Downtown NYC “Fun Schools”

by Richard Kostelanetz (May 2014)

Three Passionate Lives through the Sixties and Beyond (Public Affairs) focuses upon three people slightly younger than myself (b. 1940). They supposedly went to the Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. Since the LRS was the West Village companion to another school in the East Village that I attended from 1947 to 1951, Downtown Community School (DCS), this book reminded me of experience I’d not written about before.

To be precise, Elizabeth Irwin, then as now on Charlton Street south of Houston Street, is physically separate from the LRS. The latter, now as then, is a few blocks up Sixth Avenue on Bleecker Street north of Houston, which remains a cultural divide in lower Manhattan.

(2001), he cited the purportedly pernicious influence of Richard Lauterbach (1914-1950), who had been