NEIGHBORHOOD ORIGINS

In the era of the Early American Republic, the area now known as Greenwich Village was a tapestry of farmland resembling the new nation itself. Beginning in 1822, New York’s wealthiest families moved northward from Lower Manhattan to resettle the countryside as a bucolic suburb. Transformation of the neighborhood took place incrementally in those years, as Henry Brevoort, Jr. recognized in 1834, when he wrote that he and his wife Laura were “very much in the woods and quite out of it” after moving into the mansion that once stood at 24 Fifth Avenue. Yet by 1840, New York society was focused entirely on the Brevoorts’ corner of Fifth Avenue, when the couple hosted the city’s first-ever costume ball. With its status as New York’s most fashionable enclave cemented, decades of building, socializing, and trendsetting followed. And because Greenwich Village was the first neighborhood to receive landmark district status from New York City in 1969, those halcyon decades are splendidly preserved in streetscapes that today pulse with historic charm and contemporary life.

GREENWICH VILLAGE CREATIVITY

“O life is a joy to a broth of a boy at Forty-two Washington Square!” So “Ten Days That Shook the World” author John Reed exclaimed of his first home in Greenwich Village, not long before national newspapers would portray Greenwich Village as an incubator for “young, unrecognized genius.” Those claims were confirmed time and again. Greenwich Village is where Billie Holiday gave her debut performance. Where Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs became friends. Where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were always seated at table 26 at Chumley’s, and Dylan Thomas held court at the White Horse Tavern.