both musically and attitudinally". Robert Christgau called the song "righteously nasty". Cash Box described it as a "throbbingly bittersweet funky affair in which Dylan attacks those people who wouldn’t accept him when he was an unknown." Inspiration and the significance of 4th Street There is uncertainty about which "4th Street" the title refers to, and many scholars and fans have speculated that it refers to more than one. New York City's 4th Street is at the heart of the Manhattan residential district Greenwich Village, where Dylan once lived. This area was central to the burgeoning folk music scene of the early 1960s, which centered around Dylan and many other influential singer-songwriters. For example, Gerde's Folk City was originally located at 11 West 4th Street. However, the song also may concern Dylan's stay at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where 4th Street S.E. is one of the two main roads crossing through the part of campus known as Dinkytown, where Dylan lived and performed. The song is generally assumed to ridicule Greenwich Village residents who criticized Dylan for his departure from traditional folk styles towards the electric guitar and rock music. Many of the Greenwich Village folk crowd, who had been good friends of Dylan's, took offense and assumed that the song carried personal references. Noted Village figure Izzy Young, who ran the Folklore Center, had this to say of the accusation: At least five hundred came into my place [the Folklore Center] ...and asked if it was about me. I don't know if it was, but it was unfair. I'm in the Village twenty-five years now. I was one of the representatives of the Village, there is such a thing as the Village. Dave Van Ronk was still in the Village. Dylan comes in and takes from us, uses my resources, then he leaves and he gets bitter. He writes a bitter song. He was the one who left. Other possible targets of the song's derision include Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out! magazine and a critic of Dylan's move away from traditional folk styles, and Tom Paxton, who had criticized the emerging folk rock scene of the period in a Sing Out! magazine article titled "Folk Rot" (although Dylan wrote and recorded "Positively 4th Street" months before the "Folk Rot" article was published in January 1966). Michael Schumacher, in his book There But for Fortune: The Life of