 647 Broadway, just north of Bleecker Street.[1] It was here that Henry Clapp Jr. (1814–1875)—writer and editor of the influential  literary journal, Saturday Press, and crowned (by some) as the “Prince of Bohemia”[2]—held court, wanting to recreate something of the freewheeling, worldly atmosphere of the cafés in which he’d whiled away so much time when he lived in Paris. Around Pfaff’s tables whirled artists, writers, performers, composers, musicians, and other freethinkers, guzzling beer and coffee to fuel their combustible conversations about aesthetics, politics, and whatever other current topics gave off requisite heat.[3] (It is said that poet Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803–1882], having once visited Pffaf’s, described its patrons as a “noisy fire-engine society.”[4])

If the Parisian idea of  la vie de bohème modeled itself after popular perceptions of gypsy  tribes—the belief that their itinerant lives were propelled by pleasure, and followed fortune—the Americans seemed to refashion Bohemianism into an embodiment of sophisticated self-possession, resistant to bourgeois mores, electing personal freedom and expression over the crushing modes of production that had been heralded by the Industrial Revolution. One of Pfaff’s most illustrious patrons was journalist and poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), whose poem “Song of Myself” (1855) not only rang out his passion for the life force that coursed through him and every living being, but also channeled something of the larger spirit of his fellow nonconformists. In a line from an unfinished  poem by Whitman, which he wrote to celebrate the colorful crowd at Pfaff’s, he described how the passersby on Broadway, just up the saloon’s stairs and outside the door, somehow seemed so far away from the world inside: “Oft I doubt your reality—whether you are real—I suspect all is but a pageant.”[5]

In the following decades, New York’s Bohemian circles became ever more vivid, more real, making Greenwich Village at once their home, their artistic crucible, and their oasis. Cheap apartments, alongside affordable restaurants and bars, some of which kept running tabs for those with empty pockets, provided new generations of creative intellects with the leisure to pursue their artistic ambitions. Though not strictly in the middle of the Village, Washington Square Park was considered its center. On its south side, between Thompson Street and West Broadway, stood a stretch of houses referred to as “Genius Row” for the illustrious figures who lived there, each in their turn,[6] including authors Willa Cather (1873–1947), Stephen Crane (1871–1900), and O. Henry (1862–1910); art dealer Pierre Matisse (1900–1989); and actor John Barrymore (1882–1942). Although perhaps not a writer of note, poet and journalist John Reed (1887–1920), who lived at 42 Washington Square Park, defined what set Downtown apart from other neighborhoods in his long form poem, “The Day in Bohemia, or Life Among the Artists,” published in 1913.[7] As he boasts in one of its verses:

Yet we are free who live in Washington Square,

We dare to think as Uptown wouldn’t dare,

Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious;

What care we for a dull old world censorious

When each is sure he’ll fashion something glorious?[8]

In February of that same year, audiences were shaken awake by the Armory Show, the first major American exhibition of the European Modernists which introduced audiences to the likes of  Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi,  and (most notoriously) the genre-defying Marcel Duchamp, among others. To some, the modernists’ formal innovations were distasteful, alarming, even comedically awful. To others, the works were destabilizing, like acts of violence—to the picture plane, to the figure, to art’s traditional roles and values—and yet proved that artists, like revolutionaries, could turn the world on its head. The once-popular moniker “Bohemian,” and its romantic connotations of the liberated self, was joined in common parlance by “avant-garde,” which conjured visions of an army on the frontlines of battle. Downtown New York remained their refuge, as artists like Stuart Davis, Man Ray, Georgia O’Keefe, Alfred Steiglitz, and others continued to metabolize the ideas of their European peers, creating an American modernism that reflected the fast-changing world around them—and in particular, their fast-changing city, with its blinking lights and blaring horns, its roil and bustle, and its promise to endlessly deliver the new.

These pursuits were of course not limited to the visual arts. Writers, poets, composers, choreographers, filmmakers, and other self-appointed members of the avant-garde  all worked to path break singular visions, and to model fresh modes of expression. The American theater, however, was slower to adopt this contemporary energy and ethos. As critic Sheldon Cheney (1886–1980) noted in his book The Art Theater (1917), theater was a form traditionally “so fettered [by businessmen] that it has stifled creative effort, discouraged originality, and driven out the true artist.”[9] This condition began to change around 1912 with the rise of the Little Theater Movement, which sought to support and present daring, experimental works on stages free from the limiting demands of commercialism. More precisely, the producers and philanthropists behind the Little Theater Movement were bucking the stronghold of the Theatrical Syndicate, a small group of impresarios who, starting in the late-nineteenth century, controlled the productions and ticket sales of the major playhouses across America. The balm for this cultural ailment, according to Cheney, would be the presentation of plays guided by the principles of “beauty, truth, and seriousness.”[10]

Downtown New York proved a welcome home for these theatermakers. Among them was a band of artists, socialists, and other progressive-minded people who called themselves the Washington Square Players (1915–1918), and whose first home was an empty horse stable at 133 MacDougall Street. Their mission: “to establish a stage for experimentation, to put it at the disposal of competent authors and producers who might have something vital to contribute, to put into execution swiftly and without undue regard to hampering detail any artistic idea that seemed worthy of trial.”[11] Their first production, presented on the parlor floor of nearby 139 MacDougal Street[12] in February of 1915, was a roaring success, prompting one critic to write that it was “the most novel theatrical opening ever seen in the city.”[13] That same year, the Provincetown Players (1915–1922), helmed by playwright Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) and her husband, producer director George Cram Cook (1873–1924), made their New York debut, and went on to produce plays by Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), and, most famously, Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953).[14] “Life was all of a piece,” recalled Glaspell of their brand of theater, “work not separated from play.”[15]

New York, like the avant-garde, rarely invests itself history as much as it does in an idea of futurity. Downtown, the neighborhood, shifted and changed alongside its shifting and changing communities, threatening the very spirit that had distinguished it from the rest of the city for so long. When the New York Times reported on the tearing down of Genius Row in March of 1948, the article’s strapline declared: “Villagers Agree Demolition of Washington Square Houses Means End of an Era.”[16] The end of that era sowed the seeds of the next one—for better and for worse—but it is interesting to note that a group, led by Bishop William T. Manning, protested the sale of the block to New York University, proposing that instead a “living art center” be built on the site to support and honor the rich creative legacy of the neighborhood.[17]While the Skirball would not open until October of 2003, new crops of creative communities continued to carve  out ever newer spaces to work and think and thrive—in lofts and storefronts, churches and nightclubs, and any other places they could find. Having distinguished themselves from their European peers, these artists, writers, theatermakers and other luminaries conducted some of the most innovative experiments in form and genre in the history of art and culture.

Jennifer Krasinski is a writer and critic, and frequent contributor to 4columns, Artforum, Bookforum, and more. Her essays have been published in numerous books and catalogs including Reza Abdoh, Jill Johnston: The Disintegration of a Critic, and Hilton Als’s Andy Warhol: The Series.

Further reading:

Sheldon Cheney, The Art Theater. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917.

Thomas Herbert Dickinson, The Insurgent Theater. New York: R.W. Huebsch, 1917.

Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858–1920. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City 1952–1965. New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and DelMonico Books, 2017.

Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1991.

“The Vault at Pfaff’s”

“The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920–1925”

Footnotes:

[1] Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858–1920. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 18.

[2] Ibid., 19.

[3] https://pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu/node/54124

[4] https://pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu/node/54167

[5] https://pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu/node/55710

[6] https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/house-of-genius-greenwich-village/

[7] https://www.burnsiderarebooks.com/pages/books/140937276/john-reed/the-day-in-bohemia-or-life-among-the-artists

[8] As quoted in Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858–1920. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 343.

[9] Sheldon Cheney, The Art Theater. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917. 16.  Accessed: https://archive.org/details/arttheateritscha00chen/page/66/mode/2up?view=theater

[10] Cheney, 124.

[11] Thomas Herbert Dickinson, The Insurgent Theater. New York: R.W. Huebsch, 1917. 173–74. Accessed: https://archive.org/details/cu31924027247489/mode/2up

[12] http://www.provincetownplayhouse.com/history.html

[13] Dickinson, 176.

[14] Levin, 347. For more on Susan Glaspell, see also: https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/bookshopdoor/signature.cfm?item=15#1

[15] Levin, 348.

[16] “Wreckers Start on ‘Genius Row,’“ The New York Times, March 18, 1948, p. 29. Source: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1948/03/18/85199838.html?pageNumber=29

[17] “Art Center Urged to ‘Save’ Square,” The New York Times, February 16, 1948, p. 23–24. Source: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1948/02/16/85185347.html?pageNumber=23