City Spotlight:: Raise a Glass to Literary Greenwich Village
Although groundbreaking and often controversial writers like cummings, Louis Bromfield and Hemmingway frequented the speakeasy, the jazz-thrumming club also gave birth to the much less controversial Reader’s Digest, which rented out the basement to print its first issues in 1923.
Even faux-literary members of the Jazz Age called the Black Rabbit home. Joe Gould, who spent enough time at the speakeasy to have his mail sent there, often spoke of his massive in-progress work An Oral History of Our Time. Yet at the time of his death, no great manuscript surfaced, confirming a decades-old hoax. Although the Black Rabbit is no more, a reincarnation of the speakeasy sits at 91 Greenpoint Avenue in Brooklyn. According to New York magazine, “If the Coen Brothers were scouting for a Prohibition-era bar in Greenpoint, they’d stop looking once they chanced upon the Black Rabbit.” It was even recommended by the Village Voice, which perhaps lends some cred to its otherwise lacking literary history.
Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.