>> next, john presents a history of the new york city neighborhood, and the author reports on 400 years of the neighborhood's development from inception as part of new amsterdam in the 1600s to the role in the social, political,

and cultural movements of the 19 of # 0s and centrality of the gay rights movement. it's about 50 minutes. [applause] >> thank you. thank you, all, for being here and braving the rain. obviously, some people didn't. [laughter] new yorkers, when it rains, it's like raiser blades and we run away. we're supposed to be tough. i thank the institute for having us, and a big thanks to the historic preservation society for working this and every day to keep them from knocking down everything there is in grenich village and east village. [applause] every time i hear of another building, i say, knock down the ugly one you built and try that again before you knock down one of the old ones. [laughter] all right. so my book is a cultural history, and i'm going to do a fly-by through it.

it's a much more detail in the book, of course, and i want to start by saying, you know, in the hay day, grenich was the most famous neighborhood in the world. for centuries, it atacted and was a haven for artists, political radicals, life adventurers, gays, lesbians, and out fits and outcasts coming to the in a tiny little speck of the vast person landscape. they bounced off each other like subatomic parol kls in an accelerator creating culture for america and the world. it's worth noting, i think, at the outset that the artists and radicals were always a minority and transyepts in theville taj with other, much larger, and more stable communities in the village that guys like me don't always mention. i try to make sure they are in

the book, and i wanted to talk about them before moving on about the artist. through much of the 1980s, the village was the center of black manhattan, something people don't know, especially around called little africa, or if you were an irish cop, it was coon town. steven crane wrote about it, but more importantly, the black community itself in the village created the first black newspapers, professional black newspapers in america and had the first successful black theater in network, what said to be, called african grove, at bleaker street in the 1820s, briefly because white hooligans at first were amused by the idea of the cast doing shakespeare starting with richard iii, but they started acting out, and it didn't last long. nevertheless, one of the stars,

a man named ima moved on to london, and had quite a successful career there, did a fellow and other characters, shylock and mcbeth and others in white base. [laughter] yeah. there was the irish west village and western end of the village that inspired the movie "on the water front" although it was shot over in jersey. it was inspired by the village and hells kitchen water front. the village gave us one of the most colorful mayor in the country, jimmy walker, and a world champion boxer whom i think could only have come from grenich village in the 1920s. gene was a boxer who read shakespeare, friends with george bernard shaw and talked about the science, and this was a time

when, you know, boxers were lugs and mugs. the press, for the longest time, couldn't tell if he was a hoax because he spoke in full sentences. [laughter] it was back when little italy was not two blocks in the town, and went over to the village, a very large community. gave us another one of our most colorful and most loved mayor of the 20th century, and he didn't grow up there, but born there, grew up in italy, and came back. one of the most colorful mobsters, the daffy dawn, and there was the lost village. that's not the nicest way to say that, but anyway, the lost village, the upper class village around and north of washington

square park, henry james' jill lag, and all coexisted at the same time and the artists would come and go, but i do think it's the artists, the bo homians, radicals, gays, lesbians that made the neighborhood famous and unique. there's a lot of nice neighborhoods around, but really was only one grenich village. what i said about the function as a nag innocent for misfits and outcasts, went together for a very long time. i think it's easy to forget now that in most of america until recently, until the 1960s or 70s, if you were artistic or wanted to be a poet or gay or lesbian or radical political ideas, you were a lonely outcast anywhere you live, but there was one place that everybody heard of, this place called grenich

village to go, and people fled there from everywhere around the country and europe and found they were not just among other people like them or allowed to be whoever they were as outrageous as that was, but they were encouraged to be and act out, and that's a long tradition in the village, acting out. the outcasts goes all the way back to before grenich village was the village. this goes back to the 16 00s. they put a settlement down in the 1620s. by the 1640s, it's still only 500 people down there, and all the rest of manhattan is bogs and forests, meadows, hills, and streams, it's the wilderness. but the 1640 #s, there's dutch farms, but not much else other than the natives, and one of the

native settlements was where gansford street is now in the village. in the 1640s, the dutch gave many of their african slaves what they called half freedom, and little plots of land strung like a necklace from the island to the village into what is now the east village agreeing cropping for themselves and gave the crops to the settlement. this was not the dutch being good to the slaves as portrayed. by the 16 # 40s, even though there were just 500 people in new amsterdam, they ticked off the indians by among other things by leading what could only be called terrorist raids on indian settlements in manhattan and in new jersey, that they feared an all-out war was coming, and, in fact, it would in a few years. they put the slaves there as a buffer zone, and an early warning system for the indians, you know the pioneers because

they are arrows in their backs. [laughter] okay, that tradition of it being a place for outcasts continues newgate prison was at christopher and grenich streets in the 1790 #s. through the 1700s, yellow fever, cholera, other plagues run through that tiny little community down at the bottom of manhattan every summer, and washington square park, in fact, starts as a burial ground for yellow fever and cholera victims because it was out of town. it was out in the country. you fled out to the village to get away from the plague. by the -- especially -- it was an especially pure lant plague in 1892, and they built permanently in the village. why the west village is famous,

the streets curl and wander is because people were building along the cow path and streams and then it just stayed. by the 1850s when the avenue and street grid flows up and around it, it's too late to change that so the village always maintains this villagey mess of streets over at that end. that is part of the charm. people find it charming to this day and part of how it is marketed in the 20th century. more misfits and outcasts. i got a million. in 180 # 4 african-americanberg was living in estate, nice house on a hill that's no longer there, it was flattened, in the south village at king street and van dam. when he crossed the hudson and went over and had a jewel with

hamilton and came back, and then fled richmond the next day fleeing a murder wrap because he killed alexander. hamilton. in 180 # 9, thomas payne comes basically to die. he had been a hero of the revolution, obviously, as we all know, and as happens with revolutionaries, when the revolution was over, he didn't settle down and become a bureaucrat in the new government the way he was supposed to but continued to be what people punned in his day as a pain. [laughter] he died an outcast and miserably. in the 1840s, the misfit of all, edgar allen poe in the places all around, living on west 3rd street when the raven came out,

and the raven was his first -- he finally had a successful poem. everybody loved the raven, all the humorous parodies which is a sure sign of success. abraham lincoln was fond of the pole cat. it didn't help. he was still a miserable character, poe, and died not long after, miserably. in 1849. he had a few years of being successful. in the 1850s, walt whitman, the most vilified and misunderstood poet of the century, i'd think, comes into the village to hang out in the first celebrated bohemian scene in the late 1850s in a basement's rats killer called bats on broadway up from bleaker. there's a new lounge place there now called the baltic fats which

takes a name from a line of whitmans. it's the one next door because the building that they are under did not exist when whitman was hanging out there. that's all right. at least they know the history. the crowd published a newspaper for not very long for about a year called "the saturday press," a weekly newspaper, that was just about the only place in the world that champions whitman's poetry at the time. not least because whitman wrote his own reviews in the press. [laughter] he thought himself a genius. he was. you know, he was right. they also published jim smiley and the jumping frog that did a whole lot to promote mark twain's career, and train lived in several places in and around the village in the later 1800s. whitman was also attracted, not just by fellow writers and writers who seemed to like his stuff, although it was app

attraction for him, but because already by the 1850s, the village developed this reputation as a place where gay men can be and they lived positive, careful lives, but they breathed easier in grenich village, and there were few places to do that, and walt used to meet guys there. after the civil war, it grows into the arty neighborhood partly because of institutions like nyu starts and immediately starts making its neighbors angry. [laughter] immediately when they built the building. [laughter] one of the founders was samuel f. b morris, from the morris code. he was a portrait painter, down on dc on commission to paint when he heard his wife in

connecticut was ill. by the time he got there, she had died. he thought there has got to be a faster way to communicate information and news so he, among other people, worked on the telegraph, and he did not invent the telegraph, but one of the guys working on it and invented morse code. that's another sort of odd village legacy. there were cheap rooming houses where young art itions, intellectuals and others afforded to live. from the beginning, micking culture and money generally do not go together in america. you know, madonna makes a ton of money, everybody else makes none, and so artests and writers, ect., need cheap places to live and work and the village provided that, and, also, there was cheap places to eat in the later 1800s, there's french bistros, and anything french was

bohemian because of the persian connections. t.j. woodhouse, who lived there, wrote a song about 1912, somewhere in there, about the village, and there's a line in there about, you know, it's all about how wild and crazy we are in grenich village, and we even learned to eat spaghetti. it must have been exciting to people in 1912. [laughter] it was a great song. the grapevine was on the corner of 6th avenue, what's now the corner of 6th avenue and west 11th near jefferson market. it was a road house in the 1700s. it developed into a tavern by the later 1800s, and that was famous for its mutton pies. everybody loveed the mutton pies at the grapevine. it was known to all the artists,

actors, literatures, and good fellows generally. it was also judges and lawyers from jefferson market, from the courthouse at jefferson market would hang out there. people gathered, talkinged, shared information, and it's thought, and i think this might be true, that because of that, it's where the saying, "i heard it through the grapevine" came from. i think that's true. there's a lot of stories about the village, but i have a feeling that's right. it's worth noting there were only good bellows in the bar. all bars were men only until prohibition, until the speak easies, and many of them had a separate side, lady's entrance and there's a sign, ladies. there would be a back room where they drank, but you didn't drink at the bar with the men. that ends with prohibition because speakease's couldn't organize that so co-ed drinking

starts in prohibition. that's a tangent. i'm full of those too. okay. okay. now we're up to the years leading up to the first world war, 1912-1913 leading up to the war. the village really blooms as a center, and an arty neighborhood. this is when the village backs thee grenich village known as the left bank of america. it had what was called, prematurely, its golden era at that point, its golden age. it is amazing. i could stand here for a half hour and read a list of names of people there at this point, but i'll do a couple of the greatest hit. upton sinclaire, sinclaire louis, willa, and later, ee cummings, fuller, jane heap,

wilson, and edgar with tons and tons more actually. among other things, this crowd was instrumental in bringing modern art to america. america was a back water in materials of art, painting, cul -- sculpture until they developed the shell on lexington avenue. it was an amazing thing. they brought the -- pretty much the entire modern art scene from europe which is where it resided to new york and stuffed it all into the armory. there was many artists, and, like, dozens and dozens, almost none of them seen in america, and now everybody is seeing them, and another big important thing about the show is it really was everybody. until then, if you looked at art in america, you had money, you had an education. you had taste. you were, you know, you were the

within ones allowed to look at art and museums. this was open to everybody. cost next to nothing to get in, and all new york went. they didn't all like it or get it, but they went. it plants a seed of the guard in new york that was a back water that blooms later in the century. it's really important. they did the same thing with theater. they basically invented. not just in grenich village, but people did it in chicago and other places, but in new york, it was the village, at the province stan play house and june barnes and others were writing for the play house and pushed the envelope on modern literature bringing 20th century literature to america. two people brought it, margaret anderson and jane heap, they had a little review called "the little review," and several -- four years before it was

published in paris, they think it's the first publication. it is as a book. they serialized it in the little review starting in 1918. the book came out 1922. three issues seized by the post office and destroyed for obscenity. they were taken to jail. everybody showed up for the private trial, and at the trial, there was three judges. i'm not sure why. one of the judges, when the defense lawyer stood up and started to read out loud from one of the passages to prove it was not passengers, the judge said, stop, you can't do that, there's a young lady present. the lawyers said, but, that's the publisher. [laughter] the judge said i'm sure she didn't know what she was doing. [laughter] that's a true story. at the same time they are pushing the guard in the arts

and literature, they push it in politics in the village. there were a lot of radicals and social progressives in the village at that point. goldman and bushingman came from the east village, from the lowest east side to meet with those who were of the iww, the most radical labor organization at the time. it was early of the women's movement, suffrage, and margaret sanger was there, before she started planned parenthood, and villages like john reed organized the giant patterson strike pageant of 1913. mill workers in patterson went on trike, haywood and flynn went there to try to organize it as an iww strike, and reed own other folks in the village thought the best way to get the word out is to bring the

strikers to new york city where all the media are, so they represented out the old madison square garden, which was still on madison square at that time and held the pageant. john reed led 1100 workers from the mill up the streets and into the building. they put giant red lit up letters that said "iww" at the top of the building, and the idea was they were announcing they arrived, and, unfortunately, they announced they arrived, and the mainstream and the establishment and the "new york times" and other people were just shocked that a these an ark kisses took over, and it would come back to haunt them in years in the red scare. oh, and, and i'm a baby boomer. my generation likes to think we invented sex. [laughter] we did not.

our sexual revolution should have been called the sexual renaissance. our grandmothers had the -- grandparents had the sexual revolution. nothing we did in the 196 # 0s was anything that they were not doing 50 years before us. [laughter] that's a tradition that continues in the village, i think. [laughter] or i like to think it does. okay. the first world war killed that golden age. people leave the village. the red scare slams down on the rad calls and socialists and the an ark -- anarchists, and hayward is arrested, flynn was arrested as well. hundreds of people deported as foreign radicals, and in then comes prohibition, and in the 1920s, the village is known as a

party zone than an arty zone and speak easies on every block. henry and june miller ran one in a basement for a while. the hostess with the mostest was famous for the saying give the little girls a big hand, and worked in all the big fancy night clean ups, the one jimmy walker was in all the time uptown, lived in the village. a giant personality and moved to grenich village. the famous speakeasy was started then, and, actually, started before prohibition as hoppest to god restaurant tavern, but it was famous speak easy during prohibition. chumley was an anarchist and iww supporter. this legend is a little questionable, and i'm not sure about it, but it is said the

term requester -- "86th" comes from the back door which was 86 bedford street so when the cops got the iww guys, you ran out 86 bedford street. it's possible. i can't prove that or seen anybody who could, but it's a good line. i think the guy who probably epitomizes the village, the partying, prohibition era is maxwell who came to the village with prohibition as a poet of great promise and almost instantly became more known for the genius in insulting people and targeting arguments with people. the writer said he was, quote, more disliked, derided, denounced, kicked down more flights of stairs more than any poet i've ever heard or read, end quote. he was great at it something about it that he liked

to get into fights. he was a terrible drunk, infamous, and instead of writing poetry, he wrote pope novels. they are not bad, but it's pulp fiction. he deteriorates through the 1930s and 40s and a shambling drunken ghost of a man haunting the streets and the bars. he would sell poetry for a quarter at the park, in the bars, guys bought him drinks to hear him say something poet-like. for instance, he once -- this is a great line, he called grenich village the koney island of the soul, a very nice line. he was shot to death in a swallow lover's quarrel in 1953. that story art from promising poet to the hideous drunk, you know, is not the only one that applies to the village, but applies to the village a lot. the village was always a place where, as i said, you were encouraged to live large, you were encouraged -- not just to

be live an excessive life and excessively excessive life so drink obsessively, do it well over the top, and it was the only place in america where you could get -- you could not only get away with it but earn couraged to live that way. he was hardly the only one who drank himself to death in the village, and dylan thomas is another great poet who actually drank himself finally to death in midtown, but he did most of the drinking of himself to death in the village. with the depression, 1930s, the village is best known for its writers and artists who are markists or socialists. it's the red decade in the 1930s. if you were an artist or inteemght chewable in the 1930s, you most likely were a fellow traveler or member of the party, and it's just how people were at the time. it came back to haunt a lot of people in the early 1950 #s, but

so the partisan review, a great literary magazine and was the platform started out as the organ of the party, the cpusa. the offices were on west 13th street, and for a long time in publishing, in newspaper and magazine publishing in new york, if you reject an article because the opinions were left wing, you said, oh, well, that was 213 street. [laughter] oh, pete segar come to the village in the late 1930s bringing folk music. there's a long history of the interaction of folk music in the communism party. they original hated folk music, but embraced it in the 30s, and they planted a seed that blossoms later in the village as well, and there's the village vanguard, still going, the oldest nightclub, the oldest

continuous nightclub, pretty sure, in new york city, and i was there a couple weeks ago with my sister from out of town. in 1934, when he starts out, it's a famous club, but starting out, he couldn't afford music, so he had village characters just come in and so a drunken floor show, and people threw money at them. in the late 1930 as hitler devours europe, an entire generation, the cream of european arts and intellectualism and scholarship flees to america, almost all through new york city city, many stay, and those who stayed in new york city workedded down to the village. one of the reasons was because the new school was in the village, and they had a very aggressive policy of hiring these folks, so in new york city, not just at the new school, but in the city and village, you had by 1940, dali,

app drey, pete, hannah, rice, strauss and other people, and they were on the faculty at the school. if you were on the gi bill at the end of the war and could go to the new school for free, for a certain amount of time, you go there and have hannah or wh ogden your teacher. it was a pretty amazing time, and for free. partly through influence from the -- not just from influence, but partly, from world war ii through the 50s into the 60s, grenich village and lower east side is going through a remarkable explosion of artistic activity. if that had been the golden era back in the 1930 era, this is the renaissance, and it's huge,

and the guard in america is located in grenich village and the lower east side for well over ten years. it makes new york city the art capitol of the world, which it had never been. it's the culmination of what began, i think you can say, at the armory show in 1913, finally comes to fruition. in painting, there was the abstract expressionists, and that's really the first truly america guard in art. at the same time, picking up where the province town play house left off, there's broad kay theater that renovated everyone's idea about theater and gave us edward and sam and all the great writers from the period. at the same time, allen gipsberg comes to the village to meet others and bringing more all hanging out in the village.

at the same time, bbop, not started in the village, but drifts down into the village, finds a receptive audience, people who liked jazz for a long time in the village, and they loved -- well, most of the artists who loved bbop because of the free expression of it, but others were moldy fixes because they liked old-fashioned rag time and jazz. that we want on for -- went on for a long time. the jazz musician who i'm friends with and was around there hanging out saying we hung out together. it's exage rated how much fighting was going on, but it's new york and village. there was arguing going on. as part of that, charlie parker comes to the village, lives in the village on the lower east side in the east village, and called grenich village his

favorite place on earth. at the same time, filmmakers come to the village. the village voice and grove press, the literary publisher in the time begin in the village, dylan thomas, others previously mentioned, william, and honest to god, i can read the list for 20 minutes all in the village at the same time in the late 40s through the 50s because once again because they are all in the really small space and also because kind of nobody else is paying attention to them. uptown was not looking at abstract expressionist art, and uptown did not read the new school poets, so they were their own audience for quite a while until pollack is a superstar and everything explodes after that. they there's an atmosphere fizzy

with collaboration. if you were an artist, your poet had the catalog, you draw for his poetry book, the boast of you would walk together to create a play and make everybody be in the play if you knead a film, everybody had to be in the costumes, and because they did the collaborating, they did a ton of work and absolutely goes against what was the mainstream attitude towards artists in the 50s that look at them, they are lazy people, they just lie around in cafes all day, ferguson on tv, every time he heard the word "work," he we want, "work?" they were in the cafes in the daytime, but workedded all night making stuff happen and created a tremendous amount of culture for all of us at that time.

the late 50s folk music becomes a huge scene, and all that in coffee houses and attracting bob dylan who comes, and this is his launch pad to universal superstardom. years later in the 1960s, it's rock years, and jimmy was discovered playing in the cafe wa. he was jimmy james at that point, discoveredded, went to london, made a big star out of him. andy warhol saw the velvet underground in the village, and the thugs who still don't get credit for being thugs, they were a great band, were in residence. it was for 1800 performs or something. in the 1970s when the beatles break up, where do they flee? grenich village. in 1969, the stonewall uprising, the riots, the bunker hill of

gay liberation happens in the village, and only could have in the village. up until then, gay liberation had been -- had the people involved in it had modeled themselves on the civil rights movement and nonviolence movement and very polite and dressed nicely when they picketed in fluent of the department of defense or wherever they were picking, and as they said to me, we're not trying to act out. they wanted to be accepted in. by 1969, younger gay men, a lot street transvestites and younger lesbians as well were sick of being pushed around by the cops, the mob who owned or backed every gay bar in the village went nuts. there was not three consecutive nights, rided the next night, and the village voice objected to the way they wrote about the

riots, righted again, and then it just had a galvanizing effect on the gay community around the country. that's why the 70s is the decade of gay and lesbian liberation. they were highly identified as the gay village. my friend, george tab of furious george, grew up in the village in the 60 #s and 70s, and his parents used to take him to diners at midnight and saw people dressed up as indians and cowboys because it was the village and everybody was acting out, and so when the village people came out, the vocal group, he loved their music. he totally missedded -- too young and missed the gay sub text to it. he just thought they werings you know, village people. [laughter]

tragically in the 1980s because it was an epicenter of gay center, it was ground zero for the aids epidemic, and aids decimated the village, not just the gay village, but everybody was decimated by it. i think by the mid-1980s the village's had its last hoorah in a place that generates culture for the rest of us, as a mag innocent for artists and haven for misfits. several reasons, but i think the root cause, as it is in in store you tell about man hat p history is the cost of real estate. as we know, the price of real estate soared over the last quarter of a century, and it became impossible for anybody, and a young artist doesn't think about moving there unless mom and dad are millionaires. it is, in fact, more a magnet

for millionaires than misfits now. now, that had happened before. as early as the 1920s, the newspaper said grenich village is over as an art center, and the price of the real estate is too high, but it didn't end, and then by, you know, by 1960, if you were a young artist coming into new york to start your career, you didn't move into grenich village because you couldn't afford it then, but moved to the lower east side or east village. still, it didn't sore as it has, and i think that we've seen a great diaspora of workers, ect., ect. from downtown man hat p that was a center for them, but now they are in brooklyn, jersey, getting pushed out further in brooklyn every day. i talked to a young guy who lives in bed sty and the rent is up and he's moving again. you know, getting ready to move because represent is too high?

that just started happening as the latest neighborhood like, you know, six weeks ago. you know, at this point, they'll push them into the sea. i don't know what's left. you know, and i guess because the tv camera is here and it's not all new york city people i'm talking to, why do we care it's not the center anymore or the lower east side for that matter? i think we do care because culture is an ocean in which we all swim. films, books, tv, music are our modern folklore and technology, and if we price the artists and free thinkers and radicals and the free livers out of our live, we impoverish our lives, and on that note, that's the end of me. thank you very much. [applause]

>> just a reminder, there's a microphone coming around, and she will pick who is the first question. >> hi. when did the lower east side, do you know, become the east village and why was the name changed? >> as -- the first written version of that i can see is about 1956. there was an ad in the village voice, and it was by a businessmen's association, and it's a full-page ad saying come to the blooming east village. certainly, by the 60s people call it that, and it was to contrast it from grenich village. the east village was the rock n.' roll, hippy, the new thing, grenich village was the old jazz place to be. it begins around there. >> a marketing point?

>> it certainly was. certainly was, but it was a way for people to say, no, no, grenich village is over, it's the east village now. yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. >> i'm wondering why with all the mumford, and others standing up for the jefferson market building, fighting for it to be a library, why not stand up for great houses like the special one on 10th street between 5th and 6th because that -- that would have retained some of that culture oasis where they didn't have to leave because of high real estate; right? >> yeah, yeah, you know that building on west 10th street by 6th? it was the first, i think the first planned artist housing in america. i'm pretty sure, not positive of

that, but -- just east of 6th where the building called the priscilla is, the apartment building, and next to that is the nyu building or -- new school? that >> one block up. >> no, there's the modern banded box sort of a building. that's why the -- where it used to be. that's the new school. they were so busy fighting off highways planned to go through in both directions, they were going to go and just obliterate the village that they missed stuff, and i don't think they could have possibly covered everything. one of the things they missed was -- or were not focusing on enough in the 50s was private developers moving in and knocking stuff down and building new stuff. i think that's -- but once they finally fought that action is when they get the heart of the village land marked so you can't do that anymore. now, of course, that has the

other effect of then the price of real estate goes up there because, you know, so. there's an upside and downside to everything, i guess. >> how did you go about doing your research? you certainly researched. >> oh, boy, did i research. i read, you know, hundreds of books, articles -- i didn't realize all of all the books, but i read all the books listed in the bibliography and articles, and i interviewed a bunch of folks. this is not new to me. i thought about it and researched it, and i used to run new york press, the downtown newspaper, and i interviewed folks then. sadly, the people i interviewed in the book are not around anymore, but so it was, you know, it was a ton of work, but great work. i've done worse. [laughter] >> with so many -- with downtown culture going so mainstream and

with so many talented people, creative people doing everything from home on their computers, is -- two questions -- one, is there a necessity for that village, and, secondly, posers have existedded throughout history. is there an increase now in just people who are posing as people who are, in fact, the mainer press. >> yeah, no. i don't think there's more now. there were always a lot. going back into the -- before the civil war, the walt whitman era, there was arguments about that, and then it's gone along ever since. what happens, and there's a cycle that has happened over and over and over again is that artists and intellectuals and writers colonize some neighborhood that they can afford, instantly becomes hip, and then the fakes show up. they attract the media. they attract the real estate

interest and the businessmen, and the neighborhood prices those artists out. in new york and manhattan, there was another neighborhood you could move to, and that, i think is another problem now that there's nowhere else to move anywhere where you find cheap rent. the first part of the question was -- oh, about -- that's -- there's discussion about whether or not now in the interpret age or digital age when we are all twittering and tweeting and doing all that stuff all the time and doing, yeah, yeah, all right, and also being creative op there, all right, do you need a gee graphic? i'm old-fashioned guy, but i think the extraordinary amount of stuff that came from the place in the late 40s and 1950s, when they were all living together, sleeping together, drinking together, eating together, fighting together, and collaborating on all the work together, argues against the idea you do that, you know, if

you're here and the other is in south powell. i just don't know that you can -- i think there's a certain amount you have to literally rub elbows to affect work. i could be wrong. people think i'm an old fud fuddy-duddy, but that's me. >> until the 60s there was no place around the country equivalent to the village anywhere in the u.s.? >> there were some. >> i'm curious now where with reseeing in other parts of the country where you are just able to live is not an issue because you can live cheap and create. where are we seeing that? >> it's tough now, and, i mean, here, that's why people have moved out. jersey city is cheaper to be than in manhattan; right? >> very good question. i don't know -- i don't know the answer to that. i think it's a really good question. san fransisco has a fairly vibrant scene, but not cheap. san fransisco is expensive.

chicago, there's people in chicago, but that's not as cheap as it used to be. all cities go through the process now. they are all remaking themselves as tourist friendly, family friendly generic 21st century cities, nodes in the global, you know, the brave new world, and i think it's making it difficult to find places to be and do work. >> name a village today. >> i don't know the answer to that. the closest is bedsty and kids out in flatbush. as i say, jersey city, was hoboken, that got expensive, was williamsberg, but that was expensive. dumbo got expensive.

bushwick is getting too expensive and bedsty is too expensive. they'll be out in coney island, then to the sea and over. [laughter] is that it? are we done? oh, wait. >> i think your book clearly shows that culture flourishes in a place of nonconformity rather than conformity, and that the villages is beacon and example to the rest of the country, and i hope that your book teaches the rest of the country the value of nonconformity as a way to get some culture going. you know? it's not a question, but. >> paul foster, who was a play wright at the cafe chino and la mama says what i think is an interesting and wise thing. he says, you know it's only one

place at one time. it was in classical at pes, obviously, and it was in london, obviously, and then it was in paris in the 20s, and it was in grenich village for a long time, but he said, you know, like, once they leave, i have never seen it move back to the old neighborhood. who knows where it is now. i don't know. i've been asking people. some say, well, sort of berlin, brazil is having stuff going op, china's having stuff going op, which may be an argument because it's becoming more global and shouldn't worry about this, but i don't know. >> well, i -- one more question. >> i often wonder if great artists and writers could have flourishedded in another place than grenich village. like john savings and -- joan sloan and others could they have done what they did

someplace else? >> chicago, the chicago renaissance, they had their own scene going for a whim, and a lot of those people fed the village scene because they heard about how they should be in grenich village so they moved here from chicago. san fransisco had a scene going at various times, in the 50s and in the 60s, north beach in san fransisco had a lot going on. venice beach in l.a. had things going op. you know, there were types, but when you think about it, they were tiny specks of, you know, the vast american landscape, and that's why creative people fled to the places because it was kind of hard to be an artist anywhere else. >> well, i'd like to thank our speaker. >> thank you. [applause]

>> now from raleigh, booktv sat down to explore artificial limbs during and after the civil war. >> sort of to answer my own questions. i started my first job in the office of archives and history as a reference ark vies to find a project to work on, and there had. from the time i started a series of about five boxes, kind of down to the bottom of the shelf that said artificial lens collection. i pulled out the boxes, and they were basically arranged loosely alphabetical by surname. there were some things that were not, and i thought, well, this is great. you know, here are records arranged by people's names. they are confederate veteran, and the records started in 1866. the federal government had been

doing a similar program so it's not that we came up with this op our own. during the war, in fact, the federal government provided am by tees with artificial limbs. we were the first of the former confederate states to pass legislation to get a program for artificial limbs for veterans, and what happened after that is the stipulations of the resolution were the sheriffs in each coupe had to go out and count maimed veterans in the county. there were more arms lost than legs, but they decided that at the time the arms were not that useful so they were going to focus on the legs because the importance, the government's drive was to get people back to work, and they felt that getting people legs to walk on was more important than an arm that was not that useful. the focus, initially, was just

leg. the state chose the leg company, not necessarily the best leg out there. it was a fine leg, but another citizen in the state who had purchased a leg from the company wrote to the governor and said, well, there's a john t. ball from newburn who works for the company, and he wants to come home, and he'd be really willing to come and set up an office in raleigh and manufacture limbs here. by putting the book out, you know, a few of the limbs have surfaced. duncan hannah from red springs wrote in a letter. if you can't come to the archives to do your research, you write correspondents and say, i would like the confederate pension for my grandfather, robert alexander hannah, and i have his leg if anybody cares. mr. hannah did not have access to e-mail. i wrote him a letter and told him that i cared, and, you know,

i did not really know if he would be able to take pictures and e-mail it to me or anything like that, but a few weeks past, and i got an e-mail one day that said, the title of duncan hannah, and no message at all, and it was just a series of photographs taken in the feed store, so it was this leg, and all these feed bags, and you could see somebody's hand homing -- holding it at a variety of angles, and there was a picture with the bottom of the foot, and i saw the screw holes, and i knew how the patent worked, and i knew where the cables went, and i knew it was one of the pa tent leg. the stumps that people had were so ragged and painful that putting this big wooden lag on it to get around was often not desirable for them. they were hot, they hurt the

stumps. they came up with something at home or walk around with a couple crutches. the state paid for them. they had two options going into it. they could have purchased the patent and then purchased the kits, the woodblocks and everything for a little bit less. obviously, the most coast effective thing was what they did, and that was just having somebody from the factory come down and pay $75 if you thought the leg would work for you or say if you lost your leg from too far down in the leg and what we had commercially available would not work for you, you just take the money. the legs today versus the legs then, some of them are really high-tech. obviously, everybody has seen somebody walking down the street with a metal $6 million man-looking contraption that's high-tech and if you didn't know differentlyings you wouldn't

know they were amputee. they walk comfortably with the leg that might seem stiff, but offers very natural gait and comfort. it's lightweight. not everybody has access to a leg like that. when an amputation is done today, it's -- they are able to do with skin sewn together carefully, and really in the civil war, the surgeons didn't have a lot of time for reconstructive surgery, and the skin ragged, skin tucked under and bones close to the surface. it made it very hard for them to utilize artificial limbs. the phantom pain, the name of the book, has to do with the the pain of a missing leg or missing arm. it's universal. all amputees report sensing pain in an area that's been amputatedded. it just -- the people at the

amputee support group described it. it's -- you wake up in the middle of the night, and your leg hurts. it's not there, but it's excruciating. it makes -- it makes the recovery difficult, and, again, the state sort of had its own phantom pain. it was trying to fix these people and at the time, people thought that if you could get these injured veterans back to work, that it would ease this pain. the book's genesis was this list of every person who contacted the state related to having lost a limb or lost a use of a limb in the civil war. it's the names of the veterans, company and regimen, what county they were from, and everywhere you can find a document related to their correspondence with the state. ..

>> now on booktv cate lineberry former europe editor and staff writer for "national geographic" magazine recounts the emergency landing of a military transport plane carrying 26 american army and air force medics and flight nurses into nazi occupying albania in november of 1943. this is about an hour. [applause]