How Greenwich Village Became America’s Bohemia

By Hugh Ryan

For all the many words written on Greenwich Village, two questions have never been adequately answered: why did Greenwich Village become the heart of American bohemianism, and the most visible site of American queer rebellion? The answers to these two questions are related, and can be found in the Village’s long history as a site for the incarceration of women.

The Village’s penal history begins in 1796, when New York State opened its first post-Revolution prison in the tiny Village of Greenwich, which was then considered far outside the city. All the rest of this story spirals forward from this moment, but we’re going to jump ahead 120 years to get to the meat of it.

Most historians peg the bohemian-ization of the Village to the start of WWI, but don’t provide an explanation as to why. Emblematic of this genre (and perhaps its progenitor) is Caroline Ware’s incredible sociological study, Greenwich Village: 1920-1930, which recounts her decade spent as a participant-observer in Village life for Columbia University. As she says:

In the War and Post-War years, Greenwich Village became a symbol of repudiation of traditional values. Here congregated those for whom the traditional pattern in which they grew up had become so empty or distorted that they could no longer continue a part of it and submit to the social controls which it imposed. Many who were drawn to the Village came to seek escape from their community, their families, or themselves. [1]

Nan Lurie's "Women's House of Detention." Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library. "Women's House of Detention" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed October 19, 2024. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/77782ee0-d56d-0131-f1ac-58d385a7bbd0

By contrast, just a few years earlier, the area was usually called “Old Greenwich,” and instead of being noted for its modernism, it was considered one of the most quaint and traditional areas of Manhattan. Here is how it was described in a 1907 article from the Bangor Daily News:

‘This is Old Greenwich Village,’ as all old New Yorkers with a penchant for antiquarianism love to style it…it still retains much of the aspect and many of the traits which belonged to it when it first began to be known as the Ninth Ward, and when horse-car lines first began to perform the principal service of passenger transportation between it and Bowling Green. The population today is chiefly American with a strong admixture of the Irish and the Teutonic. [2]

What happened between 1907 and World War I that had such a strong but localized effect on this tiny corner of Manhattan?

Well, in 1907, Greenwich Village became home to the first ever Night Court in the country, which heard cases from all around Manhattan and the Bronx between 9:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m., after the regular courts were closed. It specialized in “all ‘drunks,’ all ‘disorderly conducts,’ which included prostitution,” and was created largely to prevent “the practice of detaining women over night in station houses. [3] In 1910, it was rechristened the Women’s Night Court, or just the Women’s Court, and began to handle only the arrests of women, largely for disorderly conduct or prostitution  – both vague and elastic charges that could be used to arrest almost any one, for any reason, but particularly working class women, and (increasingly as the years went on) Black women, queer women, trans men, and those who were some combination of the above.

The Women’s Court is the origin of the transformation of Greenwich Village. Criminal men were frightening and dangerous; criminal women were a morality play in technicolor. The Court was purposefully designed to attract tourists. Its point was not just to incarcerate women, but to parade them before spectators as a warning. The Courtroom featured tiered seating to guarantee good views, and created publicity materials to attract an audience. [4] As the Court’s first probation officer later wrote in her memoir, the most important work of the Women’s Court was “showing the public a long procession of the girls bound to a life of prostitution.” [5]

And oh, how the public loved it.

By 1914, the moment when most historians agree the transformation of the Village was just beginning, the Women’s Court was already attracting huge crowds to Greenwich Village.

As one anti-prostitution crusader wrote in 1914,

With the increased interest in sex problems and in fallen women, the women's night court has attracted much attention…[that] it has drawn a morbid crowd of men and women, boys and girls, is much to be regretted. Some nights the theatrical sign S. R. O. (standing room only) is needed at the entrance. [6]

"10 Greenwich Avenue at 10th Street. House of Detention." Wurts Brothers, 1945. Museum of the City of New York Digital Collections. https://collections.mcny.org/Assets/V2/3GK40eaFg9xw9h9gUyVYB6_YHIfS59l6G9XUIvf7VRJ0qjdR3LVwArTwND@yyzFSI7CBZov2goJNqWn3IjfjpI16v3@G9NvYOF3TGWU2oHg-/vOSfBQzbXwZ0S2@l/AIDl1rcjkTJRgdyt/MNY242298.jpg 

These “morbid crowds” were the first audiences for the cafes that made up café culture. In 1918, the New-York Tribune pointed out the class disparity at the court.

“Chinatown or the Night Court, which shall it be?” has been a usual after-dinner question on the part of aristocratic slummers or diners in uptown restaurants or Greenwich Village. Motors have stood for hours outside of Jefferson Market courthouse while the occupants in evening dress have watched the tragic procession of women, in turn defiant, sullen, whimpering, pass before the magistrate for sentence... Gray-haired women with shifty eyes and bold-faced little girls of sixteen… stand before the judge while their offence is discussed in the presence of unsympathetic and sensation-seeking spectators. [7]

As I know from my research for my book The Women’s House of Detention, the cis women and trans men on trial in the Women’s Court were being arrested for such offences as smoking, drinking, sex work, lesbianism, sexual openness, wearing pants, being homeless, and being indigent. Now, compare that to Caroline Ware’s description of what made a “bohemian” bohemian:

Free love, unconventional dress, erratic work— if any— indifference to physical surroundings, all night parties, crowding, sleeping where one happened to be, walking the streets in pajamas, girls on the street smoking, plenty of drink, living from moment to moment, with sometimes a pass at creative work but often not even that. [8]

We associate bohemianism with artists and upper-class women — largely because they were celebrated for it — but those women had the resources to live their bohemian lives in safer, private spaces; poor people dragged from around the city to the Women’s Court had to live their rebellions in public.

Thus was the countercultural Village born.

The Jefferson Market Courthouse, which once held the Women's Court. New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library. "Jefferson Market" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed October 19, 2024. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-e3b3-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

And because the Women’s Court was located in Greenwich Village, in 1934, The Women’s House of Detention — a 12-story, maximum security prison and jail complex — was opened there as well. The House of D (as it was often called) stood at the intersection of 10th St., Greenwich St., Christopher St., and 6th Avenue until 1974 (though it was closed in 1971). Over that time, it brought tens of thousands of women to the village every year — and became an unexpected epicenter for queer culture in New York City. To understand why, we have to look at the logic that drove women’s incarceration.

Women’s prisons were first created in the aftermath of the Civil War, as more and more women — particularly Black women — were able to live the kinds of lives that brought them under the thumb of the courts. Prior to this point, the discipline and punishment of women was primarily handled through the hetero-family: the birth family of an unmarried woman; the husband of a married woman; the employers of a domestic servant; or the enslavers of a Black woman in bondage.

These women’s prisons believed there were only three legitimate jobs a woman could have: wife, maid, or nursemaid. For any of those jobs, a woman needed to be properly feminine (in the eyes of white Victorians). Any woman deemed not feminine enough (too masculine, too sexual, too willful, too Black, etc.) would inevitably end up unmarried and out of work, at which point she would become a prostitute. For this reason, reformers spent the late 1800s and the early 1900s developing a system of “women’s justice” that targeted women at younger ages and for smaller offenses, in order to get them into prisons where they would be forcibly feminized. As the annual report of the first women’s prison in America put it in 1875, their job was “to take these [women] and so remold, reconstruct and train them, as to be fitted to occupy the position assigned them by God, viz., wives, mothers, and educators of children” [9] — a sentiment not far off from that expressed in a report on prostitution and the Women’s Court put together for Mayor LaGuardia in 1934, which stated that the best way to reform arrested women was “wholesome marriage and the responsibility for children.” [10]

Prostitution charges, which in New York were misdemeanors that required no evidence or lawyers, were an easy way to arrest these women, and after 1914, they came with what were known as “indeterminate sentences” – any woman found guilty could be held for up to three years, or until she was deemed reformed by the institution holding her. In fact, a woman didn’t even need to exchange sex for money to be declared a prostitute in the eyes of the law. New York State case law defined prostitution as simply “the common lewdness of women” in 1916, [11] and in 1925, clarified that “the element of hire or money does not appear to be essential.” [12]

Thus, the Women’s Court and The Women’s House of Detention were filled with women who were not feminine enough — many of them queer or trans [13] — but their presence in the historical record has been obscured by the baked-in heterosexual assumptions that come with a prostitution charge.

By the 1920s, the Women’s Court was bringing thousands of arrested women (and their loved ones and friends) to the Village every year. Suddenly, the Village was “noted as the home of ‘pansies’ and ‘Lesbians,’ and dives of all sorts featured this type,” according to Caroline Ware. As she described the scene in one basement bar, Jo’s, “By 1930, promiscuity was tame and homosexuality had become the expected thing.” [14] Throughout her study, Ware continually noted the distinct and unique lesbian presence in the Village. Of the many bars she examined, only four catered primarily to locals, one of which “had a Lesbian reputation and used some local girls as hostesses and attracted a few others as patrons” (this was probably Eve’s Tea Room, the first known business catering to queer women, which was opened in 1924 at 129 MacDougal Street by Chawa Zloczewer, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who would later be deported and murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz). Even other areas of the city that had businesses serving queer men did not yet have public institutions for queer women.

The Women’s Court moved in the early 1940s, but the House of D remained in the Village. After World War II, when America entered the most homophobic and traditional period of the 20th century, the Village retained its queer character, even as other queer neighborhoods in the city shrunk or disappeared entirely. Why? Because while the police could shut down queer bars and arrest gender non-conforming people on the streets, they could do nothing about the queer people who thronged to the House of D — because the police were the ones bringing them there.

In the late 1950s, Virginia McManus — a New York City substitute teacher — was arrested for prostitution and sent to the House of D. Writing about the experience later, she estimated that about 75% of the incarcerated people were queer. [15] Almost a decade after that, a sociology grad student came to study the lesbian relationships (or as she referred to them, “play families”) of incarcerated women — and she too estimated that about 75% of those detained in the House of D were queer. [16]

The House of D appears in the writings of many midcentury queer luminaries, from Audre Lorde (who called it “one up for our side — a defiant pocket of female resistance” [17]) to Joan Nestle (who called it “a warning, a beacon, a reminder, and a moment of community.” [18])

The prison was located just a block and a half from The Stonewall Inn, and on the first night of the uprising, the people inside held a riot all their own, chanting “gay rights, gay rights” as they set their belongings on fire and threw them at the cops down below. Black Panther Leader Afeni Shakur would credit her time in the House of D for linking the struggle for Black rights with the struggle for queer rights in her mind (and for connecting her with her girlfriend, Carol Crooks, who is listed as the father on the birth certificate for Shakur’s son, Tupac).

When, in the aftermath of Stonewall, young activists wanted to protest the Women’s House of Detention, leaders from the Mattachine Society (a gay men’s rights organization begun in the 1950s) refused to go along, and so the young people rebranded themselves as the Gay Liberation Front. Their first, largely forgotten action, was to protest the Women’s House of Detention.

In 1971, as the House of D was being shuttered, Melvin Van Peebles opened his show Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death. It featured the first lesbian love song in a Broadway show – sung by a woman on the street, looking up at her lover in the House of D.

In fact, the House of D would remain a site of queer rebellion until the day it was razed to the ground in 1974 —part of the great erasure of poor queer people from Village history. Soon after, the West Side Highway, where homeless queer women like Sylvia Rivera made encampments and worked the stroll, would be torn down as well; then the Christopher Street pier, where queer men gathered for sex and community; and eventually, in the early 2000s, the whole area would be sanitized and declared “Hudson River Park.” When these institutions were gone, it was easy for Greenwich Village’s queer history to be thinned down to the stories of mostly upper-class white men. But this is a radical, misogynist, racist retelling of a history whose earliest root is poor queer women and trans men, many of them Black.

Hugh Ryan is the award-winning author of The Women’s House of Detention and When Brooklyn Was Queer. Follow him on Patreon & Instagram.

[1] Caroline Ware, Greenwich Village: 1920-1930, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1935), p5.

[2] “High Cost of Living,” Bangor Daily News (Bangor, Maine), Nov. 15, 1907.

[3] “New York’s Night Court,” Boston Evening Transcript (Boston, MA), Oct. 16, 1907.

[4] Sara Harris and John Murtagh, Cast the First Stone, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1957), 223.

[5] Maude E. Miner, Slavery of Prostitution: A Plea for Emancipation (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1916), 29.

[6] Frederick H. Whitin, “The Women's Night Court in New York City,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 52 (1914), 182.

[7] “Sightseers End Women’s Night Court,” New York Tribune (New York, NY), Aug. 11, 1918.p.25.

[8] Ware, Greenwich Village: 1920-1930, p.95.

[9] Annual report, Indiana School for Girls, Woman's Prison (Indianapolis : Sentinel Company, 1876), 14. Accessed at https://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16066coll37/id/10061/rec/4 on August 18, 2024.

[10] “Report on Prostitution and The Women’s Court,” Submitted to The Mayor, Hon F.H. LaGuardia, by Magistrate Anna Kross. Box 37, folder 14: Women's Court report. 1934. pt2 - American Jewish Archives.

[11] People ex rel. Miller v. Brockman et al. (1916) 35 N.Y. Crim. Reps. 337, 341.

[12] Bruce W. Cobb, Inferior Criminal Courts Act of the City of New York, (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 143.

[13] These terms would not likely have been used by all of these people themselves, however, by being entangled with the women’s justice system, these individuals were some of the first working-class people to be exposed to (and indoctrinated into) our modern categories for sexual and gender identities, and their lives became the vectors through which these ideas spread to their wider communities. In recognition of their critical role in transforming the ways in which we name and categorize desire and identity, I use our modern terminology here.

[14] Ware, Greenwich Village: 1920-1930.

[15] Virginia McManus, “Love Without Men in Women’s Prison,” Confidential, September 1959.

[16] Halle Wise, “The House of Detention for Women: A Field Study,” July 1963, Anna J. Kross Collection, Smith College.

[17] Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, (Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1982).

[18] Joan Nestle, “Women’s House of Detention, 1931-1974,” OutHistory.com, 2008, accessed on August 18, 2024, https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/historical-musings/womens-house-of-detention.