The Village
In her memoir Eating My Words, Mimi Sheraton reports that her mother was worried that she would meet up with artists, "fairies." mixed-race couples, Communists and other "degenerates" in the Village. Sheraton attended NYU and in the summer of 1945, the end of her sophomore year she married and settled in the Village. Her mother's fears were pretty much how conventional, middle-class New Yorkers saw "Green-witch" village in 1946. To a lot of their children, this only made it all the more attractive.
The Bohemian set had made the neighborhood their home in the early decades of the century, drawn by cheap rent, the cultural institutions that rented space from NYU on Washington Square and the relative isolation of the district from the rest of the city before the southward extension of the major avenues and the construction of the IRT and IND subways . While Village residents in 1946 liked to think of themselves as romantic Bohemians, to the radicals of the olden days, the Villagers of 1946 were a bourgeois lot. Rising rents and development had driven out much of the starving artist crowd. Ad copy writers and publishing executives inhabited the high-rent, high-rise apartments along Fifth Avenue and its neighboring streets. Tourists flocked in to sample the cute little restaurants and the boozy nightlife as they had since the twenties. But you could still find young men and women from Iowa and Alabama and the sons and daughters of dentists and lawyers from Scarsdale and New Rochelle in the tenements and boarding houses of the Village, escaping from the pressures of conventionality for a few years until they most likely packed it in and got a "real job" and moved away.
The Abstract Expressionists who gathered at the Cedar Tavern were creating a new excitement in the immediate postwar years. The beat movement was gestating and would make the Village a center of the counterculture again within a few years. But while the new Bohemians drank and met in the Village, many of them lived in the tenements of the East Village where rent was cheaper and apartments were available.
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