Greenwich Village, or simply the Village, is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village also contains several subsections, including the West Village west of Seventh Avenue and the Meatpacking District in the northwest corner of Greenwich Village.
Its name comes from Groenwijck, Dutch for "Green District". In the 20th century, Greenwich Village was known as an artists' haven, the bohemian capital, the cradle of the modern LGBTQ movement, and the East Coast birthplace of both the Beat Generation and counterculture of the 1960s. Greenwich Village contains Washington Square Park, as well as two of New York City's private colleges, New York University (NYU) and The New School. In later years it has been associated with hipsters.Greif, Mark. "What Was the Hipster?",New York, October 22, 2010. Accessed April 2, 2023. "Hippie itself was originally an insulting diminutive of hipster, a jab at the sloppy kids who hung around North Beach or Greenwich Village after 1960 and didn't care about jazz or poetry, only drugs and fun."Yaeger, Lynn. "Why the Coolest Girls Still Go to New York City's Greenwich Village",Vogue, Spring 2017. Accessed April 2, 2023. "For decades they have come here—by plane and train, Greyhound bus and thumb—bright young things in search of a cooler, more meaningful, more creative life. Call them what you will: hipsters, rebels, rule breakers, iconoclasts—these musicians and poets, peace activists and painters, have for more than a century flown their freak flags in the historic alleyways of Greenwich Village."
Greenwich Village is part of Manhattan Community District 2, and is patrolled by the 6th Precinct of the New York City Police Department. Greenwich Village has undergone extensive gentrification and commercialization; the four ZIP Codes that constitute the Village – 10011, 10012, 10003, and 10014 – were all ranked among the ten most expensive in the United States by median housing prices in 2014, according to Forbes, with residential property sale prices in the West Village neighborhood typically exceeding US in 2017.West Village Housing, "trulia.com" Accessed January 13, 2016.
Geography Boundaries
The neighborhood is bordered by Broadway to the east, the North River (part of the Hudson River) to the west, Houston Street to the south, and 14th Street to the north. It is roughly centered on Washington Square Park and New York University. Adjacent to Greenwich Village are the neighborhoods of NoHo and the East Village to the east, SoHo and Hudson Square to the south, and Chelsea and Union Square to the north. The East Village was formerly considered part of the Lower East Side and has never been considered a part of Greenwich Village.F.Y.I. , "When did the East Village become the East Village and stop being part of the Lower East Side?", Jesse McKinley, The New York Times, June 1, 1995. Retrieved August 26, 2008. The western part of Greenwich Village is known as the West Village; the dividing line of its eastern border is debated but commonly cited as Seventh Avenue. The Far West Village is another sub-neighborhood of Greenwich Village that is bordered on its west by the Hudson River and on its east by Hudson Street.
Into the early 20th century, Greenwich Village was distinguished from the upper-class neighborhood of Washington Square—based on the major landmark of Washington Square Park or Empire Ward in the 19th century.
Encyclopædia Britannica'''s 1956 article on "New York (City)" states (under the subheading "Greenwich Village") that the southern border of the Village is Spring Street, reflecting an earlier understanding. Today, Spring Street overlaps with the modern, newer SoHo neighborhood designation, while the modern Encyclopædia Britannica cites the southern border as Houston Street.
Grid plan
As Greenwich Village was once a rural, isolated hamlet to the north of the 17th century European settlement on Manhattan Island, its street layout is more organic than the planned grid pattern of the 19th century grid plan (based on the Commissioners' Plan of 1811). Greenwich Village was allowed to keep the 18th century street pattern of what is now called the West Village: areas that were already built up when the plan was implemented, west of what is now Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue, resulted in a neighborhood whose streets are dramatically different, in layout, from the ordered structure of the newer parts of Manhattan.
Many of the neighborhood's streets are narrow and some curve at odd angles. This is generally regarded as adding to both the historic character and charm of the neighborhood. In addition, as the meandering Greenwich Street used to be on the Hudson River shoreline, much of the neighborhood west of Greenwich Street is on landfill, but still follows the older street grid. When Sixth and Seventh Avenues were extended in the early 20th century, they were built diagonally to the existing street plan, and many older, smaller streets had to be demolished.
Unlike the streets of most of Manhattan above Houston Street, streets in the Village are typically named, not numbered. While some of the formerly named streets (including Factory, Herring and Amity Streets) are now numbered, they still do not always conform to the usual grid pattern when they enter the neighborhood. For example, West 4th Street runs east–west across most of Manhattan, but runs north–south in Greenwich Village, causing it to intersect with West 10th, 11th, and 12th Streets before ending at West 13th Street.
A large section of Greenwich Village, made up of more than 50 northern and western blocks in the area up to 14th Street, is part of a Historic District established by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The District's convoluted borders run no farther south than 4th Street or St. Luke's Place, and no farther east than Washington Square East or University Place. Redevelopment in that area is severely restricted, and developers must preserve the main façade and aesthetics of the buildings during renovation.
Most of the buildings of Greenwich Village are mid-rise apartments, 19th century row houses, and the occasional one-family walk-up, a sharp contrast to the high-rise landscape in Midtown and Downtown Manhattan.
Political representation
Politically, Greenwich Village is in New York's 10th congressional district.Congressional District 10 , New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment. Accessed May 5, 2017.New York City Congressional Districts , New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment. Accessed May 5, 2017. It is also in the New York State Senate's 25th district,Senate District 25 , New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment. Accessed May 5, 2017.2012 Senate District Maps: New York City , New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment. Accessed November 17, 2018. the New York State Assembly's 66th district,Assembly District 66 , New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment. Accessed May 5, 2017.2012 Assembly District Maps: New York City , New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment. Accessed November 17, 2018. and the New York City Council's 3rd district.Current City Council Districts for New York County , New York City. Accessed May 5, 2017.
History Early years
In the 16th century, Lenape referred to its farthest northwest corner, by the cove on the Hudson River at present-day Gansevoort Street, as Sapokanikan ("tobacco field"). The land was cleared and turned into pasture by the Dutch and their enslaved Africans, who named their settlement (also spelled , "North district", equivalent to 'Northwich/Northwick'). In the 1630s, Governor Wouter van Twiller farmed tobacco on here at his "Farm in the Woods". The English conquered the Dutch settlement of New Netherland in 1664, and Greenwich Village developed as a hamlet separate from the larger New York City to the south on land that would eventually become the Financial District. In 1644, the eleven Dutch African settlers in the area were granted half freedoms after the first Black legal protest in America. All received parcels of land in what is now Greenwich Village, in an area that became known as the Land of the Blacks.
The earliest known reference to the Village's name as "Greenwich" dates back to 1696, in the will of Yellis Mandeville of Greenwich, who before relocating to Manhattan had long resided by another settlement of that same name on Long Island; however, the Village was not mentioned in the city records until 1713. Sir Peter Warren began accumulating land in 1731 and built a frame house capacious enough to hold sittings of the New York General Assembly when smallpox rendered the city dangerous in 1739 and subsequent years; on one occasion in 1746, the house of Mordecai Gomez was used. Warren's house, which survived until the Civil War era, overlooked the North River from a bluff; its site on the block bounded by Perry and Charles Streets, Bleecker and West 4th Streets, can still be recognized by its mid-19th century rowhouses inserted into a neighborhood still retaining many houses of the 1830–37 boom. The Greek federal style stretched to 11th street as well, the style being implemented in townhouses like the one at 11 West 11th Street.
Newgate Prison From 1797 until 1829, the bucolic village of Greenwich was the location of New York State's first penitentiary, Newgate Prison, on the Hudson River at what is now West 10th Street, near the Christopher Street pier. The building was designed by Joseph-François Mangin, who would later co-design New York City Hall. Although the intention of its first warden, Quaker prison reformer Thomas Eddy, was to provide a rational and humanitarian place for retribution and rehabilitation, the prison soon became an overcrowded and pestilent place, subject to frequent riots by the prisoners which damaged the buildings and killed some inmates. By 1821, the prison, designed for 432 inmates, held 817 instead, a number made possible only by the frequent release of prisoners, sometimes as many as 50 a day. Since the prison was north of the New York City boundary at the time, being sentenced to Newgate became known as being "sent up the river". This term became popularized once prisoners started being sentenced to Sing Sing Prison, in the town of Ossining upstream of New York City., p. 53
Isaacs-Hendricks House
The oldest house remaining in Greenwich Village is the Isaacs-Hendricks House, at 77 Bedford Street (built 1799, much altered and enlarged 1836, third story 1928). When the Church of St. Luke in the Fields was founded in 1820, it stood in fields south of the road (now Christopher Street) that led from Greenwich Lane (now Greenwich Avenue) down to a landing on the North River. In 1822, a yellow fever epidemic in New York encouraged residents to flee to the healthier air of Greenwich Village, and afterwards many stayed. The future site of Washington Square was a potter's field from 1797 to 1823 when up to 20,000 of New York's poor were buried here, and still remain. The handsome Greek revival rowhouses on the north side of Washington Square were built about 1832, establishing the fashion of Washington Square and lower Fifth Avenue for decades to come. Well into the 19th century, the district of Washington Square was considered separate from Greenwich Village.