The Birth of "The Village."

When the Greenwich Village section of New York City (the part of Manhattan below Fourteenth Street and above Houston Street) was officially designated a residential area in 1916, it was already home to some of the most influential artists and intellectuals in the city. They had moved there partly because the neighborhood was inexpensive — rent for a single room was typically eight dollars a month, or an entire floor of a brownstone house was available for about thirty dollars a month — and partly because of its bohemianism, the prevailing tolerance of a wide variety of lifestyles. The Village was also gaining a reputation as the American Left Bank, a place like the section of Paris where the brightest minds in politics, journalism, and the arts came together. Between 1913 and 1919 Greenwich Village, less than...