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25 After the explosion of the Stonewall riots in 1969, which ushered in the new era of gay freedom and openness, it seemed as if the police, as of old, were encouraging gay life to move out to the edges of the city, out of sight, in particular to the industrial West Village, where freight companies still parked their fleets of trucks on the streets along the Hudson River waterfront, and the great pier sheds, which had once resounded with stevedores unloading ships, stood dark, empty and rotting. There, the sexual energy and the creativity released by gay liberation took over the parked trucks and the derelict piers. This was always somewhat of a sex scene, with stevedores looking for blowjobs after work, but now the West Village waterfront was an orgiastic display unlike any seen before. It was in the midst of this lawless but fast-changing neighborhood, in the commercial wasteland along the Hudson River, that Westbeth, a subsidized artists’ housing project, was opened up in 1970, where Old Bohemia would make its last stand in the Village. 266 267 During the seventies and eighties, as Village rents soared, it’s no wonder that most of the younger artists bypassed the gentrified Village and gravitated to what used to be called the Lower East Side, by then renamed the classier-sounding East Village, and beyond that to enclaves in Brooklyn and Queens. But Neil and I managed to hang on by getting a loft studio in Westbeth, where many Village artists and writers found a refuge. A square-block cluster of buildings, Westbeth was formerly the Bell Telephone Labs where the Talkies and Hi Fi were pioneered. Less known is the fact that during WWII it was also part of the Manhattan Project where the Norden bombsight was designed with which my B-17 Flying Fortress and thousands of others bombed Nazi Germany. Somewhere in the maze of the basement is said to be a huge electromagnet that couldn’t be removed, and perhaps accounts for the prevalence of twins being born to the younger residents and employees. On one side of the building is still a gash, an open corridor two floors high, where the tracks of the Hudson Elevated Railroad once went through, and it was on land left from the removal of the elevated tracks to the south of Westbeth that the neighboring Jane Jacobs houses were built, which, with the decline of shipping at the nearby piers, began the revival of this waterfront district for residential use. The conversion of the building to living quarters, designed by the architect Richard Meier, preserved the unusual wavy ceilings, which poet Tom Schmidt’s clever daughter Alyssa, visiting Neil and me from the West Coast, said was like living inside a scallop shell. Giving the thirteen-story building a distinctive outline is a red-tiled Florentine palazzo perched on top, which is used by the Merce Cunningham dance company, so that our elevators are always full of healthy young dancers coming and going. The ravaged and arthritic, but still elegant, Maestro himself is also frequently to be seen hobbling through the lobby. If Yaddo was a good place to get to know artists, Westbeth turned out to be full of artists I’d known over the years, including my favorite painter Herman Rose and his actress wife Elia Braca who has often shared programs with me reading my poetry. Elia and I collaborated most recently in a celebration of Westbeth and Greenwich Village, which featured the work of two poets related by their pure bohemian spirit—Jean Garrigue, who had moved to Westbeth before she died in 1972, and a similarly passionate figure of a generation before, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Elia Braca is a darkly exotic woman with large Middle-Eastern eyes and a tumble of black hair—her mother was Turkish and her father an Egyptian fortune teller, the Professor Cairo of the Oscar Wilde circle. She’s an unusual contrast to her artist husband Herman, a schlemiel of a Brooklyn Jew who hardly knows what day it is, but in his letters reveals his original, probing, and deeply thoughtful mind. Herman can work on his paintings for years with meticulous brush strokes, so I was lucky he only took a year for his first portrait of me with guitar, when I bicycled in from Long Island. I later posed for his “Orpheus in Central Park,” now in the Hirschhorn Collection in Washington D...

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