UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Inside Greenwich Village
A New York City Neighborhood, 1898–1918
Book Jacket: "Inside Greenwich Village" by G.W. McFarland

Gerald W. McFarland

A vibrant portrait of a celebrated urban enclave at the turn of the twentieth century

In the popular imagination, New York City’s Greenwich Village has long been known as a center of bohemianism, home to avant-garde artists, political radicals, and other nonconformists who challenged the reigning orthodoxies of their time. Yet a century ago the Village was a much different kind of place: a mixed-class, multiethnic neighborhood teeming with the energy and social tensions of a rapidly changing America. Gerald W. McFarland reconstructs this world with vivid descriptions of the major groups that resided within its boundaries—the Italian immigrants and African Americans to the south, the Irish Americans to the west, the well-to-do Protestants to the north, and the New York University students, middle-class professionals, and artists and writers who lived in apartment buildings and boarding houses on or near Washington Square.

McFarland examines how these Villagers, so divided along class and ethnic lines, interacted with one another. He shows how clashing expectations about what constituted proper behavior in the neighborhood’s public spaces—especially streets, parks, and saloons—often led to intergroup conflict, political rivalries, and campaigns by the more privileged Villagers to impose middle-class mores on their working-class neighbors. Occasionally, however, a crisis or common problem led residents to overlook their differences and cooperate across class and ethnic lines. Throughout the book, McFarland connects the evolution of Village life to the profound transformations taking place in American society at large during the same years.

“The deepest, most richly textured, and most nuanced picture of Greenwich Village ever written. Far from engaging in historical nostalgia for an idyllic lost community, McFarland reveals how, even a century ago, the Village was already a place that gained its identity from the roiling ethnic, political, and class tensions on its streets.”

Daniel Czitrom, coauthor of Out of Many:
A History of the American People

“An excellent book, one that provides a full and fascinating account of this New York City neighborhood during the Progressive era. . . . The book successfully integrates the development of the Village’s ethnic and working-class communities with the institutional thrust of the elites and reformers. It makes for a complex history that gets well beyond the popular conception of Greenwich Village as little more than a hangout for bohemians and cultural radicals.”

American Historical Review

“Creatively researched and beautifully crafted. . . . Reading McFarland’s accessible prose is like being in the company of an assured and articulate tour guide as at home in Washington Square salons as he is familiar with cardboard-box factories and settlement houses.”

New York History

“Written in clear, accessible prose, this book is a pleasure to read.”

Library Journal

Gerald W. McFarland is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His books include A Scattered People: An American Family Moves West; The “Counterfeit” Man: The True Story of the Boorn-Colvin Murder Case; and Mugwumps, Morals, and Politics, 1880–1920.

American History / New York City
288 pp., 40 illus.
$22.95t paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-502-9
October 2005
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