Stylish map of Greenwich Village, dating from the Village’s heyday as an enclave of the avant-garde, the bohemian, and the counter-cultural.

The map covers the area that extends west-east from 7th Avenue to Broadway and north-south from 14th Street to Prince Street. Drawn on a modified perspective projection, it makes use of a high view-point, with streets and buildings drawn to scale, except where, as the “About the Map” section explains, the building would be so large as to obscure other places from view. Points of interest marked on the map range from bookshops and bars, to post offices, subway stations, and theatres.

The cartouche in the bottom-right is taken from Bernard Ratzer’s 1776 ‘Plan of the City of New York in North America’, and is described by Fahey as “appropriate for a map designed to convey the character and charm of Greenwich Village”.

Greenwich Village, long a focus of “youthful rebellion and Bohemian life”, as Fahey’s “Explanation” notes, had emerged in the 1950s as a centre of the Beat movement. This was the literary subculture, embodied by Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, which sought to reject materialism and consumerism, experimenting with psychedelics, sexuality, and spirituality. Locations central to the Beat movement visible on the map include: the San Remo, a haunt of Gore Vidal, Jackson Pollock, and Tennessee Williams; the Kettle of Fish, the sight of a fight between Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol over Edie Sedgwick; and the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank on the night of his death.

Lawrence Fahey (1924-1994) began his career as an apprentice map draftsman in the US Army Map Service, in 1943, and would go on to become a fellow of the American Geographical Society and of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping. Among his work was the construction of a globe, eight-feet in diameter, for the Secretary of the US Air Force; the charting of Florida’s unmapped forests and marshes; and the production of a series of maps to raise funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America. He was also responsible for the development of the Fahey projection, in 1975.