This program is part of Village Preservation’s Semiquincentennial series of programs celebrating our Revolutionary Village. The Revolutionary Village not only celebrates the founding of our country, but the exceptional role our neighborhoods played in its development and the realization of its ideals over the last 250 years and beyond.

Across four centuries and especially over the last 250 years, Greenwich Village has been a magnet for misfits and refuge for outsiders. Blacks, Italians and Irish, artists, anarchists and communists, gays and lesbians, intellectuals, eccentrics, visionaries and life’s adventurers were all drawn here. In the 20th century a Who’s Who of global culture came to “the Left Bank of America,” from Kahlil Gibran to John and Yoko, Marcel Duchamp to Jimi Hendrix. They came because this tiny speck of real estate, a neighborhood they could stroll through in twenty minutes, was the one place in America where they were not only allowed but actively encouraged to live and express themselves freely.

Join us for this special talk with John Strausbaugh, author of The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village. The renowned author will share some of the fascinating stories from the book and celebrate 250 years of this Revolutionary Village.