Just under a hundred years ago, the Village’s reputation for attracting iconoclastic, subversive and leftist writers began extending to its music scene. Because it would snake through the Village, a slew of buildings were torn down or sliced in half to make room for tunnels and stations. As a result, one of those structures, at 178 Seventh Avenue South, now resembled a pie cutter; [Max] Gordon soon learned why its previous incarnation—a speakeasy, the name for burrowed-away joints and spaces illegally selling alcohol—had been called the Golden Triangle.
Retaining the Village Vanguard name, he rented the space—with a cash infusion from someone he later called a “shylock who liked the idea of a club because he thought he could pick up women there”— and moved whatever was inside the first space to the new one. As he was preparing for its grand opening on February 22, 1935, a cop walked in, saw that Gordon was using beer cases for seats, and asked, ominously, if he was selling alcohol, which required a liquor license.
“Let me sell the beer,” Gordon replied. “Then I’ll have the money to pay for a license.” He was off the hook, at least for a while.
Since its inception, Greenwich Village had functioned as both sanctuary and battleground. Galleries, small presses, and enough writers with enough works to line the shelves of a small library were drawn to its narrow, crooked, often con-fusing streets and ambience.
At various points, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, and Henry James had called the Village their home; Herman Melville worked at the US Customs Office there. Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane all bunked at one time or another at the so-called House of Genius on Washington Square South.
Even the geography of the area played into that image: as historian and onetime Village Voice editor-in-chief Ross Wetzsteon would later write, the sheer bewildering layout of the Village—especially the new grid laid out in 1811 that overlapped with the meandering streets of the Village—had “metaphoric resonance as well: rejecting orderliness, refusing conformity, repelling the grid.”
The ethnic groups and factions that came in and out of the area had periods of cooperation and intermingling. They could also clash, as when the Lenape indigenous people who had called it home eventually battled with Dutch settlers in the middle of the seventeenth century. In time, the Village’s developing music community would prove to be equally turbulent, if not as violent.