On the evening of Saturday, 13 January 1917 the steamer Montserrat entered New York harbour. The vast majority of the 364 passengers were Spanish, a mixture of immigrants and visitors. Four were Russian: Leon Trotsky, his companion Natalya Sedova, and their two young sons. They would only stay for just over two months, but Trotsky's presence would galvanise socialist New York, just at the moment that the Revolution triumphed in Russia. One passenger was an Englishman, travelling as Avenarius F. Lloyd, though better known now as Arthur Cravan. Trotsky and Cravan chatted, but they would approach New York in very different ways. Trotsky's friends had arranged for the family to spend their first night in the Astor Hotel, where Ruben Dario had seen the writing on the wall. Cravan slept in Central Park before seeking out Robert J. Coady, who had already published some of Cravan's poems in his magazine, The Soil. He then moved into the apartment of a new Greenwich Village friend, the painter Arthur Frost, at 6 East 14th Street and after his friend Francis Picabia came back to New York in April he started frequenting the Arensburgs’ salon.3 Trotsky would soon spend his days working at the office of Novyi Mir, on St Mark's Place in the East Village, just on the edge of bohemian Greenwich Village, though representative of the very different world of the Lower East Side, where Russian and Yiddish predominated.

Two weeks later saw the start of the trial of Margaret Sanger and Fania Mindell for opening a birth control clinic over in Brooklyn. Fania Mindell was a set designer who ran a shop called ‘Little Russia’ in the Village but as a radical feminist and gifted translator she became a valued assistant to Sanger. Mindell was found guilty on obscenity charges for selling the pamphlet, What Every Girl Should Know. A rich supporter paid the $50 fine, but the decision was reversed on appeal, a first victory in the birth control campaign. Having turned down the offer of a suspended sentence, Sanger herself was convicted and sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment at the Queens County Penitentiary.