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| Born in Canada, Beals was devoted to documenting New York City |
In the first two decades of the 20th century, Greenwich Village became
known as a rather eccentric enclave. Artists and writers, Arnarchists and liberated women, inhabited the neighborhood. "Greenwich Village is the American parallel of the
Latin Quarter," The Dial observed in 1914, pointing out that "a member of Greenwich Village is a person of a sort and not too
closely of a place: he is a Bohemian."
Curiosity about the neighborhood filled with restaurants, theater, art, radical politics, and nightlife was high; and the Bohemian crowd itself was willing to instruct the outsider. Anna Alice Chapin's 1920 Greenwich Village was a perfect guide to all things Greenwich Village.
