Greenwich Village Research Articles

Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography by Julia Van Hafted

Reviewed by: Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography by Julia Van Haaften Mary Panzer (bio) Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography. By Julia Van Haaften. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018. Pp. 634. Hardcover $28.46. Berenice Abbott (1898–1982) is well known to the photography world for her breathtaking shot of New York at Night (1932); her architectural views, Changing New York, made in the 1930s; her sparkling portraits of the cultural avant-garde made in Paris in the 1920s; and her rescue of the archive of Eugene Atget. During her lifetime, she was the photographer most exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art, then America's most influential collector and exhibitor of photography. She won prizes and prestigious grants and published popular books. If this had been the career of anyone else, or anyone male, Berenice Abbott would already be as familiar to the wider public as her teacher Man Ray, her friend and contemporary Walker Evans, or even Lewis Hine, whose important career she helped bring back to light at the very end of his life. Thanks to exhaustive research and unusual commitment to a difficult subject, Van Haaften now brings us more about Abbott than the diffident artist ever allowed, and in the process, we learn an enormous amount about the times in which she lived. Abbott's small, androgynous, and spookily observant figure was well known to Greenwich Village bohemians before World War I, and to Parisian surrealists in the 1920s. Her experience as a working photographer in 1930s New York adds plenty to our information about the workings of the American art world. Even Abbott's failures—books never published, exhibits never held—show us what it was like to be an artist whose chosen medium had only marginal stature, when recognition depended upon a very small number of people whose influence could not be challenged. We learn in detail how she befriended Eugene Atget, raising the money to buy his studio contents by turning to a friend within the lesbian expatriate community. We enter the international [End Page 985] lesbian network of friendship and romance, filled with outsized personalities and now-forgotten stars, many of whom we know best through Abbott's portraits. As the story reaches past the postwar years, Van Haaften sets Abbott's story against a background that follows the rise of photography in the American art market. Much of this story is still so new that almost no secondary sources exist. Luckily Van Haaften, the founding Curator of Photographs at the New York Public Library, can call on her own impeccable experience to shape this part of the story. Van Haaften is sympathetic but never indulgent. She allows us to appreciate Abbott's great stamina in the face of bad luck (returning to New York as the Depression hits) and tough choices (she supported Atget's archive and reputation at the expense of her own career). Yet we cringe at her tendency to marry personal slights with aesthetic judgments. For example, Abbott broke with Paul Strand because he placed her too firmly in Atget's shadow and because he cheated at ping pong; but more importantly, Abbott believed that his extreme reverence for sensual print quality also tied him to the Pictorialist tradition, what she called "the general illness in photography, which is the Strand, Weston, Stieglitz group" (p. 323). Abbott's strong endorsement of photography as a documentary medium brought her into opposition with nearly every photographer who sought recognition as a fine artist. For her, photography served to represent the world that came before the lens. A modernist to her core, Abbott insisted art came from the manipulation of the materials peculiar to photography—light, silver, paper—not the endorsement of a fickle art world where standards changed along with fashion. Postmodernism killed this debate but has only slowly influenced the view of historians whose retrospective judgment constructs the canon. When Berenice Abbott is mentioned alongside Hine and Strand, we will know that the world has finally caught up with her. It seems evident that history punishes women with strong opinions; their peers find them difficult, and historians in search of informed opinion too often take the...

Misfitting Together

Misfitting Together Jon Davies (bio) Before Pictures by Douglas Crimp. Brooklyn, NY: Dancing Foxes Press, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 288, 151 illustrations. $39.00 cloth. This lavishly illustrated book charts art historian and critic Douglas Crimp's first decade in New York from his arrival in 1967 up to his curating the much-mythologized exhibition Pictures at Artists Space in 1977. While Crimp is perhaps best known for this project, his 1987 AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism special issue of October—where he worked as an editor for thirteen years (247)—and his 2002 Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics are invaluable volumes in queer cultural studies. Crimp has been a mentor to and influence on a generation of queer practitioners and thinkers, providing a model for how to gracefully articulate politics, aesthetics, and affect in times of crisis, famously declaring of AIDS that ultimately, "It is our promiscuity that will save us."1 A striking anecdote from his 1989 essay "Mourning and Militancy" that reappears in Before Pictures reads, In 1977, while I was visiting my family in Idaho, my father died unexpectedly. He and I had had a strained and increasingly distant relationship, and I was unable to feel or express my grief over his death. After the funeral I returned to New York for the opening of an exhibition I'd organized [Pictures] and resumed my usual life. [End Page 141] But within a few weeks a symptom erupted which to this day leaves a scar near my nose: my left tear duct became badly infected, and the resulting abscess grew to a golf-ball sized swelling that closed my left eye and completely disfigured my face. When the abscess finally burst, the foul-smelling pus oozed down my cheek like poison tears. I have never since doubted the force of the unconscious. (247) Crimp's memoir of his first decade in New York—which, not incidentally, also saw the emergence of a thriving gay sexual subculture—similarly seeks to retroactively return the body and its drives to his youthful intellectual engagement with the discourse of contemporary art. Often Crimp's juxtapositions of gay life and art world, personal and professional, are stark, suggesting that they can only partially be bridged with the passing of time and with recourse to the queer vocabulary that Crimp himself has helped develop. (David Velasco's review of Before Pictures in Artforum aptly observes that Crimp's writing itself seems to dance between "memoir" and "theory" from "paragraph to paragraph."2) The book is loosely structured by the neighborhoods and the specific addresses that Crimp lived in as he moved south from Spanish Harlem to Chelsea to Greenwich Village to Tribeca and finally to the Financial District apartment in the beautiful Bennett Building that he has inhabited since 1976. The first chapter discusses his escape from his family in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1962, and his early art studies in New Orleans. His architecture education there, under the tutelage of a "spectacularly flitty" professor, toured him through ancient temples, Renaissance palazzi and local Gothic revival houses (9); these seemed to become spaces of imagination and possibility for him, glamorous alternative "homes" to the nuclear family he fled. This attention to the affective energies of private and public spaces inflects Crimp's narration of the built landscape of New York, whose changes greatly influenced the city's artistic production. Where Crimp lived played a determining role in which world he fell more into; his move from the Village to Tribeca, for example, came from a decision to "get serious about being an art critic" and "exchange … one scene for another" (148). When Crimp arrives in New York, he seems to effortlessly fall into an art world full of opportunity—a small scene marked by an openness and ease, which now seems as unimaginable as cheap, cavernous Manhattan lofts. Max's Kansas City, with the "tough-minded" male artists in the front room and the camp, [End Page 142] queer Warhol crowd in the back, is Crimp's spatial metaphor for his own split consciousness and youthful ambivalence about how gay and art worlds fit...

Helen More's Suicide

Feminist Studies 44, no. 1. © 2018 by Olga Zilberbourg 95 Olga Zilberbourg Helen More’s Suicide My retired colleague Marguerite called to tell me of Helen More’s suicide. “Of all the sad, ludicrous things people do to themselves!” She invited me over. “Thursday night, as usual. I could use the company of younger people.” It had been about a year since I’d first been invited to these Thursdays —monthly literary and musical soirees Marguerite hosted in her living room. Helen had been a regular at Marguerite’s for several decades; the two women were close contemporaries and each a celebrity in her own field. Helen was scholar of the English Romantics at the same university where Marguerite had taught Flaubert, Zola, and Balzac, and where I was now a junior faculty member in the English department. I’d heard of Professor More long before I met her: she lectured at the university from the 1960s until being forced into retirement in 2006 ostensibly due to age. She had a reputation as a militant feminist who eagerly engaged in battles about appointments and promotions, and her politics could have had something to do with it. “Are they sure it was a suicide?” In person Helen was a quiet, reticent woman with a sly, sarcastic sense of humor, and the idea that she might’ve committed suicide seemed outlandish. Vague murder scenarios floated in my mind. A disgruntled student? A male professor, passed over for promotion years ago and blaming her for his career failure? 96 Olga Zilberbourg “Yes, quite. The details are unpleasant, but do you know what she wrote in her suicide note?” “Of course she left a note.” “She said, ‘Thanks for the trip. Love to all.’” I couldn’t help laughing. “Yet when you think that having written that, she took all those pills and put a plastic bag over her head,” Marguerite’s voice broke. “Anyway, it’s not a conversation to have over the telephone. Do come over.” On Thursday afternoon, having collected the student papers after the last exam of the semester, I took the subway down to Greenwich Village . Marguerite lived on a third floor walkup, in a wonderfully spacious and tall-ceilinged apartment that back in the 1970s she and her husband had converted from a pillow factory. Since her husband’s death ten years earlier, the apartment had slowly turned into a trap for Marguerite. She suffered from arthritis in her hands, shoulders, and knees, and walking up and down the stairs became a nearly impossible exercise. She ventured out once or twice a week with the assistance of a visiting nurse. The place could easily fetch three or four million dollars, and Marguerite could use the money. Yet she was reluctant to sell. “I’d rather go without bread than without my piano and my books,” she insisted. A feeling of reverence and trepidation caught my breath as I climbed the stairs to Marguerite’s apartment. One never knew what kind of celebrity of the arts or music world could show up on any given Thursday. In her lifetime, Marguerite had known everyone, from Sartre and de Beauvoir to Picasso and Chagall. In the last few years the circle of her acquaintances seemed to dwindle, and yet still world-renowned musicians, poets, playwrights sometimes appeared among the circle of her former colleagues and students. I rang the doorbell and waited for several minutes as Marguerite crept to the door. “I’m afraid you’re my only guest tonight,” she said through the door, struggling with the lock and the knob. Finally, she pushed the door open. “Several people cancelled because of the end of the semester, and then of course, there’s the funeral. But come in, come in—we’ll talk of that later.” Marguerite led me into the living room, heavily shaded from the street and dimly lit with two floor lamps. Decorated with musical instruments, piles of books on the floor and on the low tables, and bright Olga Zilberbourg 97 modernist watercolors on the walls, the room seemed to belong to a royal palace, a vast, untouchable space. Usually Helen or one of Marguerite ’s...

Modernist Mythologies: The Turquoise Trail Anthology and the Poets of Santa Fe

Modernist MythologiesThe Turquoise Trail Anthology and the Poets of Santa Fe Michael S. Begnal (bio) Writing in Poetry magazine in September 1920, Harriet Monroe discussed her recent trip to the Southwest, focusing especially on Santa Fe, New Mexico. Likening the Native American "snake-dance at Walpi, or the corn-dance at Cochiti" to "a Homeric rite in Attica, or a serpent ceremony in old Egypt" (326–27), Monroe asserts, But what has all this to do with modern poetry? Ah, much, and more, and still more! I was almost oppressed with the wealth of our inheritance—of our "tradition," if you will. Why go to Greece or China, O ye of little faith? This South-west, which is but one chapter of our rich tradition, is our own authentic wonderland—a treasure-trove of romantic myth—profoundly significant and beautiful, guarded by ancient races practicing their ancient rites, in a region of incredible color and startling natural grandeur. (328) Though sounding perhaps a tiny bit like a tourist brochure, Monroe's essay indexed an important development in American modernism: While expatriates like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot would continue to look to Old World mythologies for inspiration, poets in the United States had begun to create regional avant-gardes that, particularly in the case of New Mexico, often drew on Native American myth and living ritual. Observing the "widespread turn to myth by modern writers," Michael Bell tells us that "modernist appreciation of myth descends from a European romantic tradition in which literary creation and a national or folk spirit were intimately associated" (46). However, as I argue in this essay, the Santa Fe poets—including Alice Corbin Henderson, [End Page 175] Witter Bynner, Spud Johnson, and Haniel Long, among others—eschewed classical European models and instead sought out their mythic touchstones within a particular region and culture of the geographic United States. At the same time, embracing the Native Americans' "ancient rites" and mythological tropes in furtherance of a new vision of American poetry (and America itself), the Santa Fe poets registered their resistance to the machine age by invoking an image of a primitive other, thus freighting their project with all of the contradictions that entails. The first of the group of modernist-era poets to move to Santa Fe was Alice Corbin Henderson, an associate editor of the journal Poetry.1 Arriving from Chicago in the spring of 1916, "facing what she thought was certain death" from tuberculosis (Cline 22), Henderson's literary connections brought others along as well, including the poet Witter Bynner, who settled there in 1922 (Cline 33–35). Spud Johnson, editor of the journal Laughing Horse and a former student of Bynner's at Berkeley, arrived in the same year, becoming Bynner's secretary (Udall 6–10). Another friend of Bynner's was the Pittsburgh poet Haniel Long, who, after a series of extended visits throughout the twenties, moved to Santa Fe permanently in 1929 (Cline 134). Long, with Corbin, was instrumental in founding the collective Writers' Editions press, which published books by most of the poets under consideration. Sharyn R. Udall notes that in the aftermath of the First World War, "New Mexico was welcoming refugees from the bohemian enclaves of Greenwich Village and Chicago. They came in search of a new world of experiences, based not on urban values and messianic technology, but on values derived from a rediscovery of America. . . . Fueled by such ideas, the Santa Fe literary scene was lively in the 1920s" (10–11). Together, these (and other) writers, inspired by Native American myth and culture, the desert landscape, and Santa Fe itself, forged a new literary movement that alternately reacted against certain impulses of the early modernist period (e.g., the celebration of the city) while recapitulating others (e.g., a primitivist turn toward myth). All four of the poets primarily considered in this essay (Henderson, Bynner, Johnson, and Long) appeared in the [End Page 176] Henderson-edited collection The Turquoise Trail: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry (1928). In part, the anthology grew out of an informal workshop group that called itself the Rabble, which met at Henderson's house: "By 1925, poets Alice...

Helen More's Suicide

Feminist Studies 44, no. 1. © 2018 by Olga Zilberbourg 95 Olga Zilberbourg Helen More’s Suicide My retired colleague Marguerite called to tell me of Helen More’s suicide. “Of all the sad, ludicrous things people do to themselves!” She invited me over. “Thursday night, as usual. I could use the company of younger people.” It had been about a year since I’d first been invited to these Thursdays —monthly literary and musical soirees Marguerite hosted in her living room. Helen had been a regular at Marguerite’s for several decades; the two women were close contemporaries and each a celebrity in her own field. Helen was scholar of the English Romantics at the same university where Marguerite had taught Flaubert, Zola, and Balzac, and where I was now a junior faculty member in the English department. I’d heard of Professor More long before I met her: she lectured at the university from the 1960s until being forced into retirement in 2006 ostensibly due to age. She had a reputation as a militant feminist who eagerly engaged in battles about appointments and promotions, and her politics could have had something to do with it. “Are they sure it was a suicide?” In person Helen was a quiet, reticent woman with a sly, sarcastic sense of humor, and the idea that she might’ve committed suicide seemed outlandish. Vague murder scenarios floated in my mind. A disgruntled student? A male professor, passed over for promotion years ago and blaming her for his career failure? 96 Olga Zilberbourg “Yes, quite. The details are unpleasant, but do you know what she wrote in her suicide note?” “Of course she left a note.” “She said, ‘Thanks for the trip. Love to all.’” I couldn’t help laughing. “Yet when you think that having written that, she took all those pills and put a plastic bag over her head,” Marguerite’s voice broke. “Anyway, it’s not a conversation to have over the telephone. Do come over.” On Thursday afternoon, having collected the student papers after the last exam of the semester, I took the subway down to Greenwich Village . Marguerite lived on a third floor walkup, in a wonderfully spacious and tall-ceilinged apartment that back in the 1970s she and her husband had converted from a pillow factory. Since her husband’s death ten years earlier, the apartment had slowly turned into a trap for Marguerite. She suffered from arthritis in her hands, shoulders, and knees, and walking up and down the stairs became a nearly impossible exercise. She ventured out once or twice a week with the assistance of a visiting nurse. The place could easily fetch three or four million dollars, and Marguerite could use the money. Yet she was reluctant to sell. “I’d rather go without bread than without my piano and my books,” she insisted. A feeling of reverence and trepidation caught my breath as I climbed the stairs to Marguerite’s apartment. One never knew what kind of celebrity of the arts or music world could show up on any given Thursday. In her lifetime, Marguerite had known everyone, from Sartre and de Beauvoir to Picasso and Chagall. In the last few years the circle of her acquaintances seemed to dwindle, and yet still world-renowned musicians, poets, playwrights sometimes appeared among the circle of her former colleagues and students. I rang the doorbell and waited for several minutes as Marguerite crept to the door. “I’m afraid you’re my only guest tonight,” she said through the door, struggling with the lock and the knob. Finally, she pushed the door open. “Several people cancelled because of the end of the semester, and then of course, there’s the funeral. But come in, come in—we’ll talk of that later.” Marguerite led me into the living room, heavily shaded from the street and dimly lit with two floor lamps. Decorated with musical instruments, piles of books on the floor and on the low tables, and bright Olga Zilberbourg 97 modernist watercolors on the walls, the room seemed to belong to a royal palace, a vast, untouchable space. Usually Helen or one of Marguerite ’s...

“Told in Context.”: Dorothy Day's Previously Unpublished Reminiscence of Eugene O'Neill

Abstract Catholic Worker Movement founder Dorothy Day's previously unpublished typescript “Told in Context” (1958), edited and with an introduction by Eugene O'Neill biographer Robert M. Dowling, contains an illuminating reminiscence of Day's storied 1917 relationship with twenty-nine-year-old Eugene O'Neill. In one of history's great ironies, the manuscript establishes that the atheist O'Neill initiated a turn to religion for Day, whom the Holy See has since named a “Servant of God”—the first step toward canonization. Along with a rare photograph of Day taken around this time, the article includes a previously unpublished photograph of the Golden Swan Café, otherwise known as the Hell Hole, the legendary Greenwich Village dive bar where Day and O'Neill frequently cavorted. In this unadorned expression of tenderness for O'Neill's memory after his death in 1953, “Told in Context” is a hopeful statement on the possible redemption for an apostate by way of a prospective saint.

O'Neill (Unexpected)

O'Neill (Unexpected)

We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán: Biography of a Song of Struggle by David Spener

<i>We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán: Biography of a Song of Struggle</i> by David Spener

Sense and sensibility: Dual knowledge bases of Greenwich House, NYC, 1902–1920

Both interpretive and positivist research were a daily part of early work by social workers in settlement houses of the US Social Workers from 1902 to 1922 at Greenwich House, a settlement house (neighborhood center) founded on the west side of Greenwich Village, New York City in 1902, involved themselves in diverse investigative methods. As this analysis reveals, Greenwich House workers pursued case studies of families, residential blocks, neighborhoods, and workplaces; ethnographic depictions of an alley and a garment workers’ strike; participant-observation of tenement households, small businesses, street life, and urban factories; and social surveys on the sanitary conditions and degree of housing congestion in the neighborhoods surrounding Greenwich House.

CORRESPONDENCES AND AFFINITIES

3 6 Y C O R R E S P O N D E N C E S A N D A F F I N I T I E S M A R Y M A X W E L L The figure of Walter Benjamin has haunted the American imagination ever since his translated works arrived on U.S. shores some fifty years ago. In addition to Benjamin studies in diverse scholarly fields, his life and death have inspired creative works as wideranging as operas, novels, and documentary films. The influential Benjamin has even invaded the more bookish precincts of popular culture, such as in the title of a collection of essays by Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Benjamin as ‘‘culture hero’’ is the starting point for a chapter of Leonard Barkan ’s travelogue, Berlin for Jews. Published in 2015 was David Kishik’s The Manhattan Project, a volume which presents itself as the commentary to a text that Benjamin, after faking his suicide at the Spanish border in the midst of World War II, might have written had he moved to New York City, ‘‘assuming the position of a kind of specter living an afterlife.’’ But the ghost of Walter Benjamin has also been a presence in my own writing life. It is a little-known detail of his biography that as a young man Benjamin was the author of a set of seventythree sonnets, poems that were found among a cache of papers vouchsafed to Georges Bataille and kept in Paris during the war. 3 7 R After I came across German versions of these in a Heidelberg bookstore soon after their publication, Benjamin’s sonnets became something of an obsession. I was particularly taken with a central section composed of nine enigmatic poems. This past fall, in preparation for a conference talk about poetry and translation, I found myself back at them again. It was when he was writing his sonnets, I newly realized, that Benjamin was also translating Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal into German; the dates of the two sets of poetic texts overlap almost exactly. Given that the introduction to this privately printed 1923 translation, titled Tableaux parisiens, is the now-canonical essay ‘‘The Task of the Translator,’’ there is considerable irony to the fact that the slim volume of Baudelaire translations attracted no contemporary interest whatsoever. Yet despite his personal disappointment at the book’s reception, Benjamin hardly dropped the subject. Not only would the great French poet inspire a number of important essays begun in the thirties, Baudelaire would also form the core of Benjamin’s monumental Arcades Project. As late as 1939, the year before his death, Benjamin would write of Les Fleurs du mal, ‘‘My thoughts are now focused on this text day and night.’’ And as soon as I finished Kishik’s elaborate intellectual fantasy, an alternate specter came into view. Benjamin would not, as Kishik imagines, have lived as an anonymous figure hanging out at the 42nd Street library, eschewing contact with friends and émigré colleagues such as the Adornos, Max Horkheimer, and Brecht. And no, if Benjamin had ‘‘escaped’’ to New York, he would not have written an additional theoretical work about Manhattan along the lines of his unfinished Parisian masterwork. Instead, the middle-aged Benjamin would have continued to write about Baudelaire . There are even indications (his correspondence to Gretel Adorno, as well as the nature of the materials he left with Bataille in Paris, to name but two) that this was Benjamin’s actual intention . As Michael W. Jennings poignantly notes about ‘‘Central Park,’’ a collection of preparatory passages for the Arcades Project, ‘‘Benjamin’s title points to the central importance he ascribed to these fragments in the context of his work on Baudelaire, as well as to his hopes for resettling in America, where his friends spoke of finding an apartment for him in proximity to Central Park in New York.’’ 3 8 M A X W E L L Y In my own imaginative projection the American Benjamin would most often be found, via the A train, in Greenwich Village’s postwar cafés. There...

James Baldwin’s &lt;em&gt;Another Country&lt;/em&gt; as an Abstract Machine

This article on James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , examines how abstract machines diagram an unfolding flow of desires in a bipolar process of becoming that produces two distinct genres in Baldwin’s novel, a protest-literature narrative and an asubjective text. One abstract machine, described as a machinic assemblage by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , shapes the perceptions (cognition), significations (meaning), and language (representation) of a protest-literature narrative that takes place in Greenwich Village during the late 1950s. Embedded within this text is an abstract machine described by Deleuze and Guattari as a collective assemblage of enunciation. Its bipolar movement interrupts Baldwin’s novel by rupturing the stable surface with neurologically based emotions expressed by a chain of significations that enable it to become a new text, and in doing so, unbecome what it was. Consequently, this article examines how these abstract machines shape a novel that generates new meanings for the reader as a result of this encounter of discourses.

An Illustrated Framework for the History of Catholic Immigrant Aid Societies

An Illustrated Framework for the History of Catholic Immigrant Aid Societies Mary Elizabeth Brown (bio) Exodus 23:9 commands “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt” (NASB). In response, Catholics have organized to assist migrants with issues they face in transit and resettlement. Over the years, these agencies have amassed records that document the forces shaping migration and their effect on human beings. An overview of three of the collections accessible to scholars at the Center for Migration Studies [CMS] in New York City outlines the development of Catholic immigrant aid agencies and identifies topics that might reward study. Sending Country-Based Migrant Aid The first Catholics to concern themselves with issues facing migrants were those in places with extensive emigration. In 1881 Charlotte Grace O’Brien, daughter of Irish patriot William Smith O’Brien, became concerned about the exploitation of Irish immigrant women. As customers of travel services, they were vulnerable to being overcharged, underserved, or defrauded, as laborers they could be underpaid and overworked, and in both situations they faced “moral dangers,” which was how nineteenth-century people described sexual harassment, rape, and prostitution.1 At O’Brien’s urging, the Archdiocese of New York established a parish, Our Lady of the Rosary, with a church at 7–8 State Street, across from the harbor. Its pastor directed the Mission of the Holy Rosary, in which capacity he met Irish women steerage passengers as they landed, first at Castle Garden and, after 1892, on Ellis Island. He helped those with American relatives [End Page 101] contact and travel to them, and provided space for employers of domestic servants to interview candidates, which gave him an opportunity to determine if the employment offered was legitimate and fair.2 German Catholics had been concerned about their co-religionists and compatriots earlier, and extended their work to New York City a few years later. In 1871 German merchant, parliamentarian and devout Catholic Peter Paul Cahensly helped found the Saint Raphael Society for the Protection of German Catholic Emigrants, naming it for the patron saint of travelers. Starting with an office in Hamburg, the Saint Raphael Society honored the pope at the time, Leo XIII, by opening Leo House, a hospice in New York City, in 1889, staffing it with German-speaking archdiocesan priests and Sisters of Saint Agnes from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.3 One admirer of Cahensly’s work was John Baptist Scalabrini, Bishop of Piacenza in northwest Italy. In 1887 he founded a congregation of male religious, now known as the Scalabrini Fathers, to minister to migrants. Scalabrini and a lay associate, Giovanni Battista Volpe-Landi, organized the Saint Raphael Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants. In 1892, Scalabrini sent Father Pietro Bandini to New York City to open a branch of the Saint Raphael Society. Founded at 113 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, in 1901 the Italian Saint Raphael Society moved to 8–10 Charlton Street, where in addition to the services of a priest and an agent on Ellis Island, it offered a hospice staffed by Sisters of Charity Pallottine, the present day Pallottine Sisters of the Catholic Apostolate. Center for Migration Studies has the papers of the Italian Saint Raphael Society. The annual reports make real the phrase about “caring for immigrants.” Anecdotes highlight individual cases, such as that of the bride who lost her husband aboard the Titanic.4 Statistics indicate a more common story. The Saint Raphael Society annually saw more females than males and more adults than children, meaning the typical aid recipient was a woman traveling alone, usually to meet a husband or fiancé. The Saint Raphael Society helped women contact their menfolk, guided affianced couples through New York State [End Page 102] marriage paperwork, and provided a priest, chapel, and a community of nuns to witness the weddings.5 The stories of Holy Rosary, Leo House, and the Italian Saint Raphael Society suggest one reason why immigrant aid lagged behind other Catholic charities. Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan of New York supported immigrant aid, but his ideas on financing consisted of his personal...

Celebrating 40 Years of Callaloo: October 28–29, 2016

Celebrating 40 Years of CallalooOctober 28–29, 2016 Charles Henry Rowell Click for larger view View full resolution The Washington Square Arch in Washington Square Park, an unofficial icon that has become emblematic of the Greenwich Village campus of New York University. NYU Photo Bureau: Pierce [End Page 8] The Creative Writing Program Department of English New York University [End Page 9] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 10] Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

The Sporting Pornographer

The unexamined career of Joseph Burten (né Joseph G. Bernstein) allows us to trace the shifting terrain of semi-pornographic publishing in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s. As a war veteran, ex-football player and resident of Greenwich Village, Burten serves as a link between the bohemian magazine of the mid-1920s and the increasingly pornographic periodical of the 1930s and 1940s.

The ADTA’s First Half-Century: Ma(r)king History with an Eye to the Horizon

The author, as co-editor of the American Journal of Dance Therapy, introduces six essays by a small group of experts, invited to share reflections on the social, political, economic, scientific, and cultural context for the development of the profession of dance/movement therapy (DMT) over the first half century of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA). Through allusions to pivotal events in the United States circa 1966, this introductory editorial characterizes the U.S. zeitgeist around the year of the ADTA’s founding. Specific references are made to the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the establishment of Medicaid and Medicare, the founding of the National Organization for Women, as well as the violent targeting of civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, and the spontaneous launching of the modern LGBT rights movement with the Stonewall Rebellion in New York’s Greenwich Village. Commentary on the six essays to follow the editorial includes discussion of DMT as a female-dominated profession, which has apparently suffered the economic consequences of gender bias. Strategies for countering devaluation of the profession and building respect for it—including improving dance/movement therapists’ cultural competence, upgrading both quantitative and qualitative research, and fostering alliances between the ADTA and sister institutions—are likewise advanced.

E.G.O.: The Passions of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill: A play in two acts (excerpted)

<i>E.G.O.: The Passions of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill</i>: A play in two acts (excerpted)

John Reed, Louise Bryant, and Eugene O'Neill in Provincetown: A Novel Based on a True Legendary Love Triangle … and a Well Kept Secret Never Before Revealed

John Reed, Louise Bryant, and Eugene O'Neill in Provincetown: A Novel Based on a True Legendary Love Triangle … and a Well Kept Secret Never Before Revealed

Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence by Christina B. Hanhardt

Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, Christina B. Hanhardt. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xii, 358 pp. $25.95 US (paper). Residents of the West Village in New York City held a Take Back Our Streets rally in May 2002, near the location of riots that broke out in June 1969 after police raided the Stonewall Inn bar. In the intervening thirty-three years, however, the terms of political struggle had become markedly different. Rather than sexual outcasts fighting back against police abuse, the 2002 gathering featured privileged (mainly white) gay, lesbian, and straight homeowners calling for police to step up enforcement of quality-of-life laws. And whereas the leaders of the Stonewall riots were sex workers and transgender people, many of them people of colour, the 2002 leaders singled out queer youth of colour and trans women of colour as the sources of their problems. The very association between the West Village and LGBT residential concentration provided political cover for the 2002 rally organizers, protecting them from accusations of discrimination. American Studies scholar Christina Hanhardt's complex and rewarding new book examines the multiple ironies of this turn of events. When did LGBT neighbourhood organizing campaigns shift from safe street patrols, which sought to protect LGBT people from anti-gay violence, to appeals to the police to enforce curfews that targeted queer youth of colour? The answer, she finds, lies with the LGBT rights movement's claims to neighbourhood--space--as a physical location for identity formation and political action. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Castro in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City became centres of LGBT residence and social life. Residential patterns, cultural and social institutions, and commercial establishments defined these areas as neighbourhoods; association with a gay neighbourhood became intrinsic to gay and lesbian sexual identities. Gay neighbourhood-based identities also became markers of whiteness. Focusing on neighbourhood responses to violence, Hanhardt argues that by mooring a dominant understanding of sexual identity to place, the promotion and protection of gay neighborhoods have reinforced the race and class stratification of postwar urban space (9). The book's five chapters move chronologically, each focused on neighbourhood-based LGBT activism. A three-way tension pervades Hanhardt's case studies: liberal attempts to marshal government resources for economic opportunity; neoliberal plans to police personal conduct; and radical-left movements that celebrated alternative modes of free expression and community organizing. …

"All these places have their moments": Exploring the Micro-Geography of Music Scenes: The Indica Gallery and the Chelsea Hotel

In this article, we focus on the micro-geography of the relationship between music and place by homing in at two iconic cultural hotspots where innovative artists, notably (pop) musicians, came together in the 1960s. Because of their many famous visitors and residents, both spaces are well documented in (auto)biographies, monographs on art scenes, as well as in newspapers. We contend that the Chelsea Hotel and the Indica Gallery spaces were able to become cultural hotspots because of their location and due to the fact that these were tolerant spaces managed by people close to the artists.

Conservation Easement Deduction Fails Because of Delayed Recordation

The donation of a façade preservation easement on a historic Greenwich Village building failed to materialize into a deductible contribution because the deed was not recorded until the following year (Mecox Partners, LP v. United States (S.D.N.Y.)). The donor claimed the donation was made in December 2004, the year the deed was executed by the parties. The court found that the deed had to be recorded to be effective under state law. Because the deed was not recorded until November 2005, the court found that the donor was not entitled to claim a charitable deduction for the year it was claimed.