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interesting, interesting person, edna st. vincent, a typical woman. the new women of the greenwich village of the 1910s and 20s. now north of washington square where the houses were, the more expensive living was, this is on the right mable dodge. she was married to a dentist in buffalo. she didn't find that too exciting so she came down to new york. she was a wealthy woman. she lived at 9th and 5th. she had her own -- she had her own salon. you know, she had her own regular get together, one of the first in the 20th century. she brought together all kinds of writers, actors. she even had one of the black writers from harlem, claude mccain used to come down here, which is interesting because in all the reading i do, you don't hear about too many blacks from harlem.

the harlem renaissance was already starting in the early 1910s, but there wasn't too much mixing as far as i can see. she really -- she's kind of interesting that she invited claude down there. what she was good at, we're not sure, but she certainly looked good posing, and that she did very well, and by 1915, she had it with the village and she went off to new mexico. i think she went to dallas or santa fe, i can't remember which. she was off somewhere else. talk about north of washington square and the wealthy bohemian, the women bohemians who lived north of the square. mable donge lived north of the square and there is gertrude. no facebook, no twitter, so what she did in the village stayed in the village, and she got herself

an old stable on a stable alley, mcdougal alley and turned it into an artist's loft. she got the idea from another artist. she was a sculptor, and a great collector of modern art. she creates her artist studio in a stable. 20 years later she's built up an incredible collection of modern art. she offered it to the metropolitan museum of art and they said are you crazy? you think we want that garbage. she opens the whitney museum. how interesting, so the whitney has now left their upper east side home. who is in the whitney museum, but the metropolitan museum, it's the met broier now. this is the lady that started all of that. here she is in various -- there she is at her work desk a few

years later in front of an interesting screen. but i have no idea who did it. you could guess but i have no idea. but she is going to create the whitney museum. her artist studio was down here. this is mcdougal alley, and actually, we are looking east because if we were looking down the mcdougal alley today, it's still there today. the stables on this side of the alley would be for washington square north houses. the stables on this side of the alley would be for 8th street houses. so she -- now, it was an artist -- i don't remember his name, back in 1900, 1899 who was the first to turn one of these stables into an artist's studio. across the way for a number of years was a azama na gucci. he was there until it got too

small and moved to long island city. she's going to breakthrough to the house on 8th street, which that stable was built for. here they are constructing what will be the new whitney museum, and here it is opening up in 1930s. today it's the studio building, it's the studio art school, and it's a lovely place. and one of the last places in greenwich village really devoted to the making of art. they're lovely people, i wish them the best with the rising real estate values, who knows how long they'll be there, but i really do wish them the best, a wonderful staff of people. and this is the entrance still that looks like that today if you walked in off of 8th, you would still see that today. here is the original whitney. i love it, bare bones, simple brick, you know, it's just what it was. really different from what marcell broyer gave them in the 1960s. the studio school would look

like this, of course you don't have the sculptures. in back of the studio school is the stable that gertrude whitney turned into an artist's studio. this is that stable. in 1971 she hired a fellow by the name of robert winthrop chanler. a wild and crazy guy. he came from one of those may flower families. if he was on the may flower he probably would have sunk it, but he would plaster enjes sew. he redid her fireplace and chimney and her ceiling. it was all done in poly chrome. today the studio building, the studio school is trying to raise the money, they don't have a lot of money, they're trying to raise the money to restore this room. the day they restore it is going to be something fabulous to walk

into. if you look closely at the fireplace and chimney, you'll notice the flames rising upment look closely at the flames and you will see devils, and you will see witches, and you will see god knows what. a few more drinks and i don't know what else you may see. and if you get to the ceiling, here's the chimney rising up through the ceiling there is a smirking sun at the far left of the ceiling and the rays of sun cut through the clouds. in among the clouds, here's just one view. i don't know if you can see this too well. there's a stingray. now, in front of the stingray looks like a small shark. okay. look what's holding onto the stingray is a nude man who looks like he's going through the frames of hell. there is a porpoise probably. there is another nude, a nude male look looking like he's going through the fires of hell. serpent. i mean, you could lie on the

floor there at a party and look at the ceiling and you could trip probably. >> the day they restore this it's going to be an amazing day. they think they're all crazy, but really it just shows you, i mean, craziness comes with every generation. it just has a different look to it. now all of that is going to change with the coming of the new subway line, the original subway on the left, it bypassed greenwich village. the west side line was extended from times square right through the middle of the village under 7th avenue, and this isolation that you see is going to disappear with the coming of the -- of the subway, and the trial, the three trials of sedition for these guys, floyd dell and max eastman, 1917,

remember, they were against the war, and that's when we got into the war. well, the government never convicted them. instead, the government made them the most famous people in the united states and this was the 16th century, most people would say burn them at the stake. but this was the 20th century so most people said i'm going to get myself a bus ticket, and i'm going to go to greenwich village because i want to see this bohemian lifestyle. maybe some of it will rub off. suddenly greenwich village was on the map. everybody in america wanted to get on the bus or train, come to new york, forget the metropolitan opera, forget the metropolitan museum. they wanted to come down and see greenwich village. greenwich village was on the tourist map. it immediately became a tourist trap. he would hire friends, put them in a paint covered smock, put them in some crummy apartment or some crummy studio, throw

finished paintings around, throw a lot of paint around and bring in tourists from midtown or from out of town, and this was an artist's tour of greenwich village. have we heard this? we go to williamsburg, you'd get the same thing for sure. and here's a 1924 map. there were maps all over the place. i'm going to show you the real greenwich village. doesn't this sound like 2016? i'm going to give you the real scandal. i'm going to tell you the real story. there's washington square. now, remember, when it was redubbed greenwich village, suddenly the whole area is greenwich village. 6th avenue was no longer a dmz zone. mcdougal street became the main street. you had those tee shots run by gays, you had polys. when i came along in the 1950s and '60s it was the folky street. this is where we went to the see

bob dylan when he was in new york, peter paul and mary, joan baez, cafe -- anyway, we saw them all on mcdougal street. so you see even in the 1920s, mcdougal street was the heart of the commercial part of greenwich village. there was a second kind of sub center, and that was christopher street, and that's because of the subway. that became a second center, and that became identified during the 20th century with the gays and of course that's where the stonewall is going to be built in the 1960s, and you went down to the village to see quirky bookstores, choch ka shops, and you went down, and you would get a guide. and of course the guide would say i know the secrets of greenwich village, and i'm going

to show you. that you can see from the women's dresses it was early 1920s or the late 1910s. and the little cafes on mcdougal got more and more touristy. they all had to have a theme. this is down the rabbit hole, and she's wearing a smocky dress. they all had to be in the basement. you couldn't be on the parlor floor. you had to be in the basement and there she is, and of course all the furniture is old furniture found in the street. the crockery is all mismatched purposely so. here is another place. i love it, the pirate's den. he's all dressed up. i love this guy. look at him. i mean, he's not too interested in her, i can tell you that. he's probably looking for another pirate. so that was the great thing about greenwich village. you know, you found your own kind. you found who you wanted to find, and that's why people loved greenwich village. it's going to change a lot.

you'll see what happens in a moment. everybody had their favorite place. brick wall, exposed brick wall, halloween decorations hanging from the ceiling. again, no table cloths, mismatched crockery. that was the whole -- that was the schtick of going to a greenwich village dive, you know, a little hangout, a little eating place. uptown it was all table cloths, red velvet on the walls, the waiters are all in tuxedos. not down in the village. in his tie and jacket, his three piece suit, they're letting it hang out in the village. and oh, the drag balls at webster hall. everybody thinks it's such a new thing. in 1913, there was a patterson strike, the famous labor strike over in patterson, new jersey. the greenwich village people, one of the few instances they

really got together for a political purpose, and what did they do? they had a drag ball. they hired webster hall. the kids go there for midnight shows that start at 1:00 a.m., when you're young who cares. and it was so popular, the 1913 ball, that they started having them all the time, and the drag balls at webster hall were famous. maybe i should say infamous. they sometimes had two of them a week all through the 1920s. i think it only was the depression that finally killed them off. you think, oh, you know, we're so clever today with transsexuals and whatever we have today. no, they had it all back then and let it close out until the 1930s closed it down. the result was the village became popular. don't we know the story? the village becomes popular. developers go in. they gut these places and they turn them into places for middle class people from uptown who want to be hip? does this not sound like williamsburg or bush wick today?

it's the same thing. by the 1920s, the village has become bush wau. the days of the bohemians seem to be over. the west side of washington square becomes luxury apartments, eleanor roosevelt, i think that was the building she lived in. i'm pretty sure, but it's a sign that the village has become gentrified. you still had the whitney museum on 8th street and the new school for social research which built its headquarters. i just went by it, that's my -- i'm an alumnus actually of the new school for social research. david, a very village touched by doing the industrial look. this became very popular. this is not at all 1920s, this is 1930s, that industrial look. here it is on a photograph on the right. you know that tishman theater, it's a wonderful theater.

he does it as part of the new school. it's still in operation. i just walked past it a few weeks ago. it's a wonderful theater, very much german expressionistic, the stage juts out into the audience. it kind of reminds you perhaps of radio city music hall, which is three years later and 6,000 seats. this is only 300, and by the way, there's the lobby. joseph irvin 12th street is on the left. the theater's on the right. that's not much of a lobby but he knew what to do with it. and the new school amazingly, had two, not one, two mural cycles. where in new york do you get mural cycles? you get them in italy maybe, you get them in france, you don't get them in new york. you get slush funds in new york. you get financiers in new york. very, very different ar tirss to do these. this is kansas city.

this is thomas heart benton. he does america today meaning 1928, 1929 when he went across america and sketched it. by the way, he was a very macho guy from kansas. very much like an ernest hemingway, very hung up on being mr. macho, later in life became rather right wing. it's interesting in this visual essay of america in the 1920s, there's some really kind of far out images that were quite controversial with the right wing crowd. the way he sketched the women, the way he sketched the dancers, the workers. for years this was orphaned. the new school sold it and it was orphaned. it's a whole long story. luckily in the last few years the met museum bought it. today it has its own room at the met broier and and it finally can be appreciated, thomas hart benton 1931 for the new school. he is hired along with jose

clemente o'roscoe. he was a communist mexican painter and he is painting social justice in the world. he painted it in a room that it was used as an eating room, like a cafeteria, some kind of dining room. today it's used as a classroom. he did it in frisco. benton's work is america. this is about the world. benton was mr. right wing, mr. macho, and orasco was a communist. by the way, it's too bad you really can't see these because, you know, security problems today, but it's a wonderful, wonderful, it totally enwraps you. it runs around the whole room, and the fresco. where in new york do you get fresco unless you go into the museums? i have to explain to design students what fresco is. they're american kids, they don't know what a fresco is. an italian kid knows what fresco is. american kids don't, we're yankees, we're puritans, we don't do this kind of thing.

communists do this kind of thing. there he is, jose clemente orosco. by the way, when he's doing this work, a fellow communist, a fellow mexican communist painter is doing the mural at rock center that was destroyed. rivera got his revenge, went back to mexico city and he painted this at the university in mexico city, and that's the rockefeller center mural slightly changed. by the way, there's lenin as he was in the original. i can't really find it, but somewhere in there, de rivera painted rockefeller as a syphilis germ. i mean, he really got back at rockefeller. rockefeller didn't deserve that. if you ever go to mexico city, you might be interested -- the mural of work in mexico city is wonderful. it's just absolutely wonderful to take a look at.

it gives you an idea of the tensions of that decade. a very difficult decade, the 1930s, the depression, fascism, miserable politics. really a grim decade. isn't it ironic that in that decade, that's when the village got its mojo back. and this is when in the late 1930s the village vanguard opens up. actually, i was fascinated when we did an interview of the village vanguard. i never realized that it was founded for poetry reading. i always know the village vanguard as a jazz club. as a teenager it was one of my favorite jazz clubs. when i was a teenager nobody carded you in new york. that's why all the kids from jersey came to new york and threw up on the sidewalk because, you know, you could do that. but the village vanguard, there's the owner on the left. he died in the 1980s, his wife

took over. on the lower right in the late 1940s, the vanguard was the scene for the weavers who started the whole folk trend, the whole folk singing trend of the 1950s and '60s. they were caught up in the anticommunist hearings, so they had to disband, but they really are -- they're the basis of peter, paul, and mary, bob dylan, all the different folkies of the 1950s and '60s. they really started it. they also had comedy. judy holiday, one of the great comediennes who died young in the 1950s. lane bernstein who later became famous for his musical talents. they did some great shows. all of this began at the village vanguard, and what about this club in the ground floor of this

building off sheraton square in 1938, barney josephson, a shoe salesman opens up cafe society. cafe society was the first integrated nightclub outside of harlem. the harlem nightclubs were segregated but not all of them, but the first integrated club outside of harlem was cafe society. barney josephson used to go to jazz at the cotton club, and he couldn't understand why in harlem the blacks had to sit in back and behind piers and columns and couldn't see anything. he said i'm going to open a club where anybody can come, and they did. on the upper left is billie holiday at the cafe society. there's barney josephson himself. he also is going to be caught up in the hearings. his brother was a communist. the club had to close down by the late 1940s. a record made from the cotton club, one of the cotton club -- not cotton club, cafe society jam sessions and some of you may

remember when he had the cookery, 8th street and university. it's now been a barbecue place for years, and he brought back alberta hunter. i was so lucky i saw her about six times. i figured she was in her 80s better see her a few times. she was wonderful. she was from the old school, and you just don't have that kind of singing anymore. i'm just sorry, you just don't have it anymore. we were so lucky to have her, bonnie josephson brought her back. i don't know where this is, actually, but the reason i put it in, i think greenwich village is not getting enough credit for integrating new york city. i was a kid in the 1940s and '50s. i grew up in white, new york. white -- you didn't hang out with black people. it was very simple. you just didn't. well, i was a teenager, we'd go down to mcdougal street and hang

out in the jazz clubs and we'd go to the folk clubs. it was all integrated and it was the first time in my life i socialized with black people. i had no problem with it. it was a done deal, and then after that was the civil rights movement, screaming, you know, alabama, montgomery and all that, and i said what is their problem. you know, they don't have greenwich village in their lives. that's the problem. so you really -- i don't think we give enough credit to greenwich village for integrating new york. in this period if you went to the latin quarter, you probably had an all white audience. when i was in my 30s i was talking to a black guy who grew up in harlem, he told me what he was taught as a kid growing up black in harlem in the 1950s, the rule was no blacks south of 110th street after dark unless you had a job. ask any black person in that period, and they'll tell you, that is the way the world worked.

greenwich village integrated us. i really thank them for it. it was in the 1940s and '50s, you get a whole series of club. ironically run by jews and italians, and what did they showcase? gays and blacks. here we are today in a whole different world. i saw barbra streisand, i went down the stairs. i thought i was going into hell. and then she came out. i looked at her, i said to my friend are you sure about this? she had all the used clothing. nobody wore used clothing those days, and she had a jewish nose she wouldn't fix. and i thought i don't know about this. and then she opened up and sang. can you imagine hearing that voice in such a small venue. oh, my goodness. it was just extraordinary. i saw all these guys, ritchie valens, bob dylan, peter, paul, and mary, there's barbra

streisand, i saw all of them. you could show up the at the venue, ten minutes before the show, put down your money, get a ticket and walk in. now six months before the event you have to go at midnight online and by five seconds after midnight, every ticket is taken. who needs that, i'd rather stay home and watch cable television to tell you the truth. so of course the other pioneer in the village, of course, was the gay scene. this is christopher street, right near the christopher street station of the irt, the one two, three lines. opens up in the late 1960s, a whole different kind of gay place than before. the windows were not boarded up. the windows were totally open. you could see inside. the people who went there and they were every type of person you could imagine. they didn't care who knew they were gay. it was the late '60s and it's one of the reasons why in june of 1968 these guys fought back when the cops came in and raided the joint. they would regularly raid them.

they fought back. they could not possibly imagine one day there would be gay marriage in america. i can tell you in 1968, in the 1970s by the way, along with the gay scene in the village, i was so lucky, charles ludlum, he died of aids in the 1980s, but in the 1970s in the same spot that cafe society was located in the 1930s, charles ludlum had the theater of the ridiculous, and he was brilliant and funny, hysterical. we were on the floor laughing like crazy. oh, we had wonderful times at his theater down on chairton square, and of course who would know in june of 1969 that the gay movement would achieve what it achieved today. i end up with this scene from 1961, 1960, maybe '61. we know what she's doing, but i love this one on the left. this is what we used to call a coed. you don't hear that name

anymore. we used to call that a coed. she's now a woman, a young woman, and she's dressed like a sorority girl but with those sun glasses and that attitude she's a hip chick. inside she's a hip chick, and why is she a hip chick and sitting there in washington square in the early 1960s, because a few generations earlier these people on the upper right gathered together on mcdougal street at polly's and basically they created the first of america's bohemian greenwich village. thanks very much. [ applause ] weeknights this month we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. tonight american university professor daniel drysbach explores the bible's constitution to the american

constitutional and judicial system, including their impact on due process and the separation of powers. the talk is the start of a night long slate of programs hosted by the museum of the bible in washington, d.c. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern, and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. there are hundreds of statues, paintings and sculptures throughout the u.s. capitol, and up next on american history tv, penn state university history professor matthew restall talks about the art and architecture at the u.s. capitol including the statue of freedom on top of the capitol dome. other topics include how christopher columbus, native americans and females are depicted. mr. restall has served as a fellow of the u.s. capitol historical society. welcome to the lunchtime lecture series. i