Blog Posts by Subject: Greenwich Village

Sherwood Anderson is special to Hudson Park because I believe, I hope, that he used the branch. After all, he lived right across the street at 12 St. Luke's Place.

Kenneth Fearing was a major poet of the Great Depression and the founding editor of the Partisan Review.

He lived at 311 W. 11th Street and his birthday is July 28.

Raymond Chandler did not spend very much time in the Village but he did check into the residential hotel, The Grosvenor, 35 Fifth Avenue, in the spring of 1955 and stayed for a short while.

He also wrote this in a 1954 letter to Hamish Hamilton about imagined neglected authors:

Hart Crane lived for a time at 45 Grove Street (he more famously had an apartment with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge) and his birthday is July 21.

Clement Clark Moore is credited with writing one of the most famous poems in the world, "Twas the Night Before Christmas," also known as "A Visit from St. Nickolas."

Mary McCarthy is eminently quotable, so I'll let her speak for herself. June 21 is her birthday and she lived at 16 Gay Street.

Mark Van Doren edited and published An Anthology of World Poetry in 1929. Amazingly, this enabled him to buy the house at 393 Bleecker Street. Van Doren was a poet himself and a playwright and a greatly admired professor at Columbia University.

William Styron, like many Greenwich Village writers, came from somewhere else, in this case North Carolina.

June 11 is his birthday and he spent his early writing career living at 45 Greenwich Avenue.

Here are two quotes from Sophie's Choice:

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

Before he was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, John Masefield scrubbed floors in a saloon at Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue in the Village.

My guess, that's good training to be a poet or a writer of any kind.

John Cheever lived at 61 Jane Street when The New Republic published his first short story. His birthday is May 27.

Here are some words from the writer:

Joseph Brodsky was a Russian poet, born in Leningrad, who became the American Poet Laureate in 1991. He lived at 44 Morton Street and his birthday is May 24.

Lorraine Hansberry lived at 337 Bleecker Street. Her birthday is May 19.

A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. Here are some quotes:

Katherine Anne Porter's 1962 Ship of Fools was the best selling novel of the year and assured her financial security. She is generally more admired for her shorter works, however, such as Pale Horse, Pale Rider and her collections of short stories.

I read Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities years before I moved to New York, back when I wrote for community newspapers in my home state of Delaware. Jacobs wrote sensibly, without pretense. She observed things closely, and drew logical conclusions. She obviously cared about her subject passionately, but her arguments were not emotional. They were deductive. I admired Jacobs tremendously.

May Sarton lived a little bit out of Hudson Park's area at 42 E. 11th Street, but still, close enough. She was a poet, novelist and memoirist. May 3rd is her birthday.

Henry James wrote one of the quintessential New York novels, Washington Square. He lived in Greenwich Village at 21 Washington Place. So on April 15, celebrate something other than paying your taxes. Celebrate Henry James's birthday!

Gregory Corso was born at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City. His family lived near Bleecker and MacDougal streets at the time of his birth.

His birthday is March 26.

Edward Albee's birthday is March 12. He resided at 238 West Fourth Street (near Tenth Street) in New York City.

In September, Hudson Park Library's Book Discussion Group read Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We found it funny, awful, and moving. Several readers in the group couldn't imagine a more horrible couple than George and Martha. They are horrible, but I rather liked them. Take a look at this short excerpt:

So many remarkable writers lived in New York City at 61 Washington Square South and the adjoining homes that the structures became known as Genius Row. Frank Norris, a writer mostly associated with San Francisco, lived here for a time (as did Willa Cather, O. Henry, and Stephen Crane). His birthday is March 5.