1811
Exempted from the grid
The Commissioners’ Plan lays a rectilinear grid over Manhattan. Greenwich Village is already built and is left on its own alignments — which is why West 4th Street crosses West 10th.
The grid that doesn’t work, and the village it protected
Blocks laid out before the city had a plan, then protected before anyone could redraw them. Two centuries in ten moments — scroll the timeline.
1822
A country chapel on Hudson Street
Trinity Wall Street builds St. Luke in the Fields on open farmland, with the scholar and poet Clement Clarke Moore as its first warden. It is still the oldest church building in the Village, rebuilt inside its own walls after a fire in 1981.
1843
Two stables on Christopher Street
Nos. 51 and 53 Christopher go up three years apart. Nearly a century later a single 1930 fçade will join them into one address.
1873
The narrowest house in New York
75½ Bedford Street is built on a former carriage-house alley — nine feet six inches at the fçade, eight feet seven inside. Edna St. Vincent Millay rents it in 1923, the year she wins the Pulitzer.
1923
The literary village
Cherry Lane Theatre opens in an 1836 Commerce Street brewery, and the bohemian Village of the popular imagination reaches its height.
1947
Jane Jacobs takes 555 Hudson
She stays twenty-one years. The block between Perry and West 11th becomes the source material for the sidewalk ballet, and from the same address she helps lead the campaign that kills the Lower Manhattan Expressway.
1969
Two months that defined the neighborhood
On April 29 the Landmarks Preservation Commission designates the Greenwich Village Historic District — more than 2,000 buildings on 65 blocks, the largest in the city. On June 28 a police raid on the Stonewall Inn meets six days of resistance.
1970
18 West 11th Street
On March 6 a bomb being assembled in the basement by members of the Weather Underground detonates. Hugh Hardy’s 1978 rebuild inserts a modern bay into the restored row — narrowly approved, and still argued about.
2003
The river comes back
The Greenwich Village segment of Hudson River Park opens on May 30. Pier 45 — the Christopher Street Pier — becomes the neighborhood’s front lawn.
2005
The rezoning that ended the towers
On October 11 the City Council down-maps the blocks west of Washington Street. Together with the historic district it leaves roughly nine in ten lots protected, and the rowhouse inventory finite.
2016
A monument and a memorial
Stonewall is proclaimed on June 24 — the first national monument honoring LGBT history in the United States. On World AIDS Day the NYC AIDS Memorial is dedicated at St. Vincent’s Triangle, its paving set with Whitman by Jenny Holzer.
