Greenwich Village, Manhattan, is presented as a neighborhood whose changing visibility and nightlife give shape to several distinct diary episodes in 1977. It shifts from a place remembered as quiet on Sundays to a crowded social landscape of bars, clubs, cruising, and performance. The Village is not merely a setting: Warhol’s visits there connect observation, photography, nightlife, and an unresolved fear of encountering Valerie Solanas.

A Neighborhood Transformed

On Sunday, June 19, Warhol and Victor went for drinks at Windows on the World, then walked around the Village. Warhol contrasted the scene with earlier Sundays, when the area had seemed nearly empty. Now gay bars and leather venues were conspicuous in daylight, their public presence marking a visible change in the neighborhood. He characterized much of the leather-bar scene as performance, while noting that some participants treated it more seriously; his account registers both the spectacle and his distance from it.

Summer Crowds and Photography

On July 2, Warhol and Victor returned to the Village for dinner and visited magazine shops to gather research material for Warhol’s Landscapes project. The purchases cost $36 at one shop and $17 at another, where the seller would not provide a receipt. Warhol also bought a shirt printed with a list of names associated with gay men, including Halston and Warhol himself; he noticed that Richard Avedon was on the list, though he did not understand why.

The Village was packed with people who, in Warhol’s description, could not afford Fire Island. Victor planned to have a visitor photographed for a Landscapes image, but a delay redirected the evening: the two went to Studio 54, then returned to Halston’s residence to wait. Warhol took photographs after the visitor arrived and continued until he ran out of film. By the time he opened the door, daylight had arrived; he got home at seven in the morning. The episode links the Village’s summer crowd to a wider circuit of clubs, private apartments, and photographic work.

Clubs, Crowds, and Performance

In another Village excursion, Stevie Rubell wanted to visit clubs and was considering opening one in the area. At the Cock Ring, Warhol observed that the venues had changed: back rooms had been removed, and the bars were crowded. The club was full of young dancers. The group then went to 12 West, where Rubell danced with a pillow while Warhol declined to dance, and briefly visited the Anvil, where a drag performance was underway. Across these stops, the Village nightlife appears as a succession of crowded rooms and staged entertainment, with different rules of access and social standing at each door.

Memory and Unease

The Village also carries a personal threat that interrupts its role as a nightlife destination. In July, Warhol noted that Valerie Solanas had been seen around the neighborhood. Having been shot by her in 1968, he worried that he might encounter her while cruising there with Victor, and wondered whether she would try to harm him again or approach him as a friend. No meeting occurs in the recorded episode. Instead, the possibility makes an ordinary excursion feel uncertain: the Village’s public streets become a place where the past might unexpectedly reappear.