Word: bleeckers
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Once they were hippies; now they are yuppies. Twenty-five years ago, they might have prowled Bleecker Street looking for Woody Allen or Bob Dylan or a quick fix of transcendence. Now they are back in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in search of an easy key to their past. Most of the crowd filing into the Top of the Village Gate is early middle-aged, with a sprinkling of children. The occasion could be parents' night at a progressive school. Instead it is a rite of commercial nostalgia: Beehive, two hours of songs from girl singers and girl groups...
...every so often to hear a brass quintet called the Waldo Park Players. "Where is Waldo Park?" someone once asked the tuba player. "This is Waldo Park!" he said, gesturing to the northeast corner of 53rd and Sixth. Later that summer, I ran into the Players on Bleecker St., in Greenwich Village. Someone in the crowd asked the same question. "This is Waldo Park," came the answer...
...best songs on Dylan's undervalued Street-Legal are heartbroken ballads, wounded, surly and defenseless by turns. Dylan delivers them in typically left-field fashion, backed by three women singers as he lets the songs rip like some Bleecker Street parody of a Vegas lounge lizard. In concert, with billowing shirt, plunging neckline and a crooner's microphone calisthenics, Dylan works his way through his standard repertory and sometimes looks as if he is auditioning for The Gong Show...
When Blake moved into vaudeville in 1902 at the Academy of Music on New York City's 14th Street, he still found vestiges of oppression. "Every night after the show, they backed a wagon up to the stage door on 13th Street and carted us down to Bleecker Street. In those days, the colored artists had to stay in crumb joints. We couldn't even go to the door of a good hotel...
...bounced from a handful of schools before he sneaked into the service at the illegal age of 16. After receiving a dishonorable discharge from the Army, he returned to the Village, where he scrounged jobs as a waiter at Howard Johnson's and a poster tacker at the Bleecker St. Cinema...