I suppose the first thing that I always thing of is that Greenwich Village seemed a much more suitable name for the neighborhood when it was just that- a village. Greenwich was, for a while there, a place far off the beaten path south of Wall Street (a bustling port city stuffed with trade and goods), where stone was crumbled under hammer to rise new houses in rows and cobblestones spilled out, forming these early streets. The rich “summered” and went on holiday in Greenwich Village, where they kept larger houses and cottages, just as they now escape to the Hamptons. Greenwich Village was “the country.” As in, “We’re going to the country house for the week.”
I learned this meager fact at some point during college, and I can’t for the life of remember who taught it to me, and from there my head began to reel. Take a late 18th century walking tour: Start at Wall Street (named at the time for marking the uppermost point of denizened living in the city), from there imagine looking out not onto high-rises filled with sleeping business interns and bachelor bulls, and try to imagine a grassy, hilly green yonder stretching as far as the eye can see, riddled with the occasional boulder, creek, and forest. Take a street toward Greenwich, imagining it a single, narrow dirt path suitable for a slow-traveling carriage, and when you arrive, let’s say, at Christopher St., stop and imagine that this is where you will spend your vacation before returning to the busy city life.
Sante’s Low Life does this for me every time I read him, transporting me to another world–Old New York–where just as much was the same as it was totally alien.
I’m reminded of Gibson’s Apocalypto for odd reasons, in that I more often than not found myself calling it a “space opera”- it was like Star Wars in that everything felt foreign and yet similar, this storied time. But as I said above, Sante’s Old New York (he remains one of its sole custodians) is familiar as well, and he does a superb job of drawing out the reality of this time just as he does its mythos.
