JOURNALISM

New York in the '50s

Strolling Among 'the Wise and Honest'

For Dan Wakefield, the great days, the days to look back on wistfully as the best of times, are the 1950's. Now, there are a lot of different 1950's: the Eisenhower years, the years of Milton Berle's Tuesday night television show, the years of Elvis, the years of Hula-Hoops and the years of Levittowns. None of these are the Wakefield 1950's.

Dan Wakefield's 1950's, recalled in his new book, "New York in the 50's," (Houghton Mifflin/Seymore Lawrence, $24.95) are a slice of time in Greenwich Village. At 60 years old, the writer of the best-selling novels "Going All the Way" and "Starting Over" as well as "Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem," the pioneering survey of Puerto Rican settlement in New York, has become a Boswell of the heady days when art and literature had a singular flowering in the Village, which means in American culture, which, in those golden days of American influence, means in the world.

New York in the Fifties, Special Limited Edition, $20.00

"The 50's were the last era of the word as the honored art, still powerful then in a way that movies and television are now," he said during a recent walk through the Village in search of his beloved decade.

The stroll was taken not only to put an interviewer in the picture of what Mr. Wakefield was recalling in "New York in the 50's," but also to let Mr. Wakefield refresh himself, to steep himself in the look and the smell and the sound of the Village for a novel he is working on. And finally, just to look back and savor a past that is constantly present within him.

"I've always felt that this was one of the richest scenes or periods," he said. "The 50's were different from the 30's and the 40's. There was a real upsurge after World War II, never a time when we had such a flowering of literature, theater, music and painting. All at once that great flowering of creativity. Politically, it didn't yet have the effect, but Dorothy Day and C. Wright Mills were prophets."

His interest in the 50's, he said, is a fixation that makes sense to any observer of American culture. The 50's weren't the turbulent 60's, for sure, but Mr. Wakefield's thesis is that they were also years when young people burdened with creativity and expression found voluminous liberation in New York and were, perhaps, the pioneers who led to the uproarious 60's.

This particular day's journey into the past began at the arch in Washington Square, where Mr. Wakefield looked at the inscription high up on its southern side: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hands of God." Those were the words of George Washington, and they struck a chard in this pilgrim to the past. "I always felt he was talking about the Village," Mr. Wakefield said.

Young Dan Wakefield, an Indianapolis boy then in his early 20's, came to New York, to attend Columbia University, without realizing he was following in some of the oldest cultural footsteps in the in the country, the ones that for 200 years led bright young men and women to New York, some to find themselves, some to lose themselves.

Some thought they were leaving "back there" for good, renouncing mom's apple pie for the sophistication of the big city. They settled, many of them, in Greenwich Village, where they formed a group almost as distinct as the Italians around them. One of his first Village quarters was at 10th and Bleecker streets, and Mr. Wakefield recalled how he and his roommate sponsored parties on the roof, a "tar beach" without railing or other safeguard against a plunge into the street.

The walk veered down quiet Bedford Street, past Chumley's, a bookish drinking establishment where Mr. Wakefield's predecessors in custom included Hemingway and his circle.

And then there is the ultimate 50's shrine, the White Horse Tavern, at Hudson and West 11th streets. Outside, there were tables for diners and drinkers, a latter-day innovation. But inside, the rooms still had the familiar dark, wooden decor, sedulously ungentrified, zealously unadorned but for one plaque recalling that is was here that the great Dylan Thomas sat and drank. And drank and drank.

"It doesn't say that this is where he took his last drink before he died," observed Mr. Wakefield, without sentimentality but with affection for the great poet. "It was a drinking age. When I wrote the book, I never brought the subject up, but everybody asked, how did we survive? Joan Didion wrote that when she left New York, it was like getting up from a six-year hangover."

The White Horse, he said, represented the best of a small town's coziness. "Sitting at the table was like sitting in on a jazz group," he said as he sipped iced coffee and observed that this was one drink he never lifted a glass of at the White Horse in those days. "All the different kinds of people there. Partly it was the intellectual world, and then there were the Clancy Brothers, with those Irish songs. Sometimes James Baldwin came."

Stepping lively down Bleecker Street and the architecturally unimpressive low-lying houses that had somehow escaped the wrecking-ball 80's, Mr. Wakefield observed: "The 50's seem amazingly recreated. I'm not sure I'd be coming back to it if it was unrecognizable."

Richard F. Shepard - The New York Times

New York in the 50's, Paperback - $14.95

New York in the Fifties, Special Limited Edition - $20.00