Writer Sprout

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Context

Before it became popular w/ the, might I say, fraternity set, Greenwich Village accommodated drunks that harbored a more creative agenda. (Ouch.) Bakerloo Theatre Project conducts weekly tours of Village pubs famed for historic literary ties, applying $15 fees (six on this particular Saturday) toward their own creative endeavors. A tour makes for a three-hour excursion, which includes foot-travel time, beer-drinking time, and time for some commentary along the way. The group congregated at The White Horse Tavern on Hudson; I was rarin' to go.

Okay, so these pictures are in reverse order. (I'm too lazy to mess w/ the html.) This one--um, not actually my own, as I forgot to go click much toward the end--depicts the Kettle of Fish Bar in its original location, off McDougal. It opened in 1950, and in the years to come it was commonplace to find Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Dylan and a glut of other 60's artists and musicians throwing back bourbons. The Kettle eventually relocated to W. 3rd, where it remained for about 10 years before landing a new (and current) address on Christopher Street.

Thankfully by this point in the tour, the purple-faced wino/husband/dad had all but passed out (or was he pouting? could've been either), ensuring a pleasant enough conclusion. Pea and I stuck around the bar for awhile, hanging w/ our two guides as they gestured a lot and told crazy theatre stories. Having recently performed Shakespeare for a thoroughly engaged West Point student body, they were asked to return--where they are now. They were both real nice, if a bit, well, crazy. The Kettle scene: ordinary pub-look. Dark chairs, tables, dartboard, jukebox, regulars fused to the bar. You know.

Second to last was Minetta Tavern, formerly known as the Black Cat and a favorite bar of Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings--okay, I've lost recent sleep over the name thing--and Ernest Hemingway. Neat sign, but it looked inside like any ordinary, overpriced Italian restaurant inside. I wish I could report more, but a pesky low-blood sugar episode got in the way. (Dunkin' Donuts to the rescue! No worries.)

You're looking at the skinniest building in NYC. It may have been right around this time that old loose-lipped drunkypants began sneering at my click-click-clicking. The gall.

Building w/ three sides and a kooky address. (Waverly splits here, thus takes up two sides, then Christopher and Grove do weird things to the third.) It's the old *Northern Dispensary* and following a refusal to treat an AIDS patient in 1986, its owners lost a lawsuit and went bankrupt. The concept of a vacant space in the Village bewilders, but there's really nobody here--except for maybe a ghost or two, as our guides alerted us, waving their fingers and trembling their voices to demonstrate.

The boy-guide. His teeth, according to Pea, "perfect."

"... home of Washington Irving, Jr." But wait! Jr.? No such thing!? A controversy, this is.

The image is too small for me to read as I type, but it says something close to "nothing important happened here." (How could I not?)

Chumley's, an allegedly haunted Prohibition speakeasy patronized by Orson Welles, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair. The entrance is unmarked, and not in that 'ooh, how *now* to have no sign' way either. Inside, the utmost coziness--thick oak tables, low ceilings, a roarin' fireplace--and a residual sense of unlawfulness. A few trapdoors remain, and at one point there may have been a dumbwaiter in one of the bathrooms that led up to the roof which allowed access to secret gin distilleries in neighboring buildings. This was my favorite, thanks to some fantastic literary kitsch, including an unbroken banner of dustjackets that line the walls. *They* say an author or someone deemed an acquaintance of an author must have at some point stepped foot in the establishment to own wallspace at Chumley's. The beer's their own and the apricot ale--yum. I hear the burgers are kickin', too. We'll be back soon.

Still Chumley's.

Dustjackets.

Charming housing community tucked off some Greenwich street (Cherry Lane maybe). In the nineteenth century it was considered poor & unfortunate to be forced to live so far from the road. Now? Well.

Strange little Tudor scene popping up out of nowhere.

I liked the decorative green detail, that's all.

There's significance here, but can't recall...

The Village is the only Manhattan neighborhood disloyal to The Grid. This 'flawed' setup used to tear at the hearts of builders, who (before paved roads) would try and counteract the trend by forcing right angles. This made things wonky. (I wish for a better word, but none.)

It hadn't before occurred to me, but there's a reason why top-floor windows are sometimes smaller than the floor's below, which are smaller than the floor's below, & so on. Architects used to employ the technique to create the illusion of height. (This used to be novel? Here? Whoa.)

A boot scrape! This pre-pavedroads accommodation was pointed out to the guides by a past tourgoer. Neat! And so easy to miss.

Starting point: The White Horse Tavern. It was built in 1880, but the scribes didn't take notice until the 1950s when Dylan Thomas first stumbled into the old shipworkers' haunt. The details are sketchy, but it's believed that the White Horse saw Thomas down his last-ever whisky. Then he died. He supposedly beat his own record that night, tallying, oh, 18 shots. After staggering out to the curb and collapsing in a heap on the sidewalk, the gent was hauled off to the Chelsea Hotel, where he bit it shortly thereafter. Thing is, it probably wasn't alcohol poisoning, but pnemonia. Then again, had his immune system been a bit stronger... Anyway.