Fifty years ago, the tenements, bars and coffee houses of Greenwich Village were the centre of a hip, bohemian society of beatniks and folkniks. That society has long dispersed, most of its landmarks erased by the onslaught of chain stores and fast food outlets. But enough of the Village remains intact that, by squinting in the Arctic freeze last week, it was almost possible to picture a 21-year-old Bob Dylan with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, braced against the cold in February 1963 for the covershot of the great Freewheelin' Bob Dylan acoustic LP.
It's not unusual to see couples re-enacting that pose on the corner of West 4th and Jones Street, says Mark Sebastian, a neighbourhood activist, musician and co-writer of the song Summer in the City for his brother John Sebastian's band, the Lovin' Spoonful.
There are other landmarks here, some recreated for the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, an acclaimed film released in the UK this weekend, which loosely tells the story of Dave Van Ronk, a young folknik who walked the same streets, played the same clubs and slept on the same sofas as the young Bobby Zimmerman, and whose memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, is the key account of life in the Village. The little of the Village that's left could be described as quaintly fossilised. Most has been erased by the unstoppable momentum of gentrification. Gerde's Folk City music venue has gone; the Gas Light, where musicians of the 60s folk revival honed their skills, is now a Vietnamese restaurant. A plaque over the road marks the former location of the San Remo, now a branch of Coffee Bean, where beatniks Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso held court.
Sitting in Caffe Reggio, one of the last surviving Italian coffee houses, Sebastian tells how he has fought for the preservation of Greenwich Village landmarks such as Provincetown Playhouse, where Eugene O'Neill plays were staged, and Edgar Allan Poe's house. The loss of the distinctive character of New York neighbourhoods is hardly new. Re-zoning and soaring commercial rents have ensured the closure of bookshops, bars and dives that were boltholes for an impoverished artistic underclass.
Sebastian considers the recent remodelling of Washington Square park egregious. In the early 60s, folk musicians, the Friends of Old Time Music, would introduce each other to new songs here. "It had all the elegance of a Parisian park, so they tried to sterilise it. Like a condo owner's dream. But if you come in and say this is raggedy and bohemian and we want it to be clean, upscale and Caucasian, you're kind of fuckin' it up."
Against expectations, Inside Llewyn Davis, though critically hailed, has been largely ignored by award-season voters, possibly because the qualities that make it a recognisable Coen Brothers film – an unsympathetic hero in a gloomy, rambling story – do not lend themselves the showbiz glitz. Friends of Van Ronk, who died in 2002, say the film-makers may have brought this on themselves. They say the film mis-characterises the man it's clearly about and misses an opportunity to dramatise the excitement of a place and time when poets, leftwing intellectuals, jazz and southern blues players, abstract expressionist painters, pop artists, and young, white devotees of protest singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger served to incubate what would become the progressive consciousness of the 60s.
The Coens' rendering of the folk scene is narrowly focused, says Michael Oliver-Goodwin, a writer who lived in the Village and knew many of the central characters in the folk community."I was so disappointed that they decided to make the character disappointed and feckless. Dave Van Ronk was just the opposite of that."
In their defence, the film-makers have said the Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, is not Van Ronk. But Oliver-Goodwin doesn't buy that. "There's so much about him that it's hard to separate them. He sings Van Ronk songs, he looks like him, he works at The Gas Light, he has one record out with Moe Asch at Folkways Records. The scene in the film when he goes to his record company to complain about not having a coat is a Van Ronk story. So it's annoying."
The film-makers present Van Ronk as someone who would heckle musicians. "One of the things about the scene was everybody knew each other and everybody was extremely supportive of each other." Indeed Dylan slept on Van Ronk's sofa for a couple of months. "It's hard to explain how much we loved Dylan. He was beloved not just because he was so talented. He was just an interesting cat and we were delighted to have him around."
Criticism of the film extends to the soundtrack, produced by T-Bone Burnett and featuring Marcus Mumford and Justin Timberlake.
Some feel it overlooks the grit of the music from the era. "It gives you the impression people were playing these pretty little nylon-string guitar ballads," says Oliver-Goodwin. "You could go into a church basement or cafe to hear all these incredible blues legends," recalls Maria Muldaur, singer of classics including Midnight at the Oasis. "After the sickening, cloying pop music of the late 50s, you can imagine how thirsty we were for something as beautiful as Doc Watson playing the banjo or Mississippi John Hurt singing a real blues song."
Muldaur, who grew up in the neighbourhood, says the Village had been a mecca for free spirits of every kind since the 1900s. "Artists, sculptors, musicians, poets – the Village was the first place I know of that people dared to be somewhat openly gay." The bohemians morphed into the beatniks, and bars abounded where one could listen to beat poetry recited with jazz accompaniments. By the late 50s, people were starting to experiment with free love and smoking pot. The streets, which were quiet and residential, became a boardwalk for tourists from the Bronx – Bronx bagel babies, as they were known. "They knew something was going on here," says Muldaur, loosely quoting Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man, "but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones?" Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (and Muldaur) were minted as folk stars. Then, after Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival in 1965, the big craze of folk music seemed to fade. the Village, Muldaur recalls, "became a sleazy theme park of itself. The hippies arrived. It went from being a place that had been low-key and inexpensive, where artists could afford to live, to a place where you had to be rich just to pose as poor."
While Inside Llewyn Davis has received a lukewarm response, many credit the Coens earlier film O Brother, Where Art Thou with sparking the current interest in folk music evident in the success of Mumford & Sons or the Lumineers.
Muldaur believes we're in the middle of the second folk music revival, with more clubs and festivals featuring folk music now then there ever were in the 1930s heyday of Guthrie or the early 60s. "I discovered an incredible underground scene about 10 years ago. So many more people playing fiddles, banjos, guitars and mandolins, forming bluegrass bands, acoustic blues bands and so on. People want something from the root. They want authenticity, and it's all without any boost from the media."
