The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation presented a 80-page report last month to the Landmarks Preservation Commission that proposes the creation of a South Village Historic District comprising 38 blocks and about 800 buildings south of the Greenwich Village Historic District, which was created in 1969.

"The South Village was long the cradle of Greenwich Village's Italian-immigrant community, and contains perhaps the most impressive array of intact late-19th and early-20th Century tenements anywhere in the world," the society argued.

"Its converted rowhouses, off-Broadway theaters, reform-housing, and religious, social and charitable institutions vividly reflect its history as a working-class neighborhood from New York's last great wave of immigration," it continued.

The report was written by Andrew Dolkart, an architectural historian and funded by Preserve New York, a grant program of the Preservation League of New York State and the New York State Council on the Arts, the J. M. Kaplan Fund, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Councilmember Alan Gerson, State Senator Tom Duane, Assemblymember Deborah Glick, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

"The South Village was also long the scene of some of the most important counter-cultural movements, institutions, and events in our city and our country's history, as well as having served as the center of New York's African-American community in the mid-19th Century and its gay community in the first decades of the 20th Century. While the South Village's unconventional charm, working-class architecture, and immigrant history may not have been deemed worthy of landmark designation in 1969, we feel it's critical that these characteristics now be recognized, honored and preserved.

"The incredible concentration of tenements of every style and configuration - pre-law, old law, new law, Neo-Grec, Italianate, Romanesque Revival, Beaux Arts - is virtually unrivalled in New York, as is the frequency with which precious details such as original storefronts, cornices, and iron work - so often lost over time on tenements, remain intact," Andrew Berman, executive director of the society, wrote in the foreward to the report.

"Within its boundaries are more than fifty intact rowhouses in the Federal style (1800-1835), twenty-five in the Greek Revival style (1835-1850), and an additional 150 Federal or Greek Revival houses which have been completely transformed over time for commercial or multi-family use," he continued.

"Thankfully," according to Mr. Berman, "the South Village's architecture remains strikingly unchanged. Whole streets are largely untouched from a hundred years ago or more, with colorful tenements, ornate fire escape balconies, cast-iron and wooden storefronts, and early nineteenth century rowhouses still defining the cityscape."

"Although only a few bulidngs in the area are significant as great individual works of architecture," according to Mr. Dolkart, "this area forms an amazingly cohesive landscape of great value to the character of New York City and to the history of the city and the nation. The buildings in this remarkably intact area are vulnerable - in danger of demolition or insensitive alteration. Indeed, during the preparation of this report, the Tunnel Garage, a historically and architecturally significant early automobile garage was demolished; the historic Circle in the Square Theater was mutilated; and the Sullivan Street Playhouse, where the musical The Fantasticks ran for decades, was destroyed."