La Voz de Galicia – December 4, 2020 →
On each of our walks, Xan and I try to learn curiosities about this neighborhood we call our own because we have spent seventeen years living here. In Greenwich Village, there is always a story that takes us back to Galicia since the East as well as the West Village welcomed immigrants from our country during the twentieth century. The historic restaurants run by Galicians at the heart of Jazz and the LGBTQI+ movement makes one imagine the stories of adaptation of those who arrived here with nothing more than hope. And clubs such as La Nacional help us understand the strong bonds that joined Galicians in New York with the convulsed history of Spain in the twentieth century.
The point is that during our stroll, like so many other times, we walked by Webster Hall. And I suddenly remembered the fact that this historic building, witness to the history of rock, belongs to one of the Galician centers in New York City. Unity Gallega Inc. bought Webster hall in 1969, and for a time based the activities of Casa Galicia there. And when Galician immigration began gravitating towards Queens, they decided to rent the Hall in Manhattan to create an equivalent space in that other new Galicia.
Most beautiful for me was thinking that, during more than a decade, Casa Galicia shared the building with the legendary Ritz lounge where Tina Turner, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton played…And in my walk with Xan, taken like so many other mornings, I imagined all the heroes of my adolescence exiting at dawn the same building where, also at daybreak, a dozen Galicians entered to prepared their feasts, and I thought then that the world is as small as it is immense.
