Louis Auchincloss

The Museum of the City of New York’s award-winning short documentary explores how New York City grew from a settlement of a few hundred Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans into the metropolis we know today and features animated maps and archival photographs, prints, and paintings from the Museum’s collections. Now expanded and updated, the film's final chapter captures the astonishing – if sometimes challenging – transformations the city has experienced in the first decades of the 21st century.

For more than a century, New York’s Greenwich Village was home, playground, and inspiration to many of America’s leading writers and artists—Henry James, Edith Wharton, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan, among many others. How these writers used and were shaped by the Village is the subject of this lively history, which includes readings and commentary by today’s Village authors E. L. Doctorow, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, and Louis Auchincloss.