From Start To Finish - Greenwich Village Block Associations

— Page 3 —Resources & InformationOn Monday, June 22 at 6:30PM the Greenwich Village Societyfor Historic Preservation, Greenwich Village BlockAssociations and a dozen other community groups will hostan Open Forum on the NYU 2031 Plan at Judson MemorialChurch (55 Washington Square South & Thompson Street).NYU is formulating its ‘2031 Plan,’ which is intended toserve as a blueprint for its development over the next 22years. However, outlines of the plan which NYU has sharedwith the public indicate the potential for a very large expansionof the university in and around its core facilities in theVillage, East Village and NoHo — roughly double its rateof expansion over the last several decades. The Open Forumwill be an opportunity to find out more about the NYU 2031plan from the perspective of community groups, includingconcerns regarding aspects of the plan and how NYU is adheringto its commitments. It is also an opportunity to findout more about the process by which this plan is being reviewedand how you can be a part of it.On a bright achitectural note (there aren’t many of those),the scaffolding has come down at 171-173 MacDougalStreet. The Christian Scientist Church pulled down the starkbrick wall that had covered the building’s historic facadesince 1986. The upper floors were sold to a developer, who isshopping the 10 units as the MacDougal Lofts. The buildingdates to 1891 — the work of architecture firm Renwick, Aspinwalland Russell. The Christian Science Church acquiredBefore and afterthe place in the 1920s, and in 1986, undertook the radicalrenovation that left the majority of the facade bricked up.Judge the results for yourself.Morton Street’s rodent problem has some folks feeling likethey’re on the set of a creepy B-movie. “There’s been a paradeof big fat rats every night,” complains one local, whoseneighbors include Rupert Everett, Michael Cera and NBCNews anchor Lester Holt. “You can hear shrieks from fightingrats and from girls walking by who see the rats.” A witnessoverheard Gisele Bundchen scream after such a meeting.Ground zero for the rat infestation is a building where“the owner hasn’t bothered to replace stolen garbage cans,”leaving the rats to fight “over all the trash on the street.”(NY Post May 27)Restaurant Jarnac (W. 12 th & Greenwich Streets) closes itsdoors on June 27 th , due to a rent dispute. The owners willhold events and dinners at various locations and keep theircatering going for the foreseeable future. Co-owner TonyPowe plans on devoting more of his time to his LES bar Barramundiand his private party lounge “2nd floor on Clinton”.Chef Maryann Terillo hopes to on team up with Elisa Sarno(Babbo alum) to open Jarnac back up in a new location.On the other hand Larry Poston, of the Waverly Inn hasteamed up with Johnny Swet, of Balthazar to take over thespace that had been Marylou’s on W. 9 th Street. They are goingback to the building’s original 1870 name, Hotel Griffou,an inn run by French-born Marie Griffou who servedMark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe and Edna St. VincentMillay. When Mae West was forced to appear at the nearbyJefferson Courthouse to answerobscenity charges, her first stopafter the trial was the bar at theHotel Griffou. The reincarnationopens in late June.At the end of April, vandalsbroke the windows of the thetemporarily — neighbors hopenot — shuttered Beatrice Inn.Neighbors evidently thought thatwasn’t a strong enough message.On May 15 four friendly notesin marker were found over thewindows and signage. Some ofthe sentiments expressed: “Theneighbors of this club are overjoyedthat it has been closed.This is a totally inappropriatenightclub in the heart of a residentialneighborhood.”

— Page 4 —41111111111115Old News41111111111115Austerlitz, N.Y,.;Oct. 19 — EdnaSt. Vincent Millay, the famouspoet, was found dead at the footof the stairs in her isolated homenear here at 3:30 P.M. today.Her physician said she died ofa heart attack after a coronaryocclusion. She was 58 years old.(Some sources claim she died of abroken neck.)She was dressed in a nightgownand slippers when her body wasfound by James Pinnie, a caretaker,who had arrived to fix a fire forthe evening....Her nearest neighborlived a mile away....an idol of the younger generationduring the glorious early days of GreenwichVillage when she wrote what critics termeda frivolous but widely known poem which ended:My candle burns at both ends,It will not last the night;But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,It gives a lovely light!... Greenwich Village and Vassar, plus a gypsychildhood on the rocky coast of Maine, producedone of the greatest American poets of her time.In 1940 she published... a plea against isolationismwhich said, “There are no islands anymore,” and during the second World War she wroteof the Nazi massacre of the Czechoslovak city ofLidice:The whole world holds in its arms todayThe murdered village of Lidice,Like the murdered body of a little child,Innocent, happy, surprised at play.....Millay was born in Rockland, Me., on Feb.22, 1892, in an old house “between the mountainsand the sea” where baskets of apples and dryingherbs on the porch mingled their scents withthose of the neighboring pine woods....Floyd Dell, ...unofficial historian of theVillage in the early Twenties, has written howthe mother worked to bring up her daughters in“gay and courageous poverty.” Edna, the tomboyof the family, was called “Vincent” ... At14 she won the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry,the first of many honors. In the poem thatgave its name to her volume, The Harp-Weaver,some have discovered the inspiration of her pooryouth and her mother’s devotion.Edna entered Vassar (at) 21 years old, butwhen she was 18 she had finished the first partof her first long poem. Renascence, and at 20had ended it... She was graduated in 1917 andcame to live in the Village....Miss Millay, says Floyd Dell, was in thosedays “a frivolous young woman, with a brandnewpair of dancing slippers and a mouth like avalentine,” young, red-haired and unquestionablypretty. But the Village was the wartime Village,and Miss Millay took the radical stand.John Reed, Communist and war correspondent,was among her friends.... In a play, Aria laCapo, written in 1921, she expressed her hatredof war, and...she haunted court roomswith her pacifist friends, reciting...herpoetry to comfort themwhile juries decided-on their cases.... She acted without pay with theProvincetown Players.... she-did hackwriting for magazines under a pseudonym....her second volume of verses,A Few Figs From Thistles,...turnednational attention to the nine-footwidehouse on Bedford Street....Second April in 1921 and The Lamp andthe Bell and a morality play, TwoSlatterns and a King, in the sameyear, — and in 1922, with the PulitzerPrize, her position as a poetwas, established.The Harp-Weaver was published in1923, and then the Metropolitan Opera House commissiondMiss Millay to write a book for thescore of an opera....she went to the Anglo-SaxonChronicle of Eadgar, King of Wessex, a storynot unlike that of Tristan and Isolde, and theresult was The King’s Henchman, called by onewriter the most effectively and artisticallywrought American opera to reach the stage.It was produced at the Metropolitan Opera asthe most important production of the 1927 season,with Lawrence Tibbett, Edward Johnson andFlorence Easton, and later was taken on an extensivetour. Within twenty days of thepublication of the poem in book form four editionswere exhausted.... Miss Millay’s royaltiesfrom her publishers ran to $100 a day.In the summer of 1927 the time drew near forthe execution of Nicola Sacco and BartolomeoVanzetti, Boston Italians whose trial and convictionof murder became one of the most celebratedlabor causes of the United States. Onlyrecently recovered from a nervous breakdown,Miss Millay flung herself into the fight fortheir lives.A poem which had wide circulation at thetime, “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” was hercontribution to the fund raised for the defensecampaign. Miss Millay also made a personal appealto Governor Fuller.In August she was arrested as one of the“death watch” demonstrators before the BostonState House....“I went to Boston fully expectingto be arrested-arrested by a polizia createdby a government that my ancestors rebelled toestablish,” she said..... “Some of us have beenthinking and talking too long without doing anything.Poems are perfect; picketing, sometimes,is better.”The New York Times, October 20, 1950She married Eugene Jan Boissevain, the widowerof labor lawyer and war correspondent Inez Milholland.Boissevain supported her career andtook primary care of domestic responsibilities.