As a resident of Greenwich Village, my local park is Washington Square. I can’t account for what goes on there late at night. According to the media, there’s a riot going on after dark, with bottles being thrown at cops, brawls and even stabbings. There are those in the neighborhood who want to see a curfew in the park, as well as a skateboard ban and restrictions on how many people can be there. These Good Citizens are aiming at the one source of disturbance they can control: the young. But the atmosphere of frantic abandon is too widespread in the city to be controlled. Many people have emerged from lockdown with intense pent-up feelings, and challenges to the police make law enforcement a tricky task. Last week, a deranged man smashed the windows of my favorite diner and decked the 73-year-old cook. Hundreds of dirt bikes have roared up the avenue under my window at 1 a.m. Bursts of impromptu fireworks pierce the slats of my blinds, and I often hear cries of unleashed rage. In the wee hours, I don’t go out wearing flowers in my hair.
There’s a racial subtext to this issue, since the crowd in the Square includes many people of color, and they bring the culture of their neighborhoods, including music. Race and class have always been the flashpoint of disputes over urban turf, but in the streets of Greenwich Village the rules are lightly applied, even if the mixing doesn’t extend to the high-rent apartments. It’s no surprise that Washington Square is now a site of that diversity, since it has a storied history of free expression. The mood may be hard-edged after midnight, but at twilight, when the sunset is golden in the windows of innumerable buildings, it’s mellow yellow. I have seen no violence, but lots of casual toking and flirting—yes, there is plenty of cruising among people of all races, genders, sexualities, and hair colors that defy the human genome.
I head there on warm evenings, flashing on the fantasy that I am witnessing the arrival of a new summer of love. Gazing at the careening crowd, watching a pink-haired hottie or a twink announcing his vegetarianism on his t-shirt, there are moments when I’m lost in the lyrics of a hippie song that I hated back in 1967, the last time people spoke of such utopian things. “There’s a whole generation with a new explanation. People in motion. People in motion.”
Well, my generation was in motion once, but it ended up being a march toward comfort and wealth. Maybe it won’t work out that way again; there’s a chance that the current struggle for justice will lead to something less static. Am I rhapsodizing? You think? I’m a cultural journalist, and my profession isn’t known for its caution. Ten fans and a sociologist are enough to declare a trend. Still, something is happening in Washington Square. It’s inchoate, but it goes beyond the mere spectacle of hipsters partying at the behest of the Style section. Susan Sontag once defined a sensibility as a set of values that haven’t yet hardened into a style. That’s what I notice here. Think Whitman—the yawp, the body electric, the singing of self, but charged with skateboard twirls, wheely maneuvers, and pop-up demos that add depth to the vuvuzela din of loudspeakers from cars wrapped in flashing LED lights.
Who are these denizens of the Square? Students pale from months of nonstop gaming, dealers hawking their weedy wares, Bronx bros doing Downtown, climate activists sneaking hungry glances at a hot-dog stand, street people napping in a safe place. All of them are there, along with wannabe comics from the Latino belt of Queens, honing their routines around the fountain, as John Leguizamo once did. Artists show on the walkways; some of their work is faux Basquiat, some of it post-graffiti, but once in a while I see something worth buying. And there is constant music in every genre but polka. In the middle of it, the pianist who manages to lug his bulky instrument into the park plays an etude by Debussy. He apologizes for doing so poorly—he’s been out of practice for a year. “Don’t give me money,” he insists. How can you resist that pitch?
They don’t have a style in common. No two people dress alike. But that’s the point. Part of the mix is what you put together on your body: the ink, the sneakers, the cut. Everyone is wearing their own couture. It’s about making things that aren’t supposed to belong together fit into a unique whole. The youth attire of 1967 would look like uniformity here. But this mass-produced jumble is the signifier of a certain attitude toward creativity that seems very summer of love. It’s why, though I’m not about to sport platinum hair (or any hair), I feel welcome here.
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How did Washington Square become the Rialto of this scene? For one thing, many of the demos that took up so much energy this year ended up here. People wandered through the park in a fired-up state, and the impulsiveness of that mood lent itself to socializing. Face masks made the eyes seem full of feeling. Shit happened. Fashion followed. People dressed up to hang out here.
But that begs (or buggers) the question: why this square? Part of the answer has to do with an event that occurred in this place 60 years ago. “3000 BEATNIKS RIOT IN VILLAGE.” That was the headline in TheNew York Mirror on April 16, 1961. Bob Dylan was one of the protesters against the decision to ban singing in the Square, a move which would have dispersed a folk-music scene that had drawn young people from across the city. Many of these threats to public order were bridge-and-tunnel people like me, willing to ride the subway for an hour in order to strum a guitar (or in my case, huff into a kazoo). Those gatherings would become a pillar of rock music in the `60s. So there’s a well-earned mystique about the place, and now it hosts the latest version of this spirit. I call it woke bohemianism.
Woke because, like the youth movement of the ‘60s, it intersects with the struggle for racial justice. It’s far more inclusive and more demotic than the milieu I knew as a youth, but it draws from the same basic attitude. A bohemia, after all, is not just an enclave of artists auditioning for galleries. Under the pretensions, it’s a social setting where different castes and classes meet, a brazen violation of the separations and commodifications that make bourgeois life such a rancid brew. This tradition, which flourished in Greenwich Village beginning in the `20s, has been driven underground by waves of gentrification, glassine towers and spotlessly restored brownstones, shops with a perfect pair of Italian shoes in the window, restaurants that have never served a milk shake, massive dorms filled with NYU students who arrive every fall, some in limos—and in the remaining rent stabilized apartments, people like me. Amid the Euro-trash boutiques and nail salons, the bohemian sensibility has survived, if only as a potential. That tradition of sex and drugs, noise and politics; that melange of misfits persists in the image of Washington Square. It may be dormant, but it has never died, and, under the auspices of a generational crisis, I think it’s back. There are places like this in cities all across the nation, special parks and plazas with histories of protest. What happens here, in the media capital of America, could spread, much as folksinging did in the early 60s, drawing those—and there are millions—who think that hanging out in such a spot has something to do with freedom and possibility.
Last evening, I wandered lonely as a ganja cloud through the Square. A young man with peach-plump cheeks sized me up and started a conversation. There was nothing terribly original about it, but at least he didn’t say, “Come here often?”
I told him I was too stoned to engage. “Even better,” he replied.
I stroked his shoulder. “Make it right,” I said.
All photos taken by the author on his phone.