No Alternative for The Village Voice

Hentoff and Barrett were just among the longest serving of a list of writers far too long to assemble who made The Voice, over several generations since its 1955 founding, a touchstone for against-the-grain journalism.

It was a paper so famously cantankerous that Norman Mailer, a co-founder, quit writing for it out of rage over a copy-editing error; a paper where writers like Jack Newfield and Alexander Cockburn took up chunks of the letters page with pointed barbs against each other’s politics; where the poet and columnist joel oppenheimer wrote only in lower case; where the often feverish sentences of the dance critic Jill Johnston became an adventure in themselves; where the critic Ellen Willis properly called out the largely white male staff on their feminist failures.

It was a paper whose tabloid layout lent itself to Jules Feiffer’s wistful Village characters, and the often bizarre antics of the street people depicted by his fellow cartoonists Stan Mack and Mark Alan Stamaty. Its pages carried a constant stream of photographs by The Voice’s Fred McDarrah, who managed to capture everyone from the Village political boss Carmine DeSapio to Andy Warhol hard at work in the Factory.

It was also a paper once so rich with advertising that it was often too thick to fold in half and slip under your arm. Merchants and operators of book stores, music clubs, movie houses and futon shops managed to find ample customers among its hipster-readers, despite their thin pocketbooks.

How many papers could brag that their readers literally lined up in front of newsstands in Sheridan Square and Astor Place on the Tuesday nights when it appeared in order to be among the first to get a crack at its classified ads for apartments, jobs and the notices placed by those looking for love in its back pages?

In its heyday, The Voice threw off so much revenue that it became in a way its own worst enemy, attracting investors who liked the bottom line while reviling its style and attitude. It’s hard to believe now that Rupert Murdoch, at the same time he was turning The New York Post into the city’s leading conservative beacon, was briefly The Voice’s owner. On his arrival, employees promptly organized a union and began picketing the paper’s 11th Street offices. Mr. Murdoch moved on, eventually replaced by the pet-food magnate Leonard Stern, who moved the paper’s offices into his family’s old headquarters on Cooper Square. Whenever tenants on the upstairs floors stomped about, tiny brown bird seeds lodged in the beams rained down on the keyboards of staffers below.

Even as its glory years fell behind it, the idea of The Village Voice continued to cast a spell far beyond the five boroughs, and its subscribers could be found around the country. On a trip to the blues belt of Mississippi in 2000, just before I began a second tour at the paper, I remember the wondrous gleam that came into people’s eyes when I said where I worked. “The Village Voice,” one lifelong Mississippian told me dreamily, “that’s a real newspaper.”

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