“… Hail, hail, the gang’s all here: a galaxy of scoundrels, artists and geniuses commingle in John Strausbaugh’s ambitious 600-plus-page history of Greenwich Village. Strausbaugh — who presided over this newspaper’s ‘Weekend Explorer’ series on New York City and wrote what felt like the entirety of The New York Press in its 1990s heyday — turns a collection of stories and profiles into something less like a textbook than a party spinning happily out of control. … And he has a great ear. Telling the story of Off Off Broadway’s creation, Strausbaugh mentions work like ‘Awful People Are Coming Over So We Must Be Pretending to Be Hard at Work and Hope They Will Go Away.’ He cites the folk musician Dave Van Ronk on what Van Ronk expected to see when he arrived in the Village: ‘bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters and nymphomaniacs whose ideology was slightly to the…