Reacting to Reacting: Taking the Greenwich Village Walking Tour

While in New York City last fall, I remembered that when I began teaching Mary Jane Treacy's Greenwich Village game, I had seen a self-guided walking tour somewhere among the extra materials. Rebecca Stanton created this great resource as an add-on to the game.  I saved the map onto my phone and set out to hit a few key stops in the world of the bohemians.

My itsy-bitsy phone map of the tour. Larger Word doc version here.

The descriptions of the places on the tour. I did a lot of reverse pinching/pinching out/stretching!

If you've played the game, you may remember that most game action took place as the characters hung out in Polly's restaurant (14). You may also remember well this image of Polly's, which I show at every opportunity! 

 Jessie Tarbox Beals' photo of Polly's.

When I visited, I couldn't quite see address numbers and get my bearings enough to figure out where the restaurant formerly was-- at the time, I thought it was this building:

Wilf Hall, formerly...not what I thought.

However, when I sat down to write this post, I discovered that Polly's was actually more likely to be down the street where this building now sits. From Polly's to pizzeria? Perhaps the smallest shift in function that I found from 1913 to today overall. A blog post on Polly Holladay from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation suggests that the majority of the block was demolished to make way for NYU law buildings, Wilf Hall being one. Wilf Hall, incidentally, turned out to be more relevant than I thought it would be when it turned out not to be Polly's. As this 2010 NYU Law Magazine piece about the then-new building assures us, the Provincetown Playhouse is the lone survivor of the block, still utilized as a "working theatre." As players of the game may remember, a number of figures from the game were pioneers in the Provincetown Players, including John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell. A History of the Provincetown Playhouse gives not only background details on the formation of the Players but also some fun insight into the Players' messy personal entanglements (sound familiar to any former bohemians?)

Besides Polly's, the bohemians had other neighborhood haunts, one being the Golden Swan Cafe (1). The dive bar was affectionately dubbed "The Hell Hole" and drew many of the Greenwich Village bohemians of the 1910s through its doors. Artist John Sloan, who plays a significant role in Greenwich Village, 1913, even did an etching of its raucous interior.

John Sloan's Hell Hole, 1917. Playwright Eugene O'Neill at upper right.

At present, the area is much more peaceful. As Stanton notes, since 2000 the site has been occupied by a small garden.

Sign for Golden Swan Garden, with outline of leaf.

Trees in the Golden Swan Garden.

Another angle on the Golden Swan Garden, showing some trees, a light post, and an empty pedestal planter.

I also visited the sites of two of John Reed's former apartments. The one he inhabited during the events of the Greenwich Village game once sat at 42 Washington Square (4), and inspired him to author a poem so delightful that I will reproduce it here even though Stanton has already included it in the tour:

In winter the water is frigid,                                                   
In summer the water is hot;                                                    
And we're forming a club for controlling the tub                   
For there's only one bath to the lot.
You shave in unlathering Croton,
If there's water at all, which is rare,--
But the life isn't bad for a talented lad
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

The dust it flies in at the window,
The smells they come in at the door,
Our trousers lie meek where we threw 'em last week
Bestrewing the maculate floor.
The gas isn't all that it should be,
It flickers,-- and yet I declare
There's pleasure or near it for young men of spirit
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

But nobody questions your morals,
And nobody asks for the rent,--
There's no one to pry if we're tight, you and I,
Or demand how our evenings are spent.
The furniture's ancient but plenty,
The linen is spotless and fair,
O life is a joy to a broth of a boy
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

As far as I could tell, the site of this joyous address now sits somewhere in the midst of this NYU building.

Forty-Two Washington Square!(?)

The second apartment Reed occupied in 1918, as he worked on his famous Ten Days that Shook the World (2).

147 W. 4th St. 

As Stanton notes, Polly's occupied this building as well, from 1915-17. How convenient for Reed! No need to leave the building to socialize or get the latest scuttlebutt from his fellow bohemians.

Visiting the former site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is perhaps the oddest part of this excursion (7). The infamous fire, which killed over 140 workers on the upper floors of the Asch building (most of them young immigrant women), occurred in 1911. It launched investigations into workplace safety and inspired interest in labor movements among many locals. Yet it also followed memorable wins for women's labor movements, such as the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000, suggesting that existing efforts had not made as much change as they had hoped. The tragedy is momentous for a variety of historical and emotional reasons, and most students I've discussed it with have responded strongly to the personal narratives, the newspaper articles, and the images related to it found at Cornell's excellent online resource about the fire. The semi-recent centennial of the tragedy (has it been seven years since 2011 already?) inspired many commemorative actions and ceremonies. 

I had known that the building was in use by NYU and had been for some time, but I had expected that the site would be obvious, perhaps something of a tourist attraction with a statue or the like.  But the building (which suffered very little damage in the fire) appears in fact unremarkable. A bit of hunting reveals two plaques, one from the Department of the Interior in the 1990s and another one from 2003 by the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation.

The National Park Service plaque.

The New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation plaque.

These plaques are easy to miss, and people flow around them without cease. I seemed to be the only one there that day specifically to see the building which survived a fire that dozens of workers inside it did not. 

There is a current effort to place a memorial at the site. The Remember the Triangle Fire coalition has a plan for the design which will cleverly incorporate steel panels into the exterior of the building, stretching up to the eighth floor and around the base, with names and details of the fire etched upon them.  Until then, the view is a simple one. I found it a half-troubling reminder of the ways in which physical places can seem to move on from events that societies never quite do (as Stanton notes, sweated labor and unsafe working conditions are still alive and well in the modern US).

View of the Asch/Brown building from the sidewalk.

Related Links:

The Tenement Museum gives an idea of the living conditions of immigrant workers who worked in factories like Triangle, organized within labor unions like the IWW and ILGWU.

For teaching or just browsing around, Cornell's expansive resource on the Triangle Factory Fire is a must-visit, featuring primary sources, secondary descriptions, timelines, legacies, and more.