The Trends of Greenwich Village

By: Hannah Robinow

Posted: 10/30/09

The five boroughs of New York City are famous for being worlds unto themselves, where a different adventure can be found any given day of the week. Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in the southern tip of Manhattan, is no exception. After all, it's a neighborhood where college students from New York University sip coffee next to dreadlocked hippies in Sheridan Park, where schoolboys from the local public school pit their basketball skills against each other in The Cages on top of the 4th Street Subway station. Pedestrians stream through the shops and pubs on Bleecker Street, buying records at Bleecker Bob's Records and rubbing elbows with celebrities like Uma Thurman. Clearly, this neighborhood is a vibrant, diverse hub of activity in Lower West Manhattan. However, this begs the question of how this area developed into its present status as one of the most eclectic neighborhoods of New York City.

Greenwich Village's origins are rooted in the story of the British conquest of the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1664. Its name derives from the small hamlet that was south of New Netherland at the time, dubbed "Grin'wich." In 1712, Greenwich Village was officially classified as a village, and the name stuck. Over the next 200 years, this village became a well-known destination for bohemian poets, writers, and intellectuals, in addition to anyone with a desire to discover the latest developments in the art, music and cultural worlds. For instance, the Cherry Lane Theater was founded in 1924, and remains to this day New York City's oldest continuously running off-Broadway theater venue. The list of famous residents has included writer William Faulkner, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and dancer Isadora Duncan.

In the 1950s, the bohemian air of Greenwich Village morphed into the Beatnik Movement. Thanks to their tenures in Greenwich Village, Beatnick notable writers like Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, and Dylan Thomas inscribed this neighborhood into the national consciousness as a place where self-discovery was just around the corner, and where its residents lived out the social mores of rebellion and independence from common culture. The 1960s subsequently made the Village famous for its music scene as well, playing host to singers and songwriters like Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and the members of The Velvet Underground, James Taylor and Jimi Hendrix. In addition, the artist Mercedes Matter founded the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in the Village in 1964. Matter, along with her students, founded an establishment housed at 8 W. 8th Street which served as the first site of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Today, a visitor to Greenwich Village is much more likely to see businessmen and college students walking around the neighborhood than to see an array of hippies and black-clad poets. Thanks to the effects of gentrification on the Village, the entire area has a much more upscale feeling. The streets are lined with high-priced boutiques as much as they are with small, aged cafes. Furthermore, preservation efforts initiated in 1969 resulted in designating the Village as a historic district, which currently protects an area encompassing 6th Avenue all the way to Hudson Street; this area contains over 2,035 structures that played an important role in the cultural development of the neighborhood. In 2003, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission selected for preservation the Gansevoort Market Historic District, an area adjoining the Village that also includes the waterfront among the historic neighborhoods. Currently, the Village houses the main campus of New York University, Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, Parsons School of Design, and The New School. Highlights throughout the neighborhood also include many buildings commissioned by the federal government for archives, the Manhattan Refrigeration Company, and Bell Laboratories that have been converted into residential buildings thanks to the preservation movement.

Greenwich Village's history makes it difficult to be characterized as a single type of neighborhood, because it has played a role in so many different social and cultural movements throughout time. However, its many different social, cultural, and intellectual points of interest are exactly what makes it so fascinating for tourists to visit and learn about.