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The War
By Charles O'Brien
Peace
Timothy Mayer
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© 2001, 2002 First of the Month
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Bohemian Eclipse
By Stanley Aronowitz
Kate Millett is unpatriotic. The author of one of the defining books
of feminism, Sexual Politics, for years has enjoyed a large Bowery loft
and pays the un-Manhattan rent of $500 a month. So what else can a red-blooded
landlord do other than throw her out? Nobody should pay that kind of rent
for so much space in the 90's unless it is in Mount Olive, Illinois. If
everybody adopted Millett's attitude of fighting to stay put, slackers
would again dominate lower Manhattan and money would be crowded out. After
all, hordes of young professionals and business people are coming to the
East Village neighborhood and are happy to pay $2000 a month for a one
bedroom railroad flat; if the landlord succeeds in evicting Millett he's
likely to get $4500-$5000 for her loft. Millett has been living off the
past for too long. It's time to declare the Bohemia to which she came
thirty years ago dead and buried. If Kate wants to live cheap she might
consider Jersey City. Or better yet, South Orange. As the conservative
ideologue and city planner Peter Sahlins wrote in his 1975 dead-pan piece,
'New York in the Year 2000,' Manhattan, meaning almost every inch of real
estate below 125th street, is reserved for the rich, not even for the
famous.
My first reflection on the end of New York's Bohemia came in the late
80's when my friend and former editor Joyce Johnson published a memoir
and post-mortem of her life with the Beats, Minor Characters. It won the
National Book Award and, I suspect, the recent film documentary on the
same bunch will be a strong contender for an Oscar. (A sure sign of a
cultural dead-end.) Whether clear or blinky-eyed, these recollections
established that Bohemia was then, and this is definitely now. Living
creatively on the margins was never a picnic in Eden. And the ways of
bohemians tend to look better in retrospect. But there are good reasons
to wax nostalgic about this almost vanished breed.
I
Bohemians have been the gypsies of late capitalism. For a century they
set down their tents at the heart of cities only to be upbraided as exemplars
of sloth, celebrated as nouveau romantic heroes and then, finally, uprooted.
The everyday life of classic bohemians was a monumental struggle to beat
the 'system' by winning and reconfiguring urban space in ways that were
simply unavailable to those caught in the job machine. Bohemians attempted
to enter the realm of freedom -- life minus (much) wage labor -- without
the material means.
Bohemias have been located in less coveted urban neighborhoods for one
simple reason: cheap rent. Cheap rent meant that the artist or would-be
artist could survive on part-time and occasional wage-work and whatever
their art or music or writing might bring in; less than splendor, but
with luck, more than subsistence. Some lived in communes (in effect, if
not in name). Railroad flats might be shared by a floating cast of tenants,
the rent shared haphazardly but somehow.
Greenwich Village has been the echt Bohemia of the 20th century (though
it now lives on only in the collective imagination of its former residents,
scholars and tourists). At the turn of the 20th century it bordered on
the old Canal Street Irish ghetto whose residents worked on the bustling
West Side docks and as lorry drivers. The Village's inhabitants then were
chiefly the Italian immigrants who came to sweat in Lower East Side garment
shops, other factories, and in construction. These working-class precincts
were the model for bohemian enclaves -- shabby housing, mean streets and,
of course, cheap rent. In this era, Bohemia was informed by a commitment
to sexual liberation and radical politics. From the turn of the century
to the 1920's, the Village was a haven for rebel artists, politicos and
patrons like Mabel Dodge -- that notorious class traitor to the Establishment.
Militant labor leaders like Big Bill Haywood were regulars at Dodge's
5th Avenue Salon along with figures like Masses editor Max Eastman and
the political artist, John Sloan. It was a moment when novelist Floyd
Dell (along with many others) advocated 'free love.' While feminist Margaret
Sanger (another Dodge regular) provided the technology -- and modeled
the awareness -- to make it feasible.
In the 1920's the Village was discovered by mainline culture vultures.
It became a chic neighborhood. New money converted the old working-class
boarding houses into town houses and built large apartment buildings above
8th street where, even in the Great Depression, rents were too high for
most bohemians. A few artists and writers managed to stay put, though,
and through the 1950's the Village served as something of an ideal for
similar neighborhoods in other large cities.
Dan Wolf helped promote that ideal by founding the Village Voice in 1955.
The Voice would become closely associated with Bohemia, but it began as
a vehicle for political reformers. The Voice was originally the mouthpiece
of (relatively affluent) promoters of civic virtue who fervently sought
to upgrade their neighborhood and replace the old Tammany machine headed
by Carmine DiSapio. The Voice spoke through and for figures like Ed Gold,
a journalist at Fairchild Publications, shoe fortune heir Stanley Geller,
the high-strung (and ambitious!) attorney Ed Koch, Sarah Schoenkop (like
Koch, a migrant from Essex County, New Jersey). People who came together
to support Adlai Stevenson and found in his losing campaigns hope for
a new reform politics in New York City. (An inspiration that led to them
to lay the groundwork for the eventual victory over the machine.)
But political commentary by these relatively staid types didn't make for
a lively newspaper. And Dan Wolf realized he needed to recruit real writers
and reporters. Soon Norman Mailer, Michael Harrington, the jazz critic
Nat Hentoff, the poet Joel Oppenheimer, and political cartoonist Jules
Feiffer -- from the dwindling ranks of the Village Bohemia -- joined the
paper, giving it a more radical (and imaginative) cast. Reporters Stephanie
Harrington, Jack Newfield, Susan Brownmiller and Mary Nichols came along
to help the reform movement by exposing the shady dealings of city and
state government. And, of course, the Voice became the newspaper of record
for counter-cultural art movements -- the exploding Off Off Broadway theater,
avant garde film, downtown galleries (which were challenging the hegemony
of 57th Street), and the Jazz scene (which gradually settled in the Village
after being run off 52nd Street).
When a new Bohemia began to emerge in the Lower East Side, the Voice seemed
to break its back trying to respond. In the early 70's -- and in ensuing
years -- more than half of the paper tended to be counter-cultural, much
to the chagrin of those on the staff who wanted the paper to follow a
narrow economistic line and pursue the kind of anti-corruption reform
agenda that still dominated the front-of-the-book.
The Voice, of course, was never the voice of Downtown bohemians. During
the mid-60's, the East Village Other managed to make the Voice seem square.
The Other wasn't just hip; it excoriated gentrifiers and tried to reconcile
Bohemia with blacks and the barrio. There were other radical papers located
in the Lower East Side. On 4th Street, there was The Guardian -- a national
newspaper of distinctly Old Left origins that briefly became the chief
paper of the New Left (though not of the counterculture). The Rat was
a local sheet that tried to combine a counter-cultural esprit with revolutionary
politics. Both papers failed to survive scorching splits over social issues,
chiefly feminism. Women seized power at The Rat but couldn't get it to
fly after the conspirators split over ideological issues. The Guardian
survived its own internal battles, but eventually folded after it lost
Old Left financial support.
II
Bohemian desire and working class consciousness have (occasionally) melded
in the Village. For much of this century, younger bohemians made hang-outs
of the same old Irish bars that served blue collar workers. Despite the
steady decline of the Manhattan docks, longshoremen and truckers remained
a presence in the Village until automation ended up closing nearly all
Manhattan piers for cargo.
For decades, the arts community in the Village (very much in the spirit
of Jane Jacobs and her Death and Life of Great American Cities) joined
with local working-class tenants in mounting fierce opposition to co-op
conversions and other development schemes designed to make this area of
little streets the Shangri-la of the real estate speculator. Working with
residents of the Lower East Side and the few Italians remaining in the
South Village, they beat back first, David Rockefeller's plan for a lower
Manhattan Expressway, and then, a proposed Beltway. These combined forces
managed to save some of the besieged areas. But the gentry still encroached,
and the bohemians were forced to pull back. To appease the protestors,
the city erected Westbeth as artist housing in a sparsely-populated, hence
more easily, cleared, industrial section of the Village. But Westbeth
was no Bohemia. Soon enough, gourmet food shops and dry-cleaning emporia
clustered in the neighborhood.
Rents rose; and the area was now beyond the financial reach of bohemians.
The nearest available thing for them was the area south of Houston, down
to Chambers street (by the 1970's, experiencing its own deindustrialization)
and more significantly, the area east of Third Avenue.
Well before this influx, the Lower East Side had had a bohemian flavor.
I myself, in 1969, took an apartment on St. Mark's Place (#26), a fourth
floor walkup. The building, a few steps west of 2nd Avenue, had recently
been cut up into studios and one-bedroom apartments. Across the street
was the Dom, formerly The Polish National Home (whence the name), now
devoted to loud rock music. Finding it hard to sleep (especially on weekends),
I often walked the streets, until the streets absorbed me. I took my meals
at Veselka's, at the 2nd Avenue Deli, or at the many Polish and Ukranian
Establishments so abundant in the area. Around midnight, I'd descend on
Gem Spa to nurse an egg cream as I read the next morning's newspaper.
I could usually anticipate what was happening thanks to my night-strolls
on the block.
Of an evening, Herbert Marcuse, the age's brightest radical intellectual
star, stepped out on stage at a filled-to-the-rafters Fillmore East. With
his first words, a group of enragŽs -- Up-Against-the-Wall, Motherfuckers
-- brought the program to a screeching halt. The group, led there by Tom
Neumann, wasn't happy; not with the academic character of the event, not
with Marcuse's prosperity, not with the fact that Marcuse had married
Neumann's mother and had even -- according to rumor -- had an affair with
her while she was still married to Neumann's father, Franz (who had been
Marcuse's best friend).
Up-Aginst-the-Wall, Motherfuckers regularly placed themselves in implacable
opposition to the prevailing culture, expressing disgust for (what they
regarded as) hypocritical liberals in the most direct fashion. The group
rejected the application for membership by Abbie Hoffman (of 9 St. Marks
Place) because he did not meet their high radical standards. After all,
Abbie consorted with liberal lawyers and politicians (and was accused
of pandering to the media). Abbie was furious at his rejection and wrote
a passionate defense of his radical credentials in the Voice. The Motherfuckers
never had more than a few members but they made a lot of noise and managed
to influence hundreds of radicals who wished they had the nerve to go
public with their politics and passions.
The Motherfuckers knew how to make a scene, all right. And scenes, being
commercial draws bring in real estate developers. (As C. Carr has noted,
the Lower East Side has gone the way of Greenwich Village of the 20's
and 40's.) The area was gradually gentrified, and the Lower East Sider
of today is more likely to be a financial analyst than a colleague of
Tom Neumann. There, Bohemia has been priced out. The scene, what there
is of it, has shifted to the peripheries: to Williamsburg, and elsewhere
in Brooklyn; to Queens; to the South Bronx, where some young Latino artists
have turned old buildings into new performance spaces; to Jersey City;
and, in a move presaged years ago by Amiri Baraka, to Newark.
Bohemia today is hardly on the map. The question is, though, whether
Bohemia was ever primarily about space at all. An identifiable placeable
bohemian enclave offers certain benefits to its residents. Gregarious
by nature, bohemians are simply more likely to bump into each other in
their areas. Shared coffee shops, bars, laundromats, and parks are the
places where ideas can be discussed, information exchanged, assignations
proposed. Bookstores, newsstands, and record stores there will contain
items of greater interest to the bohemian sensibility. And in a few cases,
e.g. performance spaces for music and live theater, the bohemian enclave
is a precondition for the bohemian's artistic endeavors.
But space, important as it is, is less important than time. The space
of Bohemia exists so that bohemians may there do what it is they do: lay
claim to their time. This space may be occupied; you may move elsewhere,
even if to a far less satisfactory where. But if this time of yours is
taken from you; it is gone forever. Time colonized is not replaceable.
The worse news for bohemians is not that they are scattered (unpleasant
but bearable), but that economic circumstances have forced them onto the
job market.
Is a bohemian in the job market still a bohemian? Only to this extent:
the bohemian must still fight for control of her own time. Many have entered
the job market as part-timers (e.g. adjunct instructors at universities)
or as flexible timers. (Many of the self-employed, for example, in PC-related
businesses, have gone this route.) But eventually, the colonization of
time must be confronted. Bohemians, even while steering clear of the most
obviously deadening jobs, have come under the yoke. Such supposedly congenial
jobs as teaching (whether in the lower grades or in the university) or
work drawing on writing or design skills is, ultimately, just labor, and
tedious. Bohemians in these circumstances have been forced to do something
very traditional: organize. For example, the film-maker Tami Gold, a full-time
teacher, is an activist in her union chapter at Hunter college. Literary
scholar Barbara Bowen, a former union organizer and now Queens College
English professor, is running for president of the faculty and staff union
at C.U.N.Y. And organizing today must address more than minimally defined
conditions of labor; it must address the pointlessness of the labor that
is on offer.
The older bohemian alternative to dead time has been free time. That alternative
now less available, the better answer today, and it hardly matters where
it happens, is the demand for -- in true bohemian style -- the time of
their lives.
***
Stanley Aronowitz's The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University
and Creating True Higher Learning will be published in February 2000 by
Beacon Press.
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