Vincent Livelli just turned 100 and still holds court off Washington Square Park. blissbroyard writes
Vincent Livelli, born April 9, 1920, photographed in 2020. Photo: Tina Buckman One evening toward the end of February, my phone rings and the name “Vincent Livelli” pops up on my screen. In the last year or two, a stab of fear has shot through me whenever I see Vincent’s name that it might be a neighbor calling to say he’s died.
After the war, they rented an apartment together in Greenwich Village. My father, who eventually became the chief book critic for the New York Times, wrote in his Greenwich Village memoir about bringing the Village intellectuals he’d gotten to know — Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, and Delmore Schwartz — to the Park Plaza, their favorite dance hall in Spanish Harlem, which Vincent had introduced him to. The trip, a sort of safari for “authenticity,” became weekly.
As a broke young writer living in Brooklyn in the 1990s, I’d bring a girlfriend or my current boyfriend over to Vincent’s place in a pilgrimage to Greenwich Village bohemia and the life that my father left behind — after he married my mother, in the 1960s, they moved out to a Connecticut suburb, where they raised me and my older brother.
Vincent would tell stories about his life and read snippets of the essays he was always writing. How his Genovese grandfather was kidnapped by gypsies as a teenager and forced to play the hurdy-gurdy in a circus that traveled through the German forest until he escaped in St. Petersburg and sailed to New York in 1861, where he settled among the Italians in Greenwich Village.
In another essay, he describes how “the drum began to be something I needed biologically, it seemed. It filled the empty quality of deafness the way the gigantic Wurlitzer organ at the Paramount Theatre filled the house. To the rafters.” A rotating cast of friends appeared at his frequent parties, people who worked in bookstores and auction houses, filmmakers, writers, artists, musicians. Not long ago, the model Alexa Chung showed up. I never met any family members until recently. I knew he had a son in Virginia who had addiction issues and would sometimes call to ask for money. Vincent rarely spoke about him except to say they were estranged and that he’d done his best to be a good father.
Another, bigger party was in the works for Vincent’s 100th birthday in April. It was to be down the street in the gallery of a local church; at least 50 people on the guest list to whom he could give his speech. For months, he’d been talking about how determined he was to make it to 100. Those of us in his life seemed to need this milestone as much as he did. And yet, the last time I visited Vincent, this past December, he spoke to me for the first time about what he wanted when he died.
A few weeks after Hurricane Sandy, I was back at Vincent’s. He had turned on his kitchen sink and forgotten about it, flooding the apartments below him. Paula and another neighbor banged on the door, but he couldn’t hear them. I got a call wondering if I had a key. I didn’t. Paula finally crawled out on the fire escape from another neighbor’s window and climbed down to his floor. His window was open. She brushed aside the sculptures and vases lining the sill to wiggle inside.
Lewis began collecting Vincent’s writing into a volume, which a friend with a small press had agreed to typeset and put up on Amazon, where it could be printed on demand. Vincent’s 96th birthday was approaching. I got an invitation for a party at his place that would coincide with the debut of the book. Lewis recently told me that task felt enormous — the piles of paper kept growing like a “molten volcano of literature.
Over time, the calls came more frequently, and it was getting overwhelming, maybe even for Annie. Shortly after Vincent’s 98th birthday, his cousin John helped him secure a spot at an assisted-living residence that accepted Medicaid. It was up in Spanish Harlem, with a corner room on the seventh floor overlooking Central Park. But the day before he was to move, he announced that he’d changed his mind.
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