June 29, 2003

Still Positively 4th Street

OME streets have all the luck.

They are teeming with historical milestones, social currents, architectural curiosities, cultural signatures. As you stroll them, faces, fashions and buildings change, and they become a prism to view the larger story of the surrounding city. Their cachet is such that eventually someone writes a song about them.

Fourth Street is one of those blessed streets. This is the street where the artist Edward Hopper had one of his first shows, where John Reed wrote his breathless account of the Russian Revolution, where the novelist Willa Cather met her beloved partner, Edith Lewis. The Golden Swan on Fourth Street was one of the bars transformed into Harry Hope's saloon in Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece "The Iceman Cometh."

It was on Fourth Street that Edward Albee wrote his first produced play, "The Zoo Story," where Bob Dylan had his first New York flat and Madonna one of hers, where Jack Kerouac hung out at the Riviera Cafe and where Bruce Springsteen thrilled audiences before he was the Boss.

Just look at the landmarks Fourth Street passes as it meanders on its two-mile journey across Manhattan island: Sheridan Square, Provincetown Playhouse, Washington Square Park, Judson Memorial Baptist Church, New York University, the La Mama Experimental Theater Club.

Fourth Street rekindles memories of entire eras - the Jewish ghettos and sweatshops of the Lower East Side, the Beat Generation (Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg met in a lesbian bar on Fourth Street), the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the hazy reign of the East Village flower children, the uprising at the Stonewall Inn, just off Fourth, that ignited the gay rights revolution.

"It's an amazing street," says Judith Stonehill, the author of "Greenwich Village: A Guide to America's Legendary Left Bank'' (Universe Publishing, 2002). "What I like is the way generations overlap in a beguiling way.''

The street, as a conceit, gained much of its luster in the mid-60's when Dylan wrote, "Positively 4th Street," an angry farewell blast at the old Village folk scene. Fourth Street was the pumping heart of that scene in the days before folk started turning syrupy and opened itself to a satire like the recent film "A Mighty Wind."

People who came to the Village from places like Minnesota (Dylan) and California (Joan Baez) found themselves in a village of coffeehouses, bookshops and cheap railroad flats, a place that tolerated sexual freedom, radical politics, offbeat philosophies and mavericks with no philosophy at all. Washington Square Park was its commons, and on weekends the fountain was bordered by folk singers, or folk singers manqué.

A major center of the folk scene was Allan Block's Sandal Shop at 171 West Fourth Street. Block was a self-taught leather worker who had learned the country fiddle growing up in Wisconsin, and the combined smell of leather and glue and the sound of the fiddle was elixir to young people revolting against "regimented commercialism,'' in the words of David Hajdu, the author of "Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariņa and Richard Fariņa.'' Long-haired high school girls from middle-class homes in the Bronx and Washington Heights headed to Block's shop to buy sandals whose straps wrapped around their calves and gave them the look of Roman peasants.

Today Block's has been replaced by Original Leather, a retail shop that sells leather jackets and pants to the likes of Susan Sarandon and Sheryl Crow. This section of Fourth Street is dominated by tattoo parlors and other tawdry shops, and, longtime merchants say, drug sellers who have been kicked out of Washington Square sometimes hang out on the street.

Next door, one remnant of the folk scene remains: the Music Inn. The pocket-sized store, a half-century old, has accumulated hundreds of African drums, gourds, sitars, mandolins and fiddles that dangle from the walls and ceiling, plus thousands of folk recordings, on vinyl. Dylan, John Lennon and John Sebastian were among those who stopped by to listen to some of the arcane music that eventually influenced their work. "I can't tell you how many people got to hear music they never heard before," said Jeff Slatnick, a onetime guitarist who helps the owner, Jerry Halpern, run the store.

But the locus of the avant-garde long ago shifted to the East Village, with the West Village more a tourist haven for those who want to see what the old reputation was all about. (A group of folk singers that includes Judy Collins and Pete Seeger is trying to find space for a permanent National Folk Music Museum somewhere in the Village.)

"There's nothing happening here,'' Mr. Slatnick said, "except the Music Inn."

Once, Bohemians and Low Rents

One way to look at Fourth Street is as a highway that crosses countries so different, a passport should be required for each. Heading west toward Seventh Avenue, the honky-tonk Village where the folk music shrines stood suddenly gives way just past Jones Street to the more decorous Village of Willa Cather and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Sheridan Square, where Fourth Street crosses Seventh Avenue, has been gussied up by two well-tended gardens. The Stonewall battle is marked by George Segal's sculpture "Gay Liberation." But the only coffeehouse in sight is a Starbucks.

West of Seventh Avenue, the street becomes almost genteel, lined with handsome Greek Revival and Federal town houses and gnarled shade trees. On a quiet morning, bird song can be heard. The mood is so neighborly, a woman out in a housecoat to do her laundry raises no eyebrows.

It has been decades since Bohemians could afford the rents here, but once they were the norm. Among them was Edward Albee, who in the mid-50's moved to 238 West Fourth. He supported himself as a messenger for Western Union and wrote "The Zoo Story'' in the kitchen of his flat, which he shared with three composer friends. "That had the only table, and I had liberated a typewriter from the Western Union Company,'' Mr. Albee recalled. "One day I decided to write a play. That was in 1958. It took me about two or three weeks, and I remember typing it in that kitchen.''

Another facet of the street's history are the restaurants, institutions like the Beatrice Inn, just off the corner of 12th Street, and Fedora, at No. 239 West. Fedora, with its neon sign on a lonely street suggesting a Hopper painting, has been at the same spot for 51 years, and has been known for much of its life as a haven for gay men. Fedora Dorato, the original owner, still gets calls from regulars who call her Mom and ask her to cook a favorite dish. "I have my old clientele, no tourists," said Mrs. Dorato, 82. "Now they're 80, but they still eat here.''

The West Village has lost many of its bookshops, but among the survivors are Bookleaves at 304 West Fourth Street, near Bank Street. Stocked with out-of-print books, it is a browser's nirvana. People bring in dusty boxes, and the owner, Arthur Farrier, sorts them.

"I have the smallest inventory in the Western world," said Mr. Farrier, who spent 20 years driving a cab before he got tired of complaining about disappearing bookshops and opened one of his own. "The odds against finding a book here are tremendous."

Mr. Farrier is in danger of becoming a Village character. He affects a beret over a mane of white hair - he calls it a poor man's toupee - and he is a mine of Greenwich Village lore. Actually, Mr. Farrier is one of the few people who know why Fourth Street crosses 10th, 11th and 12th Streets. West of Avenue of the Americas, the street curves northwest; that segment was once known as Asylum Street because an orphanage was located on it. After the orphanage was torn down in 1833, the street name was changed to Fourth - at the price of geographical logic.

Genius and La Mama

South of Washington Square Park, Fourth Street briefly changes its name to Washington Square South. At No. 61 was the so-called House of Genius, whose residents at various times included Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. Almost next door stood a red-brick row house where O'Neill carried on an affair with Louise Bryant while John Reed - her lover and his friend - was undergoing surgery.

Today, the once rakish and radical character of these blocks is more ambiguous and dominated by New York University, which owns about 60 buildings in the area. One it doesn't is Judson Memorial Baptist Church. The building, built in 1888 from a Stanford White design, is significant architecturally, but what put it on the historical map is its social activism and cultural experimentation. It provided draft counseling during the Vietnam era and gave birth to the groundbreaking Judson Dance Theater.

This part of Fourth Street was also home to Gerde's Folk City, a beer and pasta house started by a Calabrese-accented immigrant named Mike Porco who began by presenting a few unknowns like Judy Collins. One night in 1961 a young émigré from Minnesota came in and asked to play. Bob Dylan eventually got a job at Gerde's for $90 a week.

The original Gerde's moved to Third Street in 1970 and closed in the late 80's. Over the ghost of its original site stands Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the seminary for Reform Judaism. But another music factory is a few steps away. The Bottom Line opened on Feb. 12, 1974, with a jam session that featured Dr. John and Stevie Wonder on stage and Mick Jagger and Carly Simon in the audience. Jerry Garcia played there for three months, and Bruce Springsteen headlined the next year.

"For music lovers, this is a holy ground," said co-owner Allan Pepper, a youthful-looking 60-year-old who resembles a scholar more than an impresario. "I cannot tell you how many people come up to me and say, 'I brought my wife here on our first date, and this is our 20-year-old daughter.' " Heading east, not much is left of the Beats, the Expressionists or the Flower Children. But a few relics remain. Phebe's, a restaurant at East Fourth Street that was popular in the 1970's with avant-gardists like Andy Warhol and later a hangout for the punk crowd, has been reborn as the more upscale Fuel at Phebe's. At No. 58 East there is a living, breathing food co-op that sells organic food.

Aficionados of early 19th-century history are familiar with the Old Merchant's House at No. 29 East, a mint-condition house built in 1831 by a well-to-do hatter turned real estate speculator who wanted to live "uptown.'' No. 124 East houses another Fourth Street original. It is called Social Tees, and it custom-prints T-shirts for seemingly thousands of school fund-raisers. But what Robert Shapiro, the owner, is passionate about is the store's other functions. He restores forsaken bicycles for resale, and he takes in and finds homes for abandoned animals, not just dogs and cats but also pythons, bearded dragons and cockatoos.

Mr. Shapiro, 46, grew up in Howard Beach, Queens, the son of a paint store worker, and he remembers coming to the Village, seeing "all the pretty girls, dressing sexier, less conservative," and visiting friends whose parents were artists and professionals. "Their homes were incredible compared to mine,'' he said. "They were like museums."

The block just east of the Bowery has long been a lively district of small theaters, and its doyenne is Ellen Stewart, founder of La Mama, which has been at 74A East Fourth Street since 1969. Ms. Stewart, who has presented works by Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson, lives in an apartment at the top of the playhouse that is a valentine to nonconformist clutter - oak dressers, bird cages, old sewing machines, typewriters, telephones and paintings, many of her.

Ms. Stewart tells a classic Fourth Street tale of fighting city fathers who tried to shut her theater during its early years, and of winning the patronage of bluebloods beguiled by her spunk. "We were in the poor Village," she said. "It was the epitome of the flower power days. You would see a limousine with a chauffeur pull up and see the most dirty, unkempt person come out. The parents were in the limousine."

Within a few years, the block became a refuge for drug users. "It was not flower power," she said. "It had transcended into a terrible scene. On this side of the Bowery were alcoholics sleeping in the street. All you did was turn the corner on Fourth Street and it was drugs."

Just across the street is the New York Theater Workshop, where the rock musical "Rent'' had its premiere in 1996. The AIDS, drugs and seediness onstage mirrors that of the streets just outside.

Poverty, and a Little Buzz

The poorer blocks east of Second Avenue don't have the allure of the flourishing blocks to the west, but there is still a wealth of local history. In recent years, artists have inhabited the Fourth Street tenements their grandparents forsook as shabby. But even those are becoming pricey, and many cutting-edge artists and those who like to dwell among them have headed closer to Delancey Street to the south or across the bridge to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Some have actually lived or worked in all three spots, staying just ahead of the fatal buzz.

"I was paying $400 for a three-bedroom on East Fourth Street between A and B, and I moved out because the rent went up $50," said Lucian Redwood, an owner of the Sardine Can, an offbeat restaurant in Williamsburg "That was too much, so I moved to Clinton Street, which is now a hotbed."

On the Fourth Street of the Lower East Side, substantial squalor still exists, mingling with the engagingly raffish. A hundred years ago, Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants crowded out of the ghetto below Houston Street moved up here, and telling artifacts of that era remain. One of a half dozen lovingly tended community gardens that grew over the rubble of demolished tenements bears a marker for a long-vanished synagogue: B'nai Israel Anshei Baranov.

The population is still poor or proletarian, but for decades it has been mostly Latino. Where Fourth Street runs out at Avenue D, there stands a housing project named after Lillian Wald, the iron-willed nurse who brought medical care to the Lower East Side poor. More than 75 percent of the 1,700 families are Hispanic and 18 percent are black. The average income is $15,400.

Given the changes in the East Village, that project may one day be an island in a sea of relative prosperity. "Every neighborhood that gets famous gets commercialized,'' said Mr. Shapiro of Social Tees. "It's the nature of capitalism. Fourth Street has never been better.''