My Greenwich Village: Walking With Ghosts

From an Interview with Vincent Livelli by Judy Samuels

Vincent Livelli first “awoke from infancy” at 117 Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. It was when his mother took him to the window to see his first snow. She picked up a handful of snow from the window sill and put it in his hand. She taught him about fire the same way, but much more gingerly.

In the 1920s, European immigration was at its peak. The Village social parlor was the streets, which were arenas of volatile class tensions as well as communal mixing. The South Villagers, though mostly all Italian, were deeply divided by region and class — the Genoese looked down on the Sicilians; the Sicilians resented Genoese business success and adaptability (They called them the Jews of Italy). Vincent’s Genoese family owned the building they lived in, and their landlordly position stung the Sicilian tenants’ sense of pride.

Walking to school at P.S. 102 on Varick Street, Vincent would be bullied by kids on the street and sometimes spat on from a tenant’s window. He escaped this fate when he walked to Central Park with his older cousin Jimmy. Jimmy worked in the paper box industry in the manufacturing district now called Soho. Sometimes he carried his younger cousin on his shoulders. In Central Park, they would go skating on the frozen lake.

Vincent remembers, as do some of us, when the Jefferson Market Library, back then the Jefferson Market Courthouse, was of a piece with the Women’s House of Detention. The inmates would yell down through the barred windows to the street and throw messages to friends on Sixth Avenue. Around 1974, the Women’s House of “D” was torn down. Today its memory is blanketed under lush flowering plants in a lovingly-tended neighborhood garden.

Vincent was born in Brooklyn and at six months old moved to 117 Sullivan Street, which he shared with his mother, father, grandparents, Aunt Tessie and unmarried Uncle John. Just across the street was the stable where the teamsters’ horses were bedded down. Their carts were parked in the street right outside his window. Before there was window screening, flies from the horses would invade his room. He could look out his window on hot summer days and see the horses returning home tired from pulling the beer wagons through the city streets. He watched as they climbed slowly up the incline to their stalls, and as the impatient teamsters beat them to hurry them up. The misery of the overworked horses came through the window with the breeze that carried the smells of hay and horse urine. At three years old, Vincent saw policemen shoot horses that were foaming at the mouth from exhaustion. He saw them drag the bodies through the streets.

When excavation work began on the Sixth Avenue Subway, Vincent played in the mountains of sand that piled up. He lit the gas lamps in the hallways of 117, held aloft on his grandfather’s shoulders. The building had two communal toilets on each floor — the pull-chain kind — that served three families. The coolest places in the building, in summer they were a popular escape from the stifling apartments.

In the twenties, poisoning from lead paint didn’t recognize class differences. Many children suffered the effects of eating the flaked-off paint chips from apartment walls.

Vincent, despite being affected with permanent severe hearing loss, learned four languages, and learned to dance and love Latin music from his Sicilian mother. For his first lesson, she climbed up on the kitchen table and danced. She told him stories about the Black Cat, the cabaret on West Third Street, and Mori’s Restaurant on West Fourth, popular in the 40s, that had a fountain in its inner courtyard. But the San Remo Bar Vincent discovered on his own.

Located on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in the heart of Italian Greenwich Village, it became home to the “Village nobility” of the 1940s and ‘50s. Anatole Broyard, who Vincent met at Brooklyn College, was at the center of a literary circle that included French diarist Anaïs Nin, poet Delmore Schwartz, writers Milton Klonsky and William Gaddis, and other artists and writers.

At Brooklyn College, Vincent was an outsider among the mostly Jewish, staunchly Leftist crowd. Anatole Broyard, the son of a New Orleans carpenter and a light-skinned black man, was equally set apart. They became close friends for the rest of their lives. Though neither of his parents had finished elementary school, their son became a writer and a book critic for the New York Times. In 1938, the two got an apartment together on West Third Street where the rent was ten dollars a month. In 1945, they opened a bookstore at 18 Cornelia Street, which became a literary nucleus in the Village, a favorite hangout for Maya Deren, the high priestess of experimental cinema, and writer Terry Southern, among others. Anatole’s Greenwich Village memoir, Kafka was the Rage, ignited an interest in European literature.

In 1948, after serving in the army in World War II, a cold day job-seeking on Wall Street made Vincent dive into a steamship office to warm up. Destiny must have had a hand because the world suddenly opened up with that steamship office, and, instead of Wall Street, he picked up a job as cruise director on a ship to the Caribbean, a career which would take him to sixty-five countries. Back in New York City, in the midst of the Depression he learned Latin dance at the Park Plaza on 110^th Street off Fifth Avenue, where poor Puerto Rican and Cuban families went to reclaim their lost cultures.

In a letter to Anatole’s daughter, Bliss, Vincent told her how her father had “refereed a certain decorum” when engaged in heated literary discussions with others at the San Remo Bar. “Nimble with words, his sentences skipped along, churning the air with words never heard before. . . . “ Tempers raged in this bar atmosphere as people argued their literary opinions. “There were days when they would cross the street to avoid each other because of Proust.”

Late in the 1940s and into the ‘50s, the elegant iron grillwork began to disappear from many Village balconies. NYU began its expansion, and with it the historic streets of the Village were rearranged or broken up. For Vincent this was the time “Anaïs Nin opened her diaries [to the world], Sartre’s ‘Huit-Clos’ opened on Broadway, and the Mob controlled Saints’ Days.” The intimate romance of the Village was disappearing.

The building at 117 Sullivan Street is today a condominium. An apartment in this building with no super rents for $1,300 a month. Vincent Livelli spent the decades of the sixties and seventies traveling the world on cruise ships, a Latin-music missionary. “Is it not better,” he wrote to Bliss, “to follow the way of the self-forgiving solitary traveler?”

Vincent and Anatole were sharers in the post-World War II Village where friendship and love were bound together by love of poetry and literature. “Everyone was writing.” One afternoon, Vincent met James Baldwin coming out of the bar at the Carlton in Cannes, France. “He gave me his number, and when I called, he said he would do a portrait of me, in the style of Matisse or Van Gogh. He once sang for me to keep the cold at bay in his wind-swept loft.”

In 1954, Anatole’s first published story, “What the Cystoscope Said,” gained him status in the world beyond the Village, but strangely prefigured his death from cancer years later in 1990. From his experience as a patient, he wrote the collection of stories Intoxicated by My Illness; it was Anatole’s posthumous gift to the world. In it, he gave a literary voice to illness, suffering, sex, and death. "I’m not interested in the irony of my position,” he wrote. “Cancer cures you of irony. Perhaps my irony was in my prostate.”

Vincent, who “walks the Village with his friend’s ghost, knows this is where his heart still resides, among the landscapes of our happy youth. Thus, we are joined together not in sadness but in the feeling that we were so close to a miracle that we could have saved the world.”

Remembering the Village

Letter to archivist Henry Medina

Dear Henry:

Your interest in Greenwich Village shows me that you are an artist at heart. With me, it was an accident of birth that placed me here, fortunately. I say fortunately because this is where I feel I most belong. If I could have had a choice, it would have been here or Paris, so much so that when I meet a Parisian, I feel I have much in common with him.

This is where I awoke from infancy when my mother took me to the window to show me snow in the backyard. My first view of “the world” was a beautiful one. Because the Ninth Ward (as Greenwich Village was once called, in the early 20th century) was so overrun with violence from street gangs, it was unsafe for me to play in the street. Furthermore, since we were landlords, there was much envy and hostility toward my family. I was only allowed out in the company of my grandmother or my uncle, on their daily visit to St. Anthony’s Church (Shrine), that my grandfather was instrumental in establishing on Thompson Street. He hoped to help the community and at the same time increase property values in the neighborhood. Today, his dream is realized, I’m happy to say.

He admired and spoke often of the Germans, a more settled element in the city. “A walk in G.V.” referred to row houses north of Washington Square Park. These stately mansions were called, in my grandfather’s time and even today, the Rhinelander Estates (now owned by NYU). He had traveled all over Germany as his old passport shows, and was in the piano-string business at 5 Bedford Street, with a German family. He may very well have built the hurdy-gurdy organ that he’d carried around Europe as a musiker. He owned a stable and opened a bar to sell German beer. In those days, the Genoese families in the Village drank beer more than wine, since it was more readily available. When I was 9 or 10, I would go for beer for the men working on West Broadway (now Soho), bailing rags and paper. They called such young children “go-fors” in English, even though the men working the huge compacting machines were all Italian-Americans.

My father was a journalist, having been born in New York and having graduated high school. He began his newspaper career as Arthur Brisbane’s office boy and worked his way up to investigative reporter with the New York World and the New York American, both Hearst newspapers. He may also have worked at the old New York Evening Post (the editor was a certain Mr. Swope).

The Village at this time was very crowded with poor immigrant families. Walking to PS 102, on Varick Street, I would be bullied, and sometimes spit on from tenants up at windows who identified me with my landlord family. Soon I was not allowed the natural pursuits of young kids and was kept tied to the fire escape. A cousin older than I would walk me up to Central Park and back, especially in the winter to ice skate on the lake. He would have to carry me home on his shoulders since it was quite far for me to walk. He would skate with me on his shoulders as well. His mother, my aunt Tessie, and my unmarried Uncle John, my grandparents, and my mom and dad were all obliged to live in the building. For safety, my dad moved me and Mom back to Brooklyn when I was 10 or 11. I had originally been born in Brooklyn, at a time when all the apartments in my grandfather’s building at 117 Sullivan Street were taken. As soon as a vacancy occurred, when I was 6 months old, my dad had us moved into my grandfather’s building, so I consider myself a Villager.

I remember what is now the Jefferson Market Courthouse Library, when it had a women’s prison attached to its property. That part was torn down around 1960, especially since the ladies would be yelling down from the barred windows at friends and passersby in the street and along Sixth Avenue. I played, jumping in the mountains of sand being excavated while they were building the Sixth Avenue subway, coming home all sandy. My real playground was Washington Square Park, where I was taken daily after visiting Pompeii Church and St. Anthony’s, to ride my tricycle…the envy of the neighborhood kids whose families could not buy them one. We sat by Garibaldi’s statue, since my father was a “Garibalino,” instrumental in raising money for the statue. He came to America in 1861 to join Garibaldi, who was living on Staten Island at that time, prior to leaving to fight in Peru against the Spaniards. He bought acres of empty land in Rego Park and Forest Hills but sold it in order to finance his son, Dominick (my uncle), who was running for mayor of Hoboken, where there was a very large community of Sicilians (who were being oppressed by the Irish political machine and made to work for a dollar a day paving streets). My uncle lost the election, and we became much poorer over time.

Today the rent for an apartment in what was my grandfather’s building on Sullivan Street is averaging $2,000 a month. Next to this building, I remember outhouses before there was central plumbing. The people called them “back houses,” as the historian Barry Lewis mentions. In Italian, “bacahows” or “cessos” (the second word comes from “cesspool” in English). Today you enter a tight alley to go into the backyard of the two buildings, where now there is a small cottage. This occurred in many instances where the space was used to build cottages where formerly there were crude toilets. Even as late as the 1960s there was a public toilet (men and women) around 17 Perry Street. Most of the kids were poisoned eating lead paint chips, as they still are today in poor neighborhoods in the Bronx and elsewhere in the city.

My mother loved dancing, and spoke of the cabaret named the Black Cat (I think it was on West Third Street, in the 1920s). Mori’s was the popular restaurant on West Fourth Street in 1945, which had a fountain in the interior yard. MacDougal Street was lined until just after the Second World War with private mansions with iron balconies and railings. The Provincetown Playhouse was there in 1946 through 1948, as was a nice club called Salle de Champagne, where guests sat on cushioned seats and drank champagne. A jazz spot named George’s was at the northeast corner, at 69 Bleeker Street and Seventh Avenue, and then, after the war, there was Louie’s on West Fourth and Barrow (today the One if by Land restaurant is located down the street).

In the hot summers when I was a child in the Village, horses would die in the streets, cops would shoot them, flies entered windows before screening, and recalling stable smells keeps me from liking horses to this day. I lit the gas lamps in the hallways of my grandpa’s building, while carried on my dad’s shoulders. The two communal toilets on each floor served three families and were the coolest places to escape the hot apartments. My dad bought me clothes on Orchard Street and, at 8 years old, I was always wearing a hat, which I took off to greet people as I bowed to them. My best friend was the son of the Jewish candy-store owner on Prince Street, when I was 9. My childhood in the Village was proper and not difficult compared to other kids, many of whom went to jail. Today, my Village is an abode of memories that will inhabit me forever.