![]() As immigrants arrived from Europe to work on the docks and in the sweatshops, Germans settled in an area between Bond Street and Astor Place that came to be called Kleindeutschland. The outwardly unassuming Greek Revival brownstone was built (with three stories) in 1840, when residential construction was sprouting all around Greenwich Village to support the city’s boom as a mercantile port and textile-manufacturing center. The outwardly unassuming Greek Revival brownstone was built in 1840, in an area then known as Kleindeutschland. Journalists writing about the World Trade Center attacks would sometimes describe 9/11 as the worst loss of life seen in New York City since “the Slocum disaster.” I looked it up and learned that the sinking of the steamboat PS General Slocum in 1904, a signal event of the early 20th century, was directly connected to 64 East 7th Street. It wasn’t until 2001, in the days after September 11, that I began to learn something of the larger history of the building. ![]() Unaware that Marianne Moore had died a couple years earlier, I was smitten with the dubious hope of seeing old lions of the Village literati hobnobbing with punks and art-rock stars, and I kept coming back to Books ’N Things looking for Patti Smith and Marguerite Young. So were the poets Allen Ginsberg and Marianne Moore, Briggs said, and “Lou, the singer in that band” - the Velvet Underground. One of the first times I went, I was flipping through a well-preserved old novel - I can’t remember the title - and noticed that it had the name Marguerite Young written neatly on the inside cover: it had come from the personal library of the author of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, who, I learned from the owner, Gertrude Briggs, was a regular at the store. I had heard from a musician friend that Patti Smith was spotted in a shop called Books ’N Things on East 7th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, a few blocks from CBGB, the punk club. As an undergraduate at New York University in the mid 1970’s, I lived on MacDougal Street and liked to imagine myself as a bohemian intellectual by browsing around what was left of the antiquarian book district, in what then was becoming known as the East Village. ![]() I had been at the site four or five times before I began to realize its importance. From the first wave of immigration from Europe to lower Manhattan, through the rise of the Beats and avant-garde performance art in the mid 20th century, to the gentrification of recent years, the same building on East 7th Street has encapsulated one era after another after another. A four-story townhouse at 64 East 7th Street has the distinction of being central to an unlikely string of important moments in New York history. This cycle of ever-altering uses within a fixed architectural framework - and with it, ever-shifting meanings and associations, as well as fluctuating use value - is a commonplace in cities everywhere, but embodied to an uncommon degree in a singular location in the east half of Greenwich Village in New York City. Old buildings stand, if they’re not razed for redevelopment, while their functions come and go: a transient newness that is perpetually renewable. Old buildings stand, if they’re not razed for redevelopment, while their functions come and go, and the character of their repurposing provides a connection to the world changing around them - a kind of transient newness that, in its transience, is perpetually renewable. The rental apartments on the residential floors above, where two generations in a family could once live together, were subdivided into studios for young singles, then sold as condos. The fabric-and-pattern shop where your grandmother got the material to sew her parlor curtains became the hi-fi store where your mom bought the stereo she took to college, and that was converted to a video outlet before the tattoo salon moved in. Trendy storefronts shutter when the trends pass. The constant is the containing vessel, the structure on the city street, and the spirit of the place is what changes over time. A spectral essence is not the constant, as it is with a soul that drifts out of one body to be reincarnated in another. The spirit life of old urban buildings works like an inversion of the transmigration of souls.
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