![]() Legends like feminist Susan Brownmiller, literary darling Vivian Gornick, hip-hop arbiter Touré, and cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Lynda Barry walked their wits weekly in the paper, which for years was thick with ads. Political author Michael Tomasky went on to write for New York, The Daily Beast, and The Guardian. Editor Bill Bastone left the paper after starting the muckraking website Smoking Gun. Legendary director Jonas Mekas was its first film critic. Peter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker art critic, and Guy Trebay, the heady New York Times style reporter, gained momentum there, as did Times art critic Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, the jester critic of New York magazine (and another Pulitzer winner). Pulitzer Prize winners Hilton Als and Colson Whitehead wrote for the Voice, as did Pulitzer nominee Nat Hentoff. Its publishers, including Clay Felker, Rupert Murdoch, and Carter Burden, had clout, and its readers had attitude. It created the Obie Awards for off-Broadway theater, covered marginalized cultures, and nabbed interviews with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Che Guevara. And if you wanted a takedown of the powerful, including landlords, city officials, and Donald Trump, you could trust the Voice to do so with precision and panache.Ĭo-founded in 1955 by Norman Mailer-who quit writing his abrasive column because an editor made a proofreading error, mistaking “nuisance” for “nuance”-the Voice was one of the nation’s first alternative weeklies and was considered the most successful for decades. Suburban and city kids used the tabloid paper with the blue logo for music reviews and underground concert listings, while serious theater, film, and book lovers depended on Voice critics to read between the lines and apply both cynicism and semiotic theory. They relied on the fierce alternative weekly’s listings for apartment shares and quirky personals ads. Once upon a time in New York City, before Craigslist and Grindr, readers would wait at newspaper stands on Wednesdays for The Village Voice to arrive. The Voice space on Cooper Square will reportedly be taken over by Grace Church School, which recently renovated the adjacent 38-50 Cooper Square into a high school space.Writer Bob Morris reflects on the alternative weekly golden era with Hilton Als, Lynn Yaeger, Michael Musto, and Vince Aletti. Eventually Hartz departed the East Village and the spaces were taken over by other commercial tenants. By the 1930s, this warren of interconnected buildings formed the home of the growing Hartz Mountain pet supply company – which had its beginnings when a German immigrant managed to sell 5,000 singing canaries to the nearby Wanamaker department store. Over its history, the structure was gradually connected internally with the buildings surrounding it at 32 Cooper Square, 419-421 Lafayette Street, and 38 Cooper Square. It was constructed with a cast-iron frame covered in sandstone and brick. The building on Cooper Square that the Voice is leaving was built as a warehouse in 1894 and is part of the landmarked NoHo Historic District. The Voice, a longtime fixture in our neighborhood, was founded in Greenwich Village in 1955, set up shop in Sheridan Square by the 1960s, and moved to its recent location on Cooper Square in 1991. The Villager reported today that the Village Voice has vacated its office at 36 Cooper Square and decamped 80 Maiden Lane far downtown.
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