A deep dive into the history of Greenwich Village spurred the author and lyricist David Hajdu to begin a song cycle in ode to a single building, an otherwise nondescript four-story brick townhouse at 64th East 7th Street amid the hubbub of New York City.
It was built in 1889 as the parsonage for St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and served as home to the Reverend George Haas and his family. On 15 June 1904 more than 1,000 parishioners of St. Mark’s died in the General Slocum disaster, having chartered the steamboat for an annual summer outing along the East River where it caught fire and sank. This was the worst maritime disaster of the twentieth century until the sinking of the Titanic and remains the worst maritime disaster in New York history, with the Reverend George Haas one of the few survivors, praised for his efforts to rescue his fellow passengers on a day when he lost his wife and three children.
The building at 64th East 7th Street subsequently served as the headquarters of the Russky Golos and saw the arrest of the Communist journalist Alexander Brailovksy, a controversial figure who was briefly detained in the wake of the Wall Street bombing.
It hosted poetry readings by such names as Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky as the beatnik coffeehouse Les Deux MĆ©gots, birthed the city’s first macrobiotic restaurant which counted a young Yoko Ono as one of its waitresses and became a cherished neighbourhood bookstore patronised among others by Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Marianne Moore. Eventually the building was taken over by the fashion set as a couture consignment shop before being gutted and sold as a single family townhouse in a sign of the times.
Compelled by the storied history of the building – a spillover of Greenwich Village as it became the site of countercultural activity and bohemian cool, with 64th East 7th Street and its coffeehouse or later bookstore at the heart of the East Village as it grew up to play home to the punk rock, experimental theatre and burgeoning art movements of the seventies – Hajdu enlisted a couple of singers, an instrumental ensemble and eight composers to realise each phase of his song cycle.
Theo Bleckmann and Alice Olatuja provide the lively and colourful recitation with Dan Tepfer behind the piano, Erik Friedlander playing cello, Carl Maraghi blowing bass clarinet and Sean Smith wielding the double bass to complete the ensemble. The composer Regina Carter commences proceedings with an evocation of ‘Sailing to the Sunday School Picnic’ while samples of Allen Ginsburg and the scatological rock band The Fugs carry us into the mid-century on ‘Translation, Two Cigar Butts’ by Ted Hearne.
The East Village takes shape through the successive contributions of Kirk Nurock and Tepfer before Hajdu and Bleckmann doff their nightcaps and pour one out in memory of Lou Reed, who it turns out was well read indeed while writing all of those songs about giving head and shooting up heroin.
In fact the future Velvet Underground andĀ Coney Island BabyĀ crooner studied poetry at Syracuse University under the diligent daydreamer and rapier conversationalist Delmore Schwartz, regarding the poet and short story writer as a lifelong mentor before he began to frequent Books ‘N Things at 64th East 7th Street in the seventies. Later its owner would regale interested parties with tales of the songs he sang in the back garden of the establishment alongside Iggy Pop and the modernist wit Moore.
In the back room singing old harmonies, equal parts Wallace Stevens and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, the climax of Bleckmann’s composition ‘Lou Reed was Very Well Read’ arrives as the onrush of history nears a pivotal moment. Hajdu’s ode captures in miniature the cultural cycles and vanishing motifs of the city with Darcy James Argue and Sarah Kirkland Snider bringing us into the gilded tenuousness of the present day.
