Beatnik Walking Tour Illuminates Greenwich Village’s Place in Art/Literary History

By Anthony J. Paradiso

On the first day of Autumn, I joined the Beatnik Greenwich Village Walking Tour, which was put on by the Village Trip Festival. This year’s tour was guided by Marc Catapano, who has had a long career in media which includes producing for MTV and scriptwriting for Nickelodeon. There was no script for this walking tour because it was as exciting as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Let’s dive in and find out how it went!

The tour started at the site of the former West Eighth Street Bookstore (now Stumptown Coffee Roasters) at the corner of West Eighth and MacDougal streets. After Stumptown, the tour went down MacDougal Street to MacDougal Alley, where we stopped to talk about abstract expressionist American painter Jackson Pollock, who lived there.

This location was significant because abstract expressionism laid the groundwork for the Beatniks, a movement that was less constrained by societal norms and more focused on spontaneity.

“I consider the Abstract Expressionists the immediate precursor to what became known as the Beatniks. Largely in a superficial way, in how they dressed, and the hard-living, hard-drinking lifestyle. Abstract Expressionism was a force in the art world up until the 60s and it’s a Beatnik cliché in Beatnik movies that you have an Abstract Expressionist painting in the background,” said Catapano.

From there, we walked into Washington Square Park’s northwest corner at MacDougal and Washington Square West. We stopped to appreciate “Hangman’s Elm,” a 110-foot-tall English Elm which is one of the oldest living trees in Manhattan.

Then it was a short walk to the Washington Square Arch, where Catapano told us about how in 1917 a group of artists, including John Sloan and Marcel Duchamp broke into the arch through a side door and climbed a staircase to the top where they shot off fireworks and declared the “Free and Independent Republic of Greenwich Village.” Greenwich Village would not in fact secede but this event symbolically represented the spirit of independence in Greenwich Village at the time; a spirit that had similarities to the Beatnik movement.

From the arch we walked to the statue of Guiseppe Garibaldi, the Italian general who fought for the unification of Italy in the 1800s. We learned about the “hootenannies” that took place inside the park, which were improvisational music events attended by thousands of people in the early 1960s much to the neighbors’ chagrin. They even asked the city to put an end to the hootenannies but that never happened.

Then it was onto MacDougal Street where we passed by more hootenanny locales like the “Café Wha?” and the site of the former “Gaslight Café” (now MacDougal Street Alehouse). We learned that musical performances as well as poetry readings were held inside those small clubs and the people inside would snap their fingers instead of clapping so they wouldn’t disturb the residents living above them.

Catapano also told the tour participants about Ted Joans, a Beatnik polymath who was known for staging what Catapano describes as “stunts” like “rent a Beatnik night” where he would put on performances that satirized the media’s depiction of Beatniks.

That was it for the tour, which ended right around the corner of Bleecker and Sullivan streets. As for what has happened to the Beatnik movement since its heyday in the 1950s and 60s, Catapano shed some light. He explained, “Beatnik as a style and fashion began to go out of date in the early-mid 1960s. It was replaced by a different type of scene…The actual people who wrote the poems and did the painting, they didn’t disappear. Allen Ginsberg [who] lived into his 90s and was very, very active as was local poet Gregory Corso. So it sort of shifts into what became known as Hippie which then gave way to what became known as Punk. As real estate prices increased in the central Village, especially in the 1990s, it became really, really difficult to be an artist living in Greenwich Village. Then people migrated to the East Village and then onto Williamsburg, Brooklyn following the L train to cheaper rents.”

Beatnik is a portmanteau combining the word “Beat” with “Sputnik,” the name of the first Earth Satellite launched into space by the Soviets in 1957. Sputnik was used to label the Beatniks as Communists, which was a jab at their nonconformity rather than based on facts.

Catapano described what made Greenwich Village the ideal home base for the Beatniks. “It was easy to hang out in the Village. The south village was for a long time, starting in the 1880s, an Italian neighborhood. And Italian neighborhoods are good for cheap food and cheap places to hang out, like coffee shops. Even though there were tensions between the artists who were moving in, there was a certain tolerance in the old Italian community just because the artists were also customers.”

This year marks the sixth year of the Village Trip Festival. In 2018, it began as one weekend of events but now is two weeks long. It has grown quite a bit in a short time and Catapano discussed what he likes about the festival. “It’s an amazing opportunity to take in the Village and all its aspects and I think it’s a great idea. As the economy changes, it’s harder and harder to take in everything the Village has to offer in a casual way and I like how they curate it and present it so that people can learn and listen and feel everything that’s going on in the Village. I think it’s amazing.”

One surprising fact I took away from the tour was that the CIA infiltrated the abstract expressionist art scene, unbeknownst to the artists or exhibitors. Catapano was able to break down exactly how they did it. “They sponsored gallery fillings especially in Europe and through their connections they suggested articles to magazines and newspapers celebrating abstract expressionism as a soft power tool in the early Cold War as a way to show that the United States was no longer this ‘bumpkin’ backwater country but was on the cutting edge of 20th century culture.”

Who would’ve thought? The CIA and the Beatniks both had the same taste in art.