Old Greenwich Village

Steve Gross

Greenwich Village is best known as the bastion of America's avant-garde, a mecca for artists and writers, free thinkers and blithe spirits. But the Village is also one of the nation's most venerable urban comniunities, rich in social and architectural history. In 1811, ambitious city fathers blueprinted a lock-step grid for the whole of Manhattan. The independent-minded residents of Greenwich vigorously protested. They wanted their rural hamlet to remain a place apart, left to evolve in its own way. They won the fight and to this day the area is distinguished by its web of crooked streets, many crowded with two- and three-story rowhouses seventeen decades old, others lined with charming cafes and bistros. This legacy of independence is also exemplified by the buoyant iconoclasm of Village inhabitants, a Who's Who of artistic and literary America, from Walt Whitman and Henry James to...

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