The Windsor Arms at 61 West 9th Street is on one of several blocks, including this one, just to the west of Lower Fifth Avenue that are considered among the most beautiful and desirable in the city.

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 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 and fireplaces. It has a full-time doorman and sidewalk landscaping designed by Susan Sipos, who designed the handsome Jefferson Market Library Garden nearby across the Avenue of the Americas at 9th Street.

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 not unpleasant aroma that wafts onto the street, a rather sweet, musty smell.

The corner is also a bus stop for the crosstown bus that pr...