In February 1949, the New York Times reported that 76-year-old author Henry Wysham Lanier had been working “sixteen to eighteen hours a day” since the previous September on a unique history of Greenwich Village. Lanier was a respected writer but far from a household name. The former editor of Golden Book magazine, the “eccentric” Lanier’s fame was overshadowed by that of his father, Sidney Lanier, who was known as the “poet of the Confederacy.” The younger Lanier told the Times that he hoped this new book would reflect his belief that “a man should live the kind of life that will make him happy.”

There was only one problem with the Times’s profile of Lanier: It failed to mention that the idea for this Greenwich Village book wasn’t his. It had come from photographer Berenice Abbott, whose “photo impressions” (as publisher Harper & Brothers called them) would ultimately constitute a major portion of the work.

When the book was published that October under the title Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday, it was apparent that the pairing of Abbott’s images and Lanier’s text was, at best, an arranged marriage. (The San Francisco Chronicle noted that Abbott, a “superb photographer,” was “not up to her best” and that Lanier’s account was “spotty.”) In fact, when I first discovered Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday, I initially supposed that the text and images had simply been cobbled together by the publisher hoping to boost sales; I guessed that they’d cribbed images from Abbott’s monumental WPA chronicle of the city, Changing New York.

But as I looked more closely at the book, I realized that while Abbott’s images were similar to her work a decade earlier, they weren’t the same. A quick search through the WPA archives confirmed my hunch. Abbott’s images depict everything from architectural street scenes to museums to restaurant interiors. There are some famous faces—like artists John Sloan and Edward Hopper—but most of the pictures have an almost snapshot-like quality.

While the initial pairing of Lanier and Abbott may have been awkward (Abbott thought it was a “terrible match”), the photos and text actually complement each other in unexpected ways. In 1949, Greenwich Village was at a crossroads: the area’s famed bohemian, artistic nature had been in decline since the Depression. Meanwhile, New York City—through the auspices of the brand-new Federal Housing Act—seemed poised to allow Robert Moses to ride roughshod across the city. Both Lanier’s words and Abbott’s photos capture the essence of a beloved neighborhood that both authors probably thought would soon be gone.

The first thing I discovered when trying to follow Lanier’s itinerary was that it was going to be difficult. Not only was he describing a streetscape that was seven decades out of date, but he had also clearly never meant for anyone to do what I was attempting.

Like many books aimed at armchair travelers, Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday thinks nothing of jumping back and forth between disparate locations, or fudging a street address here or there. Still, I was determined to follow Lanier’s route, even if it meant having to scramble to find the very first place he was describing, the Amalgamated Savings Bank on Union Square West. I knew from my research that the bank was still standing, but the building in front of me, clad in dark-hued glass, bore no resemblance to John Kellum’s cast-iron bank—originally built in 1869 as the headquarters of Tiffany & Co.—that I expected to find.

Standing in the farmers market across the street, I squinted at the building, vaguely able to discern archways peeking through the glass facade. As it turned out, the bank had been reclad more than once. In 1952, a piece of the iron facade fell off, injuring a passerby who later died. In response, the ornaments on Kellum’s facade were stripped off and the building clad in monotonous white brick. When it was converted to condos in 2006, the brick was removed in favor of a more contemporary design, which preserved a very few original details.

I’ve often thought it’s easier to find remnants of 200-year-old New York than it is to locate vestiges of our more recent past. A combination of nostalgia and inertia often preserves—by act or accident—older structures, even if they don’t have much significant history. But Lanier and Abbott were trying to document the Village of the 1940s. Was I going to come upon nothing but white brick walls and glass facades?

I flipped to the first of Abbott’s photos, which shows a bus passing through the Washington Square Arch. While the practice of using the park as an MTA depot ended in 1959, little else in that image is different 70 years later: The famed “Old Row” stands in the right side of the image, with the Art Deco tower at One Fifth Avenue looming behind it. Similarly, while the rear workshop on the Bedford Street side of 17 Grove—now, along with the main house, on the market for $10.9 million—has been restored in recent years, this and many other West Village streetscapes that Abbott documented remain remarkably unchanged.

Heartened, I started my circumambulation of the Village using Lanier’s odd walking tour, which takes readers entirely along the fringes of the Village and almost never into the heart of the neighborhood. Ostensibly, he did this to “grasp the essence of this unique Village” by trying to “fix its outer limits.” However, he may also have written it this way because he was leaving the rest for a planned second volume of Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday that never materialized. It the end, it doesn’t matter. As I’ve learned from attempting to follow in the footsteps of guidebooks stretching back to the 1860s, these types of itineraries are rarely dictated by a desire to take readers to specific, meaningful places. Instead, Lanier’s route gave him ample opportunity to contemplate and expound on the changes he had witnessed in his lifetime. Lanier, born in 1873, probably arrived in New York in the early 1890s, just as the Village was becoming increasingly bohemian and increasingly Italian.

Lanier’s itinerary moves east on 14th Street, which was then a major shopping thoroughfare. (His chapter title, “West, Through Hunting Grounds and Farmlands,” alludes to the history of the area that he’ll touch on later in the book.)

Though Tiffany’s on Union Square and Macy’s at the corner of West 14th and Sixth Avenue had long since moved uptown, department stores like Hearn’s, founded in 1827, still anchored a retail district that was increasingly dominated by itinerant street vendors (or “parisitcal animacula of the business world” as Lanier calls them). Today, the street vendors are gone, as is Hearn’s. But as I searched out a “long line of clean, new, low taxpayers” that Lanier described, I realized that not only had I found them at 25 W. 14th Street, but that this block—with Liberty Travel, Guitar Center, Goodwill, and Lot-Less—would not have seemed out of place in Lanier’s streetscape.

But I also noticed that Lanier didn’t bother to remark on the next building on the block, No. 33, then the modernist home of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union whose cast-iron bank he’d just sent me to see. Indeed, as I walked, it became increasingly clear that both Lanier’s text and Abbott’s photos had a tendency to dwell on the “old” Village—with old being a relatively fluid term—and not on the area’s more recent developments.

Heading farther west, I passed what had evidently once been a used-car lot and the former home of the 244th Coast Artillery Armory, built in 1894, and—like the more famous Park Avenue Armory—often rented out for private events. What drew Lanier in was a fancy poultry show, the likes of which he’d never seen, but which fascinated him, making him wonder if such diverse events could save a building like the armory from eventual destruction. While what came to be known as adaptive reuse would ultimately save some Village landmarks, such as the Jefferson Market Courthouse, the armory on 14th Street would be pulled down in 1969.

Across the street from the armory stands the Salvation Army headquarters, a 1930 Art Deco building by Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker that is still an outsized presence on the block. In Lanier’s time, the blocks farther west became increasingly Spanish and Italian, though little evidence of this history remains. What does continue to stand are monuments to wealth: the banks at three of the four corners of Eighth Avenue, and then, even farther west, the warehouses of the Meatpacking District, Delamater Square—the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Hudson and Greenwich streets—and the “elevated street viaduct” of the New York Central, today’s High Line.

As everyone else climbed the 14th Street stairs to the High Line’s highly programmed aesthetic experience, I continued as far west as I could, following Lanier’s footsteps south on West Street, which has mostly been subsumed into the West Side Highway. In 1949, West Street still faced active piers, with “the Cunard and adjoining dock warehouses” forming “a solid wall.”

What I found remarkable—taking this walk on a crowded, beautiful summer day—was how instantly pedestrian traffic melted away. As I walked the blocks of West Street down to Gansevoort Street, I was completely alone—and I would be on many of the streets between West 14th and Canal, which was then the southern border of Greenwich Village.

Following Lanier’s text, I went to take in Charles Lane, a relic of the early 19th-century Village that once led to Sir Peter Warren’s front door. Though Abbott didn’t photograph Charles Lane for this book, her WPA-era shot of this tiny street shows it looking almost as it does today. I then went searching for traces of the old prison and the later brewery that stood nearby, but couldn’t find any. So much construction has taken place on West Street in the last 20 years that I was gratified to find anything left at all.

One surprise was to turn onto Weehawken Street, which vies for the title of “Shortest Street in Manhattan,” where Lanier points out an old house with “a rear entrance via an enclosed outer wooden stairway, and the eaves thrust out two feet from the wall in picturesque seventeenth-century style.” This is exactly the sort of old building that I expected had hung on through the 1940s but not much beyond that; I was amazed to discover the building—wooden staircase and all—still standing on Weehawken Street just as Lanier described it.

In the introduction to Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday, Lanier asserts that “more novelists, poets, painters and sculptors of real significance lived, for short or long periods, in this little square mile than in all of the rest of the island put together—or in any other region of the United States of America.”

On its face, this would appear to be the central tenet of Lanier’s work: to provide a history and guide to this creative crucible. Lanier ticks off names—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Samuel F.B. Morse, Winslow Homer, and many more—who were shaped by their time in the Village.

But as I walked, I began to appreciate that Lanier’s goal wasn’t merely to show that the Village was a creatively fecund environment, but to plead for it to remain so. In my walk “South, Along What Was River Bed,” Lanier calls on Robert Moses, “our amazingly intelligent and efficient commissioner of parks and parkways,” to remember that “without a lively affection for those remaining scraps of the city’s past, the thing he builds today, no matter what its streamlined efficiency, has no roots, no character, no significance.”

In 1949, Robert Moses’s projects had come to define the face of the modern city. The first stage of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was nearly completed and the Cross Bronx Expressway was under construction, as was the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The recent creation of Title I in the Federal Housing Act would soon give Moses and his Commission on Slum Clearance the ability to bulldoze even more neighborhoods.

Though Lanier never explicitly states his fears for the West Village, it’s telling that he includes his critique of Moses in the section of the walk that covers the neighborhood’s industrial waterfront. Lanier clearly knew that the area’s days were numbered. Writing about the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, he laments “the complete wiping out of those nice eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century buildings along lower Washington and Greenwich streets,” calling the construction site “truly horrifying” and wondering what “loathsome” creature will climb out of the tunnel’s “slimy depths, lusting to devour even beautiful memories.”

Lanier must also have been aware that in 1944, the New York State legislature had approved funding for a highway across Manhattan at Canal Street, of which Moses was also a champion. What would ultimately become known as LOMEX would end up one of Moses’s biggest defeats, but in 1949 its future was unclear. Canal Street was, in Lanier’s eyes, a “traffic maelstrom,” which he compared to an unbridled herd “of wild mustangs” ready to “trap the unwary walker” who attempted to cross the island on foot.

As leery as Lanier, I decided to abandon Canal Street and walked over on Grand Street to Broadway, where I turned north toward Bleecker to resume looking for traces of Lanier’s city. Much of what Lanier chooses to single out on Broadway is either now gone or was already gone when he was writing. One exception is James Renwick’s Grace Church, which Lanier speculates may have housed the noisy bells that caused Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Bells,” and which has been a staple of Broadway since the 1840s. But nearly everything else Lanier talks about on Broadway—Pfaff’s saloon, where Walt Whitman hung out; the old wooden house at No. 703; the cast-iron department store of A.T. Stewart—is gone.

I arrived back in Union Square—after walking about four and a half miles—having accomplished Lanier’s goal of understanding the boundaries of the neighborhood. But I haven’t really understood what made his Village special, so I headed down University Place toward Washington Square with Abbott’s photos as my guide. I wasn’t going to be able to seek out all of the locations she’d photographed—some of which no longer exist—but I hoped that studying her contributions to the book would flesh out my understanding of the 1940s Village.

Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, and first landed in New York in 1918. A struggling sculptor, Abbott moved to Paris in 1921, where she took a job as the darkroom assistant to her friend Man Ray. The work sparked her interest in both the technical and artistic aspects of photography. She returned to New York in 1929 and began documenting the changes she encountered in the city, in particular in her own neighborhood of Greenwich Village. During the Depression, she shot photos for the WPA; they were ultimately published as Changing New York. In the 1940s, Abbott proposed to Harper & Brothers that she again turn her lens on her ever-changing neighborhood, and that project, coupled with Lanier’s text, became Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday.

Compared to her earlier work, there’s a looser, more casual style to Abbott’s Village photos from the 1940s, many of which feature her artist friends at work in their studios or showcase shop fronts that were probably Abbott’s own haunts. Even more than Lanier’s text, these images tell the tale of a Village that’s now essentially gone.

The caption for the photograph of the cafe at the Lafayette Hotel notes it was taken “just before the Lafayette closed its doors, March 31, 1949.” The next page features an image of the entrance to the Hotel Brevoort, “closed as a hotel after more than a century of entertaining guests.” The following two photos document Eighth Street’s Whitney Museum, which would decamp for the Upper East Side in the 1960s before returning to the Village in 2014.

As much as I was encouraged by my initial perusal of Abbott’s images, I realized when I looked at them in more depth that for every photo of Patchin Place or Washington Square, there’s an image of a shop that’s gone or an artist’s studio that is now either demolished or simply unaffordable.

Moreover, most of the shops that Abbott showcases—a gun dealer on Christopher Street, a bird sculptor on Hudson, Dinty Moore’s Antiques on a residential block of West 11th Street—are the remnants of a quirkier Village that struggled to hang on even into the 1950s and ’60s.

A few photos stand out. One shows the retail strip along Eighth Street, including Bamboo Forest, a chop suey restaurant of a type once ubiquitous in the city. In contrast to that is a lively produce market on Bleecker Street and a shot of Vito’s Bakery, both reminders that Bleecker was at the time still the main street of a large Italian community in the South Village.

But my favorite is probably the young man peering through the window of a “tiny triangular bookshop” on Seventh Avenue South, which advertises “Manuscripts Typed / Quick Service / 60¢ @ 1000 wds Carbon Free / Special rate on novels, plays.” When I started at New York University in the late 1980s, flyers for this same service would be posted throughout the Village offering to type my term papers (or anything else creative I might have percolating). These services probably still exist, but have now firmly migrated online, and it strikes me that one thing Abbott was capturing—with her analog camera—was the tail end of a world that was about to turn digital. Two years after Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday was published, the first mainframe computer was built. A mere 20 years after its publication, people walked on the moon.

Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday would prove to be a swan song for both Henry Lanier and Berenice Abbott. In the 1950s, Abbott bought a house in Maine and ultimately left the city to live there full-time. Her collaboration with Lanier would be her last set of New York photos, and, in fact, by the late 1940s she had already shifted her focus to taking more abstract and scientific images as well as improving camera technology.

Unfortunately, after a brief flurry of early publicity, Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday soon fell out of print. Lanier’s proposed second volume never appeared, and he died in 1958 having never published again.

But perhaps Abbott and Lanier’s work had a more lasting effect. I’m curious if Lanier ever met Jane Jacobs, who had recently purchased a townhouse at 555 Hudson Street when Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday came out. It’s well documented that Jacobs and her husband were friends with Berenice Abbott and would visit her in Maine during the summer.

Did Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday influence Jacobs’s later activism in the Village and her influential urban planning study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities? Lanier’s laments about New York University snapping up property around Washington Square certainly presage Jacobs’s later work:

A few years back… the university felt that Washington Square really belonged to it, and that the ancient, out-of-date houses, about which people made such a sentimental fuss, were serving no useful purpose…. This attitude was hardly appreciated by the people whose parents and grandparents had built homes here, to whom there was no spot in New York where they so completely belonged; or by the score of artists and writers who had discovered here an atmosphere in which they could live and work happily.

Looking at Abbott’s photographs—the man perusing the shop window, or the bar at Joe’s, or a dancer from Trinidad performing at the Calypso Restaurant—readers see a spirit of the Village beneath her seemingly mundane documentation of the rhythms of the area’s daily life. While these people might not have crossed paths with Jane Jacobs, it isn’t hard to see in their faces those with whom Jacobs stood in Washington Square to ban traffic or who she recruited to form the Committee to Save the West Village.

The last chapter of Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday is titled “Dine as You Please” and features Calypso along with 31 other dining establishments across the Village. Today, only one survives—Chumley’s, which, with $19 chicken liver cannoli, would be unrecognizable to its founder, Leland Chumley. So, really, none survive. A few artists and writers hang on in rent-stabilized apartments, but what’s more typical is that the home across the street from Mark Twain’s old house is on the market for $52.5 million.

Abbott and Lanier documented a neighborhood they both clearly loved and saw slipping away. And while their passion likely helped ignite the next generation of preservationists, it may simply have been too late. Seventy years after its publication, Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday is mostly just Greenwich Village: Yesterday.

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