They have an eclectic and charming mix of handsome townhouses, some early apartment buildings and an elegance not rivaled elsewhere downtown and only on a few blocks uptown.

Most of these very long blocks are more attractive closer to Fifth Avenue than the Avenue of the Americas. Ninth Street is in fact perhaps the least spoiled of the blocks that run up to 12th Street, but it is anchored by a white-brick apartment house on the north side at the Avenue of the Americas, a building best known for housing the famous Balducci’s gourmet food store that originally started as an open fruit stand on the other side of the avenue along Greenwich Avenue.

The ambiance here is quintessential Greenwich Village as the Jefferson Market Courthouse Library is across the avenue between 9th and 10th Streets and its huge community garden finally had its ugly fence replaced in 1999. The south side of the western end of this block used to house Trudy Heller’s, a major discotheque in its time that later was used by a 31-piece jazz band for concerts and now is a restaurant.

This pleasant building with its peaked roofs is adjacent to the entrance to the PATH subway lines that runs to New Jersey and to Herald Square. For decades, this station has had a very distinctive and non-unpleasant aroma that wafts onto the street, a rather sweet, musty smell. The corner is also a bus stop for the crosstown bus that proceeds west across the avenue to Christopher Street (the continuation of 9th Street). The returning bus comes across West 10th Street and turns on Greenwich Avenue to go along West Eighth Street, one of the most legendary streets in the Village, its "main street" that once was the very gracious home to the Whitney Museum of American Art, some famous bookstores and restaurants and the legendary Eighth Street Playhouse, one of the nation’s most important movie houses from a design viewpoint. The street is now given over most to shoe stores and young apparel shops, but its raucous nature rarely spread north. The Village’s great drugstore, Bigelow’s, still occupies the middle of the block between 8th and 9th Streets on the west side of the Avenue of the Americas, although sadly its marble soda fountain has been replaced with cosmetic counters.

The rear of the many attractive townhouses on the north side of 9th Street presumably were the inspiration for the main set of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, "Rear Window," and this architecture writer used to listen to Leonard Bernstein practising his piano with an open window on the backyards while looking out his rear window on West 10th Street.

P.S. 41, one of the city’s finest public schools is just across the Avenue of the Americas at 11th Street, and Washington Square Park is two blocks away, although no longer the terminus of the city’s doubledecker buses that run and down Fifth Avenue in the glory days of the Village.

This neighborhood is still exceeding desirable as it is served by excellent public transportation, numerous religious institutions and abounds in many good restaurants and famous food stores and plentiful neighborhood retail services. Directly across Fifth Avenue at No. 43 is a great apartment building designed by Stanford White and around the corner a block to the south on the avenue is the Ascension Episcopal Church with its own large corner fenced garden. The ambiance here has few rivals in the city and is very lively because of the Village, the presence of New York University nearby and the proximity to the very trendy Union Square, Flatiron and Chelsea districts.

This attractive, 11-story, brown-brick building was erected in 1925 and converted to a cooperative in 1983. It has 61 apartments and handsome masonry detailing.

Carter B. Horsley