My View of the Village
By Roger Paradiso
The Village Gate
A little piece of the Village Gate survives on Bleecker. Photo by Roger Paradiso.
Art D’Lugoff opened the Village Gate, a jazz club in Greenwich Village, in 1958. It became an iconic home for jazz and theater performances. When disco came in and NYC was going broke in the 1970s, the city ran a campaign to modernize old structures for fire safety. This strained D’Lugoff as he was always straddling the fiscal red line. Finally, with the rising rents, code infractions and costs crashing down on him, he declared bankruptcy and the Village Gate closed in 1994. He searched for a new space but he ran out of time and died in 1996 with a broken heart. But his legacy shines brightly. The Village Gate sign was hung at the corner of Bleecker and Thompson suspended above the CVS sign. The magic was there for a time, but now it is gone.
Mean Streets
GREENWICH VILLAGE, Manhattan (WABC) ─ Police are searching for a man wanted in a shooting in Greenwich Village. A 41-year-old man was shot in the stomach before 1 a.m. along LaGuardia Place. He was taken to the hospital in stable condition.
GREENWICH VILLAGE, Manhattan (WABC) ─ Two teenage girls were shot and a third was slashed in a burst of violence between two rival groups of teenagers just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, as Pride festivities were winding down. The victims are in stable condition.
GREENWICH VILLAGE, Manhattan (WABC) ─ A man was stabbed in the abdomen during a dispute in Washington Square Park. The victim, who is said to be in his twenties, was taken to the hospital where he is expected to be okay.
Letter from the Editor of the Washington Square News
Excerpts from May 14, 2026
An attempt to grapple with saying goodbye to the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done.
By Dharma Niles, Editor-in-Chief
The satisfaction of student journalism that held me captive was accompanied by the infuriating nature of the news itself. My time at WSN was marked by a transformative three years for the university, and for higher education at large. NYU, a school that once lauded itself as a space for progressive opinions — with former President Andrew Hamilton openly condemning the Trump administration’s policies multiple times — now remains eerily silent when presented with any semblance of controversy.
The university punished student protesters until movements went quiet, built walls to shut down future demonstrations, unprecedentedly restricted speech and attire at graduations, and uplifted one of the country’s loudest critics of progressive culture in the name of viewpoint diversity. It’s easy to chalk some political ambiguity up to federal funding threats, or concerns that Barron Trump might decide to find a different business school — but the renovations and policy changes took place long before Donald Trump’s re-election, and they said more about the school than the political climate.
From student suspensions to (President) Mills refusal to join hundreds of college presidents condemning Trump, I spent my tenure watching a university I was once naively proud to attend do everything in its power to isolate itself from students. Every week brought a new policy change and poor excuse. And in some ways, that’s what kept me addicted: Once you start paying attention, institutional failure becomes hard to look away from.
