Romany Marie Totally Explained

Everything about Romany Marie totally explained

Marie Marchand (May 17 1885—February 20 1961), known as Romany Marie, was a Greenwich Village doyenne and restaurateur who played a key role in bohemianism from the early 1900s through the late 1950s in New York City's Manhattan.

Romany Marie's cafés

Her cafés, which encompassed the functions of bistro and salon (gathering) for the bohemian intelligentsia, were popular restaurants which attracted the core of the Greenwich Village cultural scene, "hot spots for creative types," which she considered centers for her "circle of thinking people," a circle which she'd sought since 1901 when she arrived at the age of sixteen in the United States from Romanian Moldavia.
   They were among the most interesting cafés of New York's Bohemia and had an extensive following. More salons than taverns, they were places for the interchange and pollination of ideas, places of polarity and warmth, Many regulars such as inventor Buckminster Fuller and sculptors Isamu Noguchi and David Smith compared them to the cafés of Paris.
   Romany Marie herself, described as attractive and unusual, lively and generous, and a Village legend, and was well known and beloved.
   She became a leader in Greenwich Village, and not only among the habitués of her own establishments. For example, in June 1921, when there were public protests after the Washington Square Association brought charges against "the tea rooms and dancing places of the village" for immorality, The Times credited a local pastor's letter of approval to ‘Dear Romany Marie’ as the turning point in the crisis.

Habitués

Painter John French Sloan was a regular from 1912 until 1935 when he returned to Chelsea. His vivid portrait Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the famous quatrain that begins My candle burns at both ends, which at the time she called "My Candle" and later re-titled "First Fig," at Romany Marie's during a visit with Charles Edison, Carolyn Hawkins and others in 1915 or 1916. Eugene O'Neill was one of many needy artists whom Romany Marie fed when they couldn't pay for meals. She was said to have kept O'Neill alive the architect and muralist James Monroe Hewlett, the only people present in the restaurant when they arrived were Romany Marie and O'Neill: "The entire evening was devoted to conversation with those two unique individuals." Isamu Noguchi first visited in October 1929. He had been in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship and had been working for several months with Constantin Brâncuşi, Brancusi, like Marie, was of Romanian heritage and an old friend of hers in Paris and New York;
When Stefansson met Ruth Gruber at Romany Marie's in 1931 or 1932 after her return from the University of Cologne at age 20 with her doctorate, he hired her to translate German documents which he needed for his study of the Arctic countries for the War Department. Years later, in 1941, in the "elite chambers" of the American Museum of Natural History as when camped in a field hunting for fossils or hanging out with the bohemians at Romany Marie's. Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Canning Miller was a regular, as was her husband Holger Cahill, whose selection of paintings from Mark Tobey's 1929 solo exhibition at Romany Marie's was a turning point in Tobey's career. Lionel Abel, who came to the Village in 1929, was one of those who depended on Romany Marie's generosity.held forth with poets and non-poets alike including Paul Robeson, Edgard Varèse, and Marsden Hartley.

Diego Rivera

Bertrand Russell

Howard Scott

Kate Smith

Alfred Stieglitz

William Zorach

Locations

The first location, rented in 1914 near Sheridan Square at 133 Washington Place on the third floor of a four story building, was reached by climbing one outside staircase and two inside staircases.
From 1915 through 1923, Romany Marie's was in a tiny house at 20 Christopher Street, which held the Marie's Crisis restaurant, named for its owner Marie Du Mont and Paine's Crisis pamphlet.

40 West 8th Street (St. Mark's Place).

64 Washington Square South (West 4th Street). on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 8th Street where Fifth Avenue originates at Washington Square.

Biography

Romany Marie Marchand was a Jewish Romanian American who was born in Moldavia Marie, her sister Rose (who married Leonard Dalton Abbott in 1915), their brother David (the youngest), and their mother Esther (who was known as Mother Yuster and whose portrait was painted by Robert Henri), were all active in the Modern Schools (Ferrer Schools) in New York City and in Stelton, Piscataway Township, New Jersey.
Romany Marie's "centers" for her "circle of thinking people" began in 1912 in their three-room apartment on St. Mark's Place in the East Village,
Author Ben Reitman included Romany Marie among the characters in his fictional autobiography Sister of the Road (1937), which Martin Scorsese adapted for the 1972 film Boxcar Bertha. In the mysteries Free Love and Murder Me Now (2001), which are set in the Village in the early 1920s during Prohibition, author Annette Meyers included both Romany Marie and her husband A. D. Marchand, called Damon, among the characters. Journalist Robert Schulman, a co-founder of the Louisville Eccentric Observer, was Romany Marie Marchand's nephew. During his youth in New York City he visited her frequently in Greenwich Village. In adulthood, whenever he was in the city, he recorded oral history interviews with her and with many of her devotees. Schulman, whose biography of John Sherman Cooper was published in 1976, published his biography of "that bohemian aunt... with little regard for profit but with central regard for giving unconventional and creative people a place at little cost to talk, think, perform and ponder" in 2006. He died at the age of 91 on January 6 2008.

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