Bank Street, NYC

An easy and entertaining memoir of 200 small pages from a lady, a little younger than I, born in 1955, who was brought up in Bank Street in Greenwich Village in New York, retaining a foothold there ever since. 

I had thought that I had been prompted to buy this book by an article in the NYRB, but online inspection fails to turn it up. And nothing online at the TLS or LRB either. So I think it must have been an advertisement in the NYRB which prompted purchase more or less blind from Amazon towards the end of July. Which resulted in an attractively produced book, which claimed in the front to have been manufactured in the USA, but which included a mention of what appears to be a print on demand operation in Milton Keynes in the back. Print on demand would certainly explain the poor quality of the illustrations – including the absence of a map. In that above, the red spot marks the middle of Bank Street, in West Village.

Florio was a proper native, the child of a pair of second generation immigrants from Italy who made a living out of opera. So she is not able able to trace her roots in Bank Street back through many generations, but at least she is not some Johnny-come-lately; she is qualified to write a memoir, of the vanishing world of Greenwich Village as a bridge between blue collar and arty New York.

I associate to London’s loss of docks and industry over the same period, and I dare say there are similar streets in East London, although I suspect you would not be able to find quite the same mix as was generated in the rather special circumstances of Greenwich Village, running out from mid-town onto what were the piers and docks on the Hudson River, the home of various rough trades in the 1960’s of Florio’s formative years. Stoke Newington? Soho? Covent Garden? Kings Cross? Hoxton Square? Bermondsey?

An engaging tale of the people and places of Greenwich Village, and it seems that Florio was well suited, being arty and something of a gypsy herself. I dare say she has even smoked the odd joint in her day. But in the end rather unsatisfying. A large collection of interesting – but quite possibly quite difficult people – and I got rather lost in among all the names. And I would have preferred her to have told us a bit more of her story, rather than scattering titbits through the pages. And perhaps a bit more of the story of the street itself, rather than lots of anecdotes about the people who lived there – which is not quite the same thing.

Perhaps it would have worked better for me as a picture book, with lots of nicely chosen illustrations, old and new, scattered through the text. The one above is taken from a New York estate agent.

I close with a mention of one Earl Browder, who was brought up on a Kansas farm that failed, and who learned first hand how the system then treated the workers. Maybe the newly hatched Soviets did have the right idea? He became a big cheese in the Communist Party of America, was hounded by Hoover’s men and, contrariwise, was made a confidant by Roosevelt who, it seems, made use of him as a sort of personal envoy to Stalin. I learned that, contrary to received wisdom, the Soviets did not always look after their own. In this book because his brother Bill, another communist with curious connections, spent most the early 1940’s in Bank Street.

References

Reference 1: Growing up in Bank Street: A Greenwich Village Memoir – Donna Florio – 2021

Reference 2: https://donnaflorio.com/. 

Reference 3: https://www.ingramcontent.com/publishers/print. 'About Ingram: For A World That's Reading: A dedicated partner for publishers, retailers, educators, and libraries, we are working towards a vision of the world where anyone, no matter where they are, has easy access to the books they want’. Also known as Lightning Source Ltd of Milton Keynes.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Street_(Manhattan).