Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village as a Literary Hotbed

In the nineteenth century, Greenwich Village was already an established community with its own unique character. The political philosopher Thomas Paine, who moved there in 1802, began a trend of attracting creative and talented people to the area. New York University, which opened in the 1830s, drew more teachers, writers, and scientists, including the painter and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of bohemians began to congregate in the Village, where food and rent were fairly cheap. These counter-cultural progressives garnered their name from the French word for wandering gypsies who came from Bohemia; the term bohemian referred to eccentric types who disregarded conventional dress codes, sexual taboos, and work habits. The group was led by Henry Clapp, a notable journalist who founded The Saturday Press, a weekly newspaper that served as the voice of bohemia. The poet Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass was published in 1850, frequently visited the Village and moved among this crowd.

In 1856, the Tenth Street Studio was built in the Village; it housed such leading U.S. artists as William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, and Augustus SaintGaudens. In later years, Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, also resided at the Studio. Nearby lived Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial, and the painter Albert P. Ryder.

In the late nineteenth century, as New York was increasingly considered a world cultural capital, several other well-known figures were associated with Greenwich Village: John La Farge, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain. Stanford White designed the Village's Washington Arch, built in 1889. The novelist Edith Wharton wrote The House of Mirth while living on Washington Square in 1905.

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