The Village scene had begun marketing itself grotesquely to tourists by 1960

Evidence

Summer 1960, the Voice ran J. R. Goddard’s three-part series on MacDougal Street’s “fruitcake inferno.” Café Bizarre was furnished like a spook house with flying bats and black drapes. The poet Ray Bremser’s wife Bonnie worked there as a waitress: “Everything about it was gross, intentionally grotesque and designed to hustle tourists.” It was also a firetrap, she recalled, “always packed and very hot.” The management sent its provocatively ghoulish waitresses walking in the neighborhood—bleached hair, dead-white make-up, heavy eyeshadow, garish sarapes draped over purple leotards. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 261

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘fruitcake inferno’ moment — the scene’s own commercialization and tourist hustling beginning almost as soon as it existed — is a strong angle on gentrification’s origin inside the art itself, not just imposed from outside.