AMERICA’S BOHEMIA

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 306, 17 March 1928, Page 12

AMERICA’S BOHEMIA

HOME OF FREE LOVE REPLACED BY BOARDING-HOUSES Greenwich Village 1, floonM Greenwich Village the gay. tad Quarter” of New Tork. where Art u Art and Love is Free. It is to be turned into a quarter. The Village, really, is an attracts, place, full of old houses and streets and set like an oasis ) n desert —a fragment of a tleepv English country town in the' midst 0( all the raucous crudity of Kew But it was a real estate man * no made the picturesque old slum :nto "Latin Quarter.” He boosted it. so it became. The young an 3 talented, the young and merely aspiring, th« young and drifting, flocked to th. dingy old houses and picturesque n leys. But it did not become the Sreenwirs Village of tradition until the ’rubber neck wagon.” found its I'ossiMmjU and began running in the rourists m nights. Country bridal couples and small-town “sports” saw life j n t ? 7 cellar cafes with picturesque name, and felt deliciously naughty Soon came Free Love, open and flaunting, and many a young aspirant for attention who had never thought of free love before, leaped to this opportunity for self - expression Whereof there was a serious scandal One night a visitor from the countrv dined with a Greenwich Villager at one of tlue largest and most popular Bohemian restaurants. “Hello.” said the ecuntryman. “there’s a couple from ths old horn, town—there in the corner.” “Yes.” said the villager, “Johnni, Jones and Sally Smith. One of our best-known pairs of free lovers. Thev don’t believe in marriage but .** j “Free love, your eye!” retorted the countryman, “they were married eight years ago last June by the Reverend Albert T. Jenkins at the Second Congregational Church. Don’t I know* I one of the ushers?”