Ghosts of Greenwich Village: Minetta Tavern

MINETTA TAVERN (113 MacDougal Street, corner of Minetta Lane).

The Minetta Tavern opened in the late 1930s and was famous as a bohemian hangout after World War II. The writer Anatole Broyard used to hang out there, trolling for women. The first-wave Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline drew the caricatures that still line the wall. Joe Gould, the famed semi-homeless bohemian, “who was allegedly writing his monumental “Oral History of the World” was paid by the management in spaghetti and meatballs to be an “actual live bohemian” for tourists to gawk at while he’d sit and write.

In 1945, a rebellious 15-year-old from the Irish enclave in the Bronx named Brigid Murnaghan, wandered into the Minetta, with a school friend, looking for the bohemian life. “I could have been taken to an opium den, for all I knew,” said Murnaghan in an interview in 2009. A friendly drinker at the Minetta told the girls that they should go to the San Remo, a more intellectual bar down the street.



In the 1940s, the Minetta was known for its house special, the manicotti, which was 75 cents a plate. A few years ago, the famed restaurateur Keith McNally took over the Minetta and turned it into a high-end bistro, where diners routinely spend $150 per person.

"The Making of “The Last Bohemians” by Dylan Foley

In 1997, I was working as a freelance writer in New York City and looking for good stories. An acquaintance was completing a documentary on Tobias Schneebaum, a painter and writer who had lived with a cannibal tribe in the Amazon jungle in the 1950s. I set up an interview.

I went to Tobias’ apartment at Westbeth, the old Bell Labs building on the Hudson River that had been converted to artists’ housing in the late 1960s. The apartment was an explosion of hanging plants and carved shields from the 25 years Tobias had lived among the ex-headhunting Asmat tribes of New Guinea, as well as three shelves of beaded human skulls that were gifts from his Asmat blood brothers. Tobias was in his late seventies then, a shy and genial man who was more reminiscent of a retired city college professor than a sexual anthropologist who had slept his way from Afghanistan to Malaysia and Burma, writing about homoerotic sexual practices in dozens of countries.

I overcame Tobias’ wariness by bringing him pastries and tea. We became friends and Tobias introduced me to Edward Field, a well-respected poet who also lived in Westbeth. Edward shared an apartment with his partner of 42 years, Neil Derrick, who was a pornographic novel writer until he went blind in 1970. I met Tobias, Edward and Neil for lunch twice a year and they regaled me with stories from the 1950s, including tales of their friend Floriano Vecchi, who founded the avant garde Tiber Press and published monographs which paired the paintings of Grace Hartigan with the poems of Frank O’Hara. Then there was the relicmaker Barton Benes, who collected celebrity garbage, like a drinking straw used by the Presidential concubine Monica Lewinsky, and made them into relics. The stories were brilliant and the social networks extensive. Edward had dated O’Hara and Tobias had been friends with Norman Mailer and the novelist Vance Bourjaily, and had mentored some members of the younger generation of artists, including the fiction writer Allan Gurganus and the painter Melissa Meyer.

In 2005, Edward told me that he was publishing his literary memoir, “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag.” We decided to produce a photography-and-text show of old bohemians who emerged in New York City and Greenwich Village during the 1940s and 1950s. We developed a list of exceptional people, which included Judith Malina, the founder of the Living Theatre; Karl Bissinger, a famed fashion photographer who gave up his career to become the heart and soul of the resistance to the Vietnam War at the War Resisters’ League, and Dudley Williams, a founding member of Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre’s first standing company, and who danced with the company for 42 years. I interviewed Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, a former nude model and an editor at the controversial (and now defunct) Provincetown Review, who slept her way through the Cedar Tavern and Provincetown, and met Rosetta Reitz, who ran an influential bookstore in Greenwich Village where novelists Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison used to hang out.

Instrumental to the success of the exhibit was the Westbeth Gallery director Jack Dowling, who introduced me to several exceptional artists at Westbeth, taught me how to hang a show and resolved several crises on the opening day of the exhibit.

“The Last Bohemians” exhibit in January 2006 was a great success. After the packed opening, the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Daily News all ran features on the event.

In doing research on the book project, I started noticing historical trends among the artists and writers, as well as important meeting places, like the White Horse Tavern, the San Remo and the Cedar Tavern. Digging around, I found that many important literary figures and painters in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s hung out at these three important bars, as well as a host of smaller cafes and saloons. By going through obscure memoirs and letters and conducting interviews with survivors of the period, a picture of the chaotic postwar cultural and sexual revolutions emerged.

Beats like Ginsberg and Kerouac started their climb to fame while they were drinking at the San Remo in the late 1940s. Dylan Thomas finished his downward spiral at the White Horse, a disintegration observed by a young novelist named David Markson. In 1959, the photographer Robert Frank and the artist Alfred Leslie pulled in the now-famous Ginsberg and Kerouac, and the poet Gregory Corso from the Cedar Tavern to make their film "Pull My Daisy." Frank O’Hara drank at the Cedar almost every night, and collaborated with or posed for such artists as Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers.

My book proposal came together when I framed the book as a biography of the bars of Greenwich Village in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I have found incredible stories through the mostly forgotten characters like Jay Landesman, who first published the Beats in the long-defunct journal Neurotica. Harriet Sohmers Zwerling enlightened me on the sexual environment at the San Remo and the Cedar. David Markson told me about his friends Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac at the White Horse. From the bars to the wild afterparties and the “art happenings” in the galleries of East 10th Street, the groundwork was laid in the Village for the American political and social upheaval that took place in the 1960s.

Along the way, I have had some thrilling moments, like meeting the actor and producer George Bartenieff, and having him regale me with tales of Judson Poets Theatre, which tried to replace the stodgy, old theater world with an avant garde hybrid of dance, poetry and acting. I was almost held hostage by an 80-year-old bedridden singer-songwriter during a photoshoot, for she was desperate for the company. Some moments were tragic, like the great bohemian figures I missed. I tried hard to interview the publisher Floriano Vecchi. He canceled our interview due to severe back pain, then died of a heart attack several days later. My friend Tobias died at the beginning of “The Last Bohemians” project in 2005.

The fascinating stories I have found of the young writers, artists, hustlers and thugs who drank at the San Remo, the Cedar Tavern and other bars will make up this book. “The Last Bohemians” will be a popular history of art, literature, drinking and sex after World War II, and the cultural explosion in Greenwich Village that has influenced American culture for the past five decades.

GEORGE BARTENIEFF, ACTOR AND PRODUCER, 75

George Bartenieff fled Nazi Germany with his dancer parents in 1939. A classically trained Shakespearean actor, Bartenieff joined the Judson Poets Theater in 1962 and founded the Theater for the New City, which got it’s start in Westbeth in 1970. Bartenieff’s most recent project is a one-man show of Victor Klemperer’s Holocaust diary, “I Will Bear Witness,” written by his partner, the playwright Karen Malpede.

When I was 11, my mother took me to see a play of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I turned to her and said, “This is what I want to do.” When I was 14, I got a role in a Broadway play directed by Harold Clurman called “The Whole World Over.” I was disillusioned with Broadway right away. I thought of becoming a cabinetmaker, a shoemaker or a tailor. I wanted to do something with my hands. I thought acting was stupid and silly, but at the same time I had a great Shakespeare passion. I went to London and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I returned to New York in 1955 and did off-Broadway and regional theater.

In 1962, I bumped into a beat poet I knew on the street. He told me about Judson Poets Theater at Judson Church. I thought it was incredible. All the actors around me were poets, writers, composers. They were all brilliant. Between the 1960s to the 1970s, it was an incredible explosion and synthesis of the arts. Judson became a focal point where all the arts came together. Dance became a generator of a lot of other interactions. The visual arts were mixed with poetry and theater. To me, it was heaven. I threw everything out the window. We were paid nothing. It was like we’d all been released from prison.

I had been part of all these theater companies that had great hopes and desires. These companies did not deliver on these wonderful ideas. With my then-partner Crystal Field, Larry Kornfeld and Theo Barnes, we said, “Let’s stop complaining and open a theater.” We wanted to create a theater that would not bullshit, that would only deliver what it said it would deliver. I wanted to continue the synthesis of the art disciplines. We were not to be a theater that happened to be in Greenwich village. We had to be the theater of Greenwich Village.

We got the space in Westbeth. It was a raw space that hadn’t been used since Bell Labs abandoned it. We had “beer and apple” painting parties. Sweat equity means “for nothing.” We got all our seating off the street, from churches throwing out these wonderful seating units. We started with one space, then two, then three. We had the whole building.

There was a big drama. We got the place rent-free for the first 18 months. The Westbeth tenants went through the roof, because they had been promised that the rent from our building would subsidize their rents. They said, “You’ve got to kick them out immediately.” Mrs. Kaplan, who had given us the space, told us, “You’ve got to leave.” I said, “Yeah, but we ain’t got no place to go and we’ve got a lease.” They left us alone. We later moved to the ballroom in an old Swedish officers’ club on Jane Street. It is a story fit for a musical.

HARRIET SOHMERS ZWERLING EX-NUDE MODEL AND MEMOIRIST, 80

Harriet Sohmers Zwerling has been an editor, a teacher, a nude model and a writer. She has also been a one-woman sexual revolution, whose lovers included Susan Sontag, the playwright Irene Fornes and editor Bill Ward. Raised on the Upper West Side and educated at Berkeley, Black Mountain College and NYU, Zwerling lives in Stuyvesantown. She is the author of “Notes of a Nude Model.”

I’m in this documentary called “Still Doing It,” about the sex lives of older women. People stop me on the street. I’m really becoming famous. I’ve been around a long time. I’m 77. It blows my mind.

When I got to Paris in 1950, I had $200 in my pocket. You could live on $50 a month. I was supposedly studying at the Sorbonne. I lived with this Swedish guy in the old bohemian Paris. We had no running water, no heat or electricity. It was primitive and great.

In 1959, I went to Provincetown. I met Bill Ward and he invited me to move in with him. He had a magazine called the “Provincetown Review.” I became the assistant editor. I started modeling in Provincetown, It was easy and my mind was free. Back in New York, the Cedar Bar was in full bloom. It was really alive. We all smoked pot. We had these big bashes to raise money for the magazine. We had the Hubert Selby scandal. We published his short story “Tra-La-La” and had an obscenity trial in Provincetown. I was banned from the town.

Bill and I were both screwing around. Those were the days. I was with the artist Emilio Cruz in the Cedar Bar one night. I went to the john and this drunk out of his mind, handsome guy came over and asked Emilio how much money it would take for me to go back to his hotel with him. I came back, Emilio and I laughed about it and we decided on 30 dollars. I went back to his hotel room. He was bombed, so nothing happened. That was Louie Zwerling, the man I married.

The scene changed. It got tame. My son Milo was born in ‘63 and that cramped my style. I still was having a lot of affairs. Having a husband that was a merchant seaman was great.

I became a schoolteacher in ‘68. I taught for 28 years in Greenpoint, an ugly, racist Polish and Irish neighborhood. I am financially secure. It was completely by accident.

People don’t know what the term “bohemian” means nowadays. To me, it is very important but it doesn’t exist anymore. First, a bohemian is a person who doesn’t give a fuck about money. Second, a bohemian doesn’t give a fuck about the majority way of living. I take these classes at the New School with these young kids. They are worried about everything. “How could you go to Paris by yourself with no money?’” The young people are not the way we used to be. They don’t fuck. Where is the adventure? We didn’t care about money. We didn’t care about real estate. The kids today only care about real estate.

HARVEY PERR, PLAYWRIGHT AND ACTOR, 69

Harvey Perr has written more than 16 plays, including “Rosebloom,” “Afternoon Tea” and “The Night Little Girl Blue Made Her Social Debut.” He has acted in off-off-Broadway shows and movies such as “Stranger than Paradise.”

I lived most of my childhood in Flatbush and East Flatbush, Brooklyn. My father was in prison from the time I was a year old, so I had a lot to write about. In 1955, I went to London and saw a production of “Waiting for Godot,” which really changed my life. I went to the New School for Social Research. I wrote a play about being a working-class Jew, and it was about my own life. It was called “Upstairs, Sleeping.”

Edward Albee was conducting a workshop at the Circle in the Square. I was about 23. When Albee started the Playwrights’ Unit, he asked me to join and that started my career.

In 1965, I was asked to go to Universal Studios for a screenwriting seminar. I went out there for two weeks. I came back to New York. They called and asked me if I wanted to come out there on a one-year contract. I had no choice. At the time, I had a wife and small daughter. We were poor. I was working in the credit office of a trucking company that had just gone bankrupt. I said, “Of course.” It was the last thing I wanted to do. I felt it was a mistake, but I went anyway. The only thing of mine that wound up on the screen was “Tobruk,” this terrible war movie with Rock Hudson. It was incoherent. I was called to rewrite some of that stuff.

When my career as a screenwriter went out the window after a year, I didn’t have enough money to take my family back to New York. I really became a playwright in Los Angeles. I was stuck there. I started doing my plays at the Mark Taper Forum. To make a living, I worked in the music business.

Ed Field thinks of me as a bohemian because he loves my writing and I’ve never made a penny. I have never compromised and I have never given it up. I never thought of myself as a bohemian. I thought of myself as a survivor. Maybe they are one and the same thing. I never knew where I fit in. I have been produced commercially, but I have never had a commercial success. It is no longer important to me if I become successful or accepted. I think it’s been a good life. I’ve written things that I wanted to write.

I didn’t really become politicized until the 1980s. The director Joe Chaikin really politicized me. He made me look at the world in a different way. I’m sort of sorry that I’ve become so political because it makes living in the world so difficult. I’ve been on this earth 67 years and there is a lot in America that I am unhappy with, but I could always live here. I now find it impossible to live here.

BARTON BENES, ARTIST AND RELICMAKER, 65

Barton Benes’ infatuation with relics started in 1961 when he went to the Catacombs in Rome and stole a monk’s bone out of a crypt. His controversial career has included relics incorporating a straw used by Monica Lewinsky and making AIDS ribbons out of human ashes. His exhibit “Lethal Weapons,” made from various items like a water pistol or a perfume atomizer filled with his own blood, was almost banned in Sweden. Finally, Swedish authorities allowed the exhibit, but only after the artworks were heated to destroy any germs or viruses in the blood. Benes’ brilliant relics have been collected in his book “Curiosa: Celebrity Relics, Historical Fossils and Other Metamorphic Rubbish.”

When I die, I am willing my entire apartment to a museum in North Dakota. They are going to rebuild it exactly as it is. They have photographed it and will catalogue it. My ashes are going to stay in the apartment, in a pillow on the bed.

Diane Arbus lived down the hall from me. I remember when they took her body out. She died in the bathtub. She slit her wrists.

In 1969, my boyfriend lived near Gay and Waverly. On the night of the Stonewall riots, I heard this great racket. I thought “What is that?” I didn’t participate. Instead I went to the local Howard Johnson’s. They had a wild tea room (public toilet). When all the action was going on, I was in the tearoom.

I once had an original Picasso lithograph. I say “once” because one night when I was a little high, I thought I was being very clever and scribbled on the lithograph. When I came to, I freaked and realized I had destroyed my Picasso. Then, either inspiration or desperation made me put it into a blender and grind it up. I got some cocaine bottles and filled them with the Picasso, telling people I was selling Picasso by the gram.

Editor’s note: “1 gram of Picasso” first sold at $300 a piece. The price is now more than $3000 per piece.

EDWARD FIELD, POET, AGED 83

Edward Field was raised on Long Island and came to New York City after serving as a navigator in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He has published eight books of poetry, including “Frieze for a Temple of Love” and “Counting Myself Lucky.”

“Bohemian” was an adjective, not a noun in the 1950s. It was people working on creative things, who wanted to fulfill themselves and fuck bourgeoisie ambition, and not to follow the standard course laid out for you by conventional society. Success was not your goal. If it happened, you tried to keep your integrity. One of the main principles of bohemian culture was sexual liberation.

I had poems published from the 1940s, but I didn’t get a book published until 1963. I never had money success, unless money success was having enough money to live on, which I did. That is remarkable in itself.

The main thing was that you had to earn money for your analyst. Whatever it was, it was more than I could afford. If it was $25 a session, it was a week’s salary.

Bohemian life in the West Village ended in the mid-1970s with gentrification. The Village became unlivable. The whole tradition grounded in one area became unavailable to young artists. In a sense, when the mother country died, it was a diaspora. Sexual freedom had already spread around the country, even gay liberation. The one thing that didn’t spread was the leftist political radicalism.

I came to Westbeth in 1971. Neil moved in in 1976. At the beginning, Westbeth was open to the world. Now it is an island in the West Village. There are still all the old lefties here. The young people and the old people have very little to do with each other. The young people in Westbeth just see it as housing. They are not from the old Village. They are trying to make it.