The city’s most famous “neighborhood,” Greenwich Village is also the city’s largest “historic district,” which means that any exterior alteration to the district’s more than 4,300 buildings must be approved by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. The 4,300 or so properties include a few architectural masterworks, and many lovely 19th Century townhouses as well as many tenement buildings and parking lots.

The historic district’s boundaries are, roughly, from Washington Square East and the east side of University Place to 12th and 13th Streets to Ganesvoort Street to Horatio Street to Washington Street to Perry Street to Greenwich Street to Barrow Street to Hudson Street to St. Luke’s Place to the Avenue of the Americas to Barrow Street to West Fourth Street and back to Washington Square East.

The official boundaries actually exclude several areas that are popular and historically considered to be in the “Village” including Bleecker Street, Cornelia Street and much of MacDougal Street. For decades, the “Village” has traditionally included what is known now as the West Village and the Meat Packing districts.

The “unofficial” boundaries now generally recognized for Greenwich Village is the area bounded by the south side of 14th Street, the north side of Houston Street, the east side of Seventh Avenue and Seventh Avenue South and the west side of Broadway.

In the 16th Century, the Village was a marshland called Sapokanikan by Native Americans who camped and fished in the trout stream known as Minetta Brook. In the early 17th Century, Dutch settlers cleared pastures and referred to the area as Noortwyck where freed slaves farmed parcels of land. Under the English who conquered New Amsterdam in 1664, the area gradually changed into a country town and was first called Grin’wich in 1713 Common Council records. Sir Peter Warren, Vice-Admiral of the British Navy and commander of its New York fleet, would soon own a vast land tract as did Captain Robert Richard Randall.

After the Revolutionary War, the area’s population increased as outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever in Lower Manhattan drove residents northwards. The potter’s field and public gallows on the present site of Washington Square Park was closed in 1826 and the park’s northern perimeter was soon billed with impressive Greek Revival townhouses that still exist.

In their great book, “The A.I.A. Guide to New York City, Fourth Edition,” Elliot Willensky and Norval White provided the following introduction to the area:

"Greenwich village is a concentration of contrasts in a city of contrasts. But in the Village’s case, these contrasts have long been synonymous with its identity: Bohemia. This is less apparent today than when both aspiring and successful artists and writers gravitated to this crooked-streeted, humanely scaled, out-of-the-way, low-rent enclave passed over by the city’s growth northward.

"Since around 1900 the Village has not only been a proving ground for new ideas among its creative residents but also a symbol of the forbidden, the free life—the closest thing to Paris that we had in this country. With the opening up of Sixth and Seventh Avenues and the subways beneath them, the area became even more accessible. After the hiatus caused by the Depression and World War II, the Village once again attracted interest, this time from high-rise housing developers, from smaller entrepreneurs who created little studio apartments with minispaces inversely proportional to their high rents, and from tenants who left the ‘duller’ (meaning the outer) parts of the city to taste forbidden fruit. Creators were swept out by observers (middle-class doctors, dentists, cloak and suitors and other vicarious residents). The people of the visible Village changed—leaving West Village families, such as those written about by Jane Jacobs, and those of the South Village (the Italian community), to go about their own business, largely unnoticed. In the 1950s it was the beat generation; since then, after a bout with the drug culture (which has moved easterly) it has returned to beckon yet another younger generation with its special raffishness. As its nostalgic glamour fades, it continues to fulfill a variety of seemingly conflicting roles; a genteel place to live, a fashionable step up the professional ladder, a sprawling ground for movements such as feminism and gay liberation, a singles’ haven, a place to raise a family—in short, a perplexing but certainly not colorless community.

“The city commissioners, having already contemplated the future growth of Manhattan, appointed John Randel Jr., who from 1808 to 1811 prepared maps and plans for the present grid-iron of Manhattan’s streets. The Village escaped most of this layout, however, since it was simply too difficult to impose it over the well-established pattern. The commissioners, though, had their way with the hills, leveling them all by 1811 and taking with them the grandeur of the old estates. These properties were then easily divisible into small city lots, and by 1822 the community was densely settled, many of the settlers ‘refugees’ from a series of ‘downtown’ epidemics.

“Sailors’ Snug Harbor and Trinity Parish have both had leading roles in the Village’s growth. The Harbor was founded in 1801, when Captain Robert Richard Randall deeded in perpetual lease 21 acres of land (around and north of Washington Square), together with a modest cash grant, for the support of a home for aged seamen. It was moved to Staten Island in 1833, and since then has received its income from its leased village land. Prior to the 1920s, its property had been divided into small lots, rented mainly for individual residences. Since then, land values have skyrocketed, and the Harbor understandably sought to increase its income from its holdings. In doing so, however, it leased rather indiscriminately, permitting the demolition of many historic and architectural treasures and their replacement by mediocre works, to the detriment of the area.

“Trinity Parish made great contributions to the development of the West Village in the 19th century, encouraging respectful care and beautification of its leased land. In 1822, it developed a residential settlement around St. Luke’s Church, which to this day is a positive influence upon the neighborhood.

"The artist in his garret is today mere legend. The well-established Hollywood actor, ‘Madison Avenue gallery’ painter, and copywriter have replaced the struggling painter and writer. Eugene O’Neill and his group at the Provincetown Playhouse, Maxwell Bodenheim, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the delightful, ‘spirited’ Dylan Thomas at Hudson Street’s White Horse Tavern, and quiet Joe Gould accumulating material for his ‘oral history’ at the Minetta—it was such as these who once made the Village’s reputation international. Their forerunners were writers of the 19th century who took up residence here, attracted by modest rents, the leisurely pace and the delightful streets and houses. They included Poe and Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James?.The village, though no longer bohemian, still represents the unconventional, a reputation supported by its winding streets, its tiny houses sandwiched between impersonal behemoths, and its charming shops and eateries.”

The Village was home to many poets such as E.E. Cummings and Marianne Moore and also many political activists including John Reed who with Marcel Duchamp, the artist, proclaiming the founding of “The Independent Republic of Greenwich Village” that never did actually secede.

The heart of Greenwich Village is Washington Square Park at the foot of Fifth Avenue and its impressive Arch. This is where folksingers such as Richie Havens and Phil Ochs and chess players held court and where drug dealers for a while ruled beginning in the 1960s.

New York University has taken over most of the properties around the park and in recent years has expanded tremendously up to 14th Street and over to Third Avenue putting up dormitory buildings of no particular distinction. In 2008, the university indicated it would like to put up new towers at University Village and Washington Square Village, the city’s two finest “towers-in-the-park” housing developments, both south of Washington Square Park. The proposals would destroy the architectural importance of these two fine developments, which are not official city landmarks.

The main street of the Village used to be Eighth Street between the Avenue of the Americas and Fifth Avenue. This is where Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the Whitney Museum of American Art that would eventually migrate uptown and where Barbra Streisand performed at the Bon Soir nightclub. Eighth Street was also home to two intimate movie theaters, the Art and the Eighth Street, that were the leading showcases in the city for foreign films in the 1950s and 1960s. Sadly, they closed and Eighth Street between the Avenue of the Americas and Fifth Avenue was taken over by shoe stores and hippie emporiums.

The Lower Fifth Avenue area between 13th and 9th Streets has long been one of the city’s most elegant stretches with great apartment buildings like 40 and 43 Fifth Avenue, great churches like the Episcopal Ascension at 10th Street and the First Presbyterian Church at 11th Street, both on Fifth Avenue, and Grace Episcopal Church at 10th Street and Broadway, and splendid side-streets, especially between the Avenue of the Americas and Fifth Avenue. This area also included the impressive Butterfield House apartment building with many bay windows and a center garden on West 12th Street down the block from the New School for Social Research, an important bastion of adult education.

The Studio Building at 51 West 10th Street was a three-story building that provided large studios and apartments for most of the country’s greatest 19th Century artists such as Winslow Homer, Frederick Church and William Merritt Chase.

One of the most important landmarks in the Village is the great Jefferson Market Courthouse tower, designed by Vaux & Withers, on the southwest corner of 10th Street and the Avenue of the Americas. After years of neglect, it was converted to a library and the adjoining Art Deco-style Women’s House of Detention was demolished and eventually replaced with a large and lush community garden across from the fruit and vegetable stand of the original Balducci’s on Greenwich Avenue between Eighth Street and Christopher Street.

The Village has long been home to a large gay community, many of whom march in its enormous, annual Halloween Parade, which began in 1973, and some of whom remember the Stonewall Bar on Christopher Street facing Sheridan Square that was the scene in 1969 of a historic clash with the police that has been regarded as the beginning of the nationwide movement for gay and lesbian rights.

The major movie palace in the Village for decades was the Loews Sheridan, which was not on Sheridan Square but several blocks north on a triangular block founded by Greenwich and Seventh Avenues and West 12th Street. It was demolished by St. Vincent’s Hospital for a loading dock and the hospital’s expansion plans a generation later called for the planned demolition of Albert C. Ledner’s great National Maritime Union Building with its port-hole motifs, which became one of the great preservation battles in the Village’s history.

The “Beat” movement flourished in the Village in the 1950’s as Abstract Expressionist paintings such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock hung out regularly at the Cedar Tavern, a linoleum-floored bar on University Place between 8th and 9th Streets that eventually relocated a few blocks north. At the same time, the handsome Judson Memorial Church on the south side of Washington Square Park became an important center of artistic “happenings.”

In the preface to his book, “Republic of Dreams, Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960,” Ross Wetzsteon provided the following commentary:
“Greenwich Village isn’t what it used to be. When I started this book ten years ago, I knew that would be its first sentence. And when I soon discovered that the phrase had been used as early as 1916, I knew the history of the Village would be in large part the ever recurring birth and death and rebirth of Bohemia. Youth, romance, adventure -- joy, poetry, rebellion - what so quickly recedes into our past? - what more often begins again?

“The Village has been called ‘the most significant square mile in American cultural history,’ ‘the home of half the talent and half the eccentricity in the country,’ ‘the place where everything happens first.’ As a young journalist named John Reed said in the teens, ‘Within a block of my house was all the adventure in the world; within a mile every foreign country.’ The young scholar named Lionel Trilling declared in the twenties, ‘There seemed no other place where a right-thinking person might live.’ And a young actress named Lucille Ball put it in the forties, ‘The Village is the greatest place in the world.’

“Many major movements in American intellectual history began or were nurtured in the Village -- socialism, feminism, pacifism, gay liberation, Marxism, Freudianism, avant-garde fiction and poetry and theater, cubism, abstract expressionism, the anti-war movement and the counterculture of the sixties. And nearly every major American writer and artist lived in the Village at one time or another. What other community could claim a spectrum ranging from Henry James to Marlon Brando, from Marcel Duchamp to Bob Dylan, from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to Abbie Hoffman?”

Mr. Wetzsteon documented a lot of the Village’s fantastic cultural history:

“The first pizza served in America was served in the Village, also the first spaghetti dinner and the first ice cream soda. More in keeping with its mythology, the first labor demonstration in America took place there in the 1830s, when local stone cutters protested the use of Sing Sing convicts to cut stone for the construction of New York University (the nation’s largest private university). And where else could the Unitary Household have been founded in 1859 (the first free-love community in the country), or, for that matter, the American Civil Liberties Union? The first musical comedy, the first theatrical cliffhanger, the first cabaret, the first American production of a play by Oscar Wilde. John L. Sullivan had his first fight there and George M. Cohan made his stage debut. The first theatrical agency (William Morris), the first salon, and, naturally, the first professional women’s organization.

“That quintessential American, the inventor, also had his place in Village history. For a time Thomas Edison had his office there (his son Charles was a Village poet, a fact he didn’t dwell on, years later, when he was elected governor of New Jersey). Samuel Colt invented the Colt .45 there, and Samuel F. B. Morse invented the telegraph. Bell Laboratories in the West Village (now an artists’ housing complex called Westbeth) was the site of the first commercial radio broadcast and the first TV broadcast. The PA system was developed there as well as the sound-on-disc projector, which made talkies possible.

“And speaking of movies, two young Village furriers, Adolph Zukor and Maurice Loew, started their dynasties at the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue with Biograph Films, where Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters made their first pictures. Hundreds of movies were set in the Village in the following years, including Scarlet Street, Daisy Kenyon, On the Town, My Sister Eileen, Barefoot in the Park, Funny Face, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, The Group, and Desperately Seeking Susan.

“The trial of Harry Thaw for murdering Stanford White (who designed the Washington Square Arch) took place in the Jefferson Market Courthouse?.The narrowest house in New York City, only nine and a half feet wide, its occupants including Edna St. Vincent Millay and John Barrymore, is on Bedford Street....And Lindbergh’s legendary flight? One of the reasons Lindy took off was to claim the $25,000 offered by the French-born owner of the Brevoort Hotel on lower Fifth Avenue.

“The founder of the New York Times came from the Village, and Tammany Hall -- another institution with an aversion to everything its residents stood for -- had its headquarters there. One local organization, in Little Italy in the South Village, has even less connection to the spirit of openness to diverse points of view -- the Mafia.

“The list of novelists who called it home at some point in their lives is a complete pantheon of American literature. James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis. Ford Madox Ford and Sherwood Anderson. John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. Henry Miller and Ana’s Nin. Henry Roth and Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, Nathanael West, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, James Agee, James Baldwin. John Cheever, Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow and James Jones. Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Louis Auchincloss and Joan Didion and Gore Vidal. J. D. Salinger and William Gaddis. William Styron and Donald Barthelme. Hubert Selby and Thomas Pynchon. Norman Mailer, of course -- who wrote “The Time of Her Time” about a sexual marathon in the Village. And the five novelists who have sections in this book -- Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, Djuna Barnes and Dawn Powell.

“From The New Yorker, James Thurber, E. B. White, S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, and Joseph Mitchell. Among the dozens of playwrights who followed Eugene O’Neill were Tennessee Williams (who hung out at the Cedar Bar), Edward Albee (who saw a graffito asking “Who’s Afraid of the Virginia Woolf” in the men’s room at the Ninth Circle), Sam Shepard (who worked as a busboy at the Village Gate). Kahlil Gibran, the moony Lebanese mystic whose perennial best-seller The Prophet evokes the mysterious Middle East, actually wrote the book at 51 West 10th Street, where he lived from 1911 until his death in 1931.

“Among the poets, the Village was once home to Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, Edwin Arlington Robinson, John Masefield, and Louis Untermeyer. Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay. Stephen Vincent Ben?t and William Rose Ben?t. Allen Tate and Wallace Stevens -- Mina Loy and Louise Bogan and Elinor Wylie. John Berryman and W. H. Auden. Even Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot lived in the Village for brief periods, and for a longer time Galway Kinnell, John Ashbery, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Allen Ginsberg. A list of poets who didn’t live in the Village would be shorter.”

The Village abounds in restaurants and bars. Some of the most elegant, Casey’s on West 10th Street and Charles between 10th and 11th Streets on the Avenue of the America’s are now long gone, but nightlife still flourishes.

Many auction houses such as Kalisky & Gabay and Lawner’s on University Place and Fisher on Broadway sold masterpieces of Hudson River School paintings in the 1940s and 1950s were under $100 each. They are long since gone, but one of the city’s great pharmacies, Bigelow’s, survives, albeit without its soda fountain on the Avenue of the Americas between 8th and 9th Streets.

Perhaps the most devastating loss in the post-war era was the closing of Sutter’s, the pastry store that was across from the Women’s House of Detention, and which had the greatest prune danish in the city, never equaled since.

Indeed, the street serenades by strolling Italian violinists are pretty scarce, as are the horse-drawn, knife-sharpener’s wagons.

The popularity of the SoHo and NoHo districts and the renaissance of the Union Square and Flatiron districts to the north have only reinforced the desirability of Greenwich Village, the city’s most liberated district and also one of its most expensive. The area has excellent public transportation and good schools, including P.S. 41 on 11th Street at the Avenue of the Americas.

The Village remains incredibly vibrant and is more popular than ever.

It is the spiritual soul of the city.