I consider myself the foremost historian on life in Greenwich Village in the Fifties and sixties. Many of my younger years were spent observing and enjoying its night life. After finishing my factory job at midnight I unwound by drinking beer with the out of town visitors. They were an interesting bunch of guys and gals. They all came to New York looking for a new kind of sexual experience it was one that was not available in their hometown. They found what they were looking for in Greenwich Village. That crowd was called by the writers of that era: “Beatniks”, they also were called: “The Beat Generation”.
The village in the early fifties was a low rent neighborhood occupied by Italian-American families and college students from nearby New York University. The students socialized in Washington Square Park and in the many coffee shops scattered around the area. It was a quiet picturesque scene as young people studied, relaxed and chatted in coffee shops and in the park. What made the area stand out most was that it was an inexpensive place for college students to spend their time. On the weekends the coffee shops and parks were full of hundreds of thousands of young students who wanted to experience its lay back atmosphere.
Most people in the early fifties had very narrow sexual views. It was forbidden for a woman to have a sexual affair before marriage and if the neighbors found out that she broke the rules, she was called a tramp. If a woman got herself pregnant without a guy willing to marry her it was a cause for her to commit suicide. On the other end horny young single men were suffering extreme agony with no way to relieve themselves. Most were forced to constantly masturbate while others got quickly married. Occasionally men found a mentally disturbed woman who had sex with the whole neighborhood, but it was difficult to get a date with her. This was the way things were and it is not surprising that people got fed up with those rules. Greenwich Village became the battleground for a more open society where adults could choose the way they had sex and with whom.
Word soon spread through out the country that there was a “sexual oasis” in New York City where free love was available. Sex starved single guys and gals from all over the nation left their families and jobs and headed eastward to Greenwich Village. And when they met they found sexual freedom in each other. Most were broke and had to share one room with ten others. Some lived on only a few cans of beans a day, but nothing mattered to them but having great sex as often as they pleased. They were young and had unlimited sexual energy.
Poets and writers discovered a marketable opportunity in romanticizing the sex life of the young guys and gals who newly arrived in the village. They called them:” Beatniks” or products of the: “Beat Generation”, But the truth was simple. They were just ordinary young people who wanted a sexual freebie without their parents interfering with their personal life.
This sexual paradise came to an end when the guys and gals realized that they had other needs that were just as important as sexual ones. They slowly went back to their hometowns, families, and jobs. But it was a learning experience for them and it was all worth it. Greenwich Village today has become gentrified, only the elite can afford to live there. But memories of what once took place still remain.
melviiin1@verizon.net
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