The first time I ventured into Greenwich Village—that quintessential New York City neighborhood, celebrated for being at once countercultural and culture-defining—it was for a cupcake. Tourists and locals alike used to line up around the block at Bleeker and West 11th, waiting up to two hours for a Magnolia’s vanilla-vanilla. (That’s vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream frosting.) Today, however, we Uptowners don’t have to venture so far from home to get our hands on these gourmet Greenwich sweets since, in a series of moneymaking moves over the last several years, the quaint little Village bakeshop has expanded its operations to the residential Upper West Side, the touristy Rockefeller Center, and Grand Central Station.

The cupcakes aren’t all that’s vanilla about Greenwich Village these days either. The once scandalous fetish shops seem tamed now, sandwiched as they are between a Tasty De-Lite on one side, and an inauthentic Mexican chain inviting you to “build your own burrito” on the other.

The neighborhood retains some of its original flavor in its few remaining cobblestone streets, the famous arch in Washington Square Park, and a peppering of offbeat theaters and jazz and comedy clubs. But while one might travel down to the area a few times a year for an eccentric new play, artists themselves could never afford to live there anymore. “Trendy,” not “radical,” characterizes the Village in 2013.

John Strausbaugh’s The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues tells the story of the Village as it once was: a cultural epicenter of jazz, modernist drawing, painting, and literature, abstract expressionism, bebop, and a slew of other artistic movements. He notes that, “the artists, radicals, and misfits drawn to the Village for all those years were always a small and transient minority, though a highly visible and vocal one.” The book’s strength lies in the sheer breadth of Strausbaugh’s research, and in its engrossing portrayals of the bohemians, politicians, and thugs of downtown Manhattan.

Strausbaugh has taken on a monumental task in attempting to document 400 years of history, while going into anecdotal and often trivial detail about the dramas of his characters. The task was so monumental, in fact, that it was more than he could ultimately manage, and the book’s narrative of revolution, angst, momentary upheaval, and the steady march toward more progressive ideals is dully familiar. That which shocks one generation, unsurprisingly, does little to rattle the next.