Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.
Why the streets are wrong
Greenwich was a village — an actual separate one, with its own street pattern following old property lines and a creek — when the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 drew the grid over Manhattan. The residents fought the grid and won. Everything below 14th and west of Broadway kept its lanes.
The result is the most walkable and most confusing part of Manhattan, and the only part where you can turn a corner and not be able to guess what is there.
What happened here
The Village was cheap, low-rise and tolerant, which made it the American bohemia for most of the twentieth century — the Provincetown Playhouse and Eugene O’Neill, the Abstract Expressionists at the Cedar Tavern, the folk revival on Bleecker and MacDougal in the early 1960s where Dylan started, and the Beats before them.
The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street is where the riots of June 1969 began after a police raid, and it is now a National Monument — the first in the United States dedicated to LGBTQ history. Christopher Park opposite has the Gay Liberation Monument.
Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue South has been a jazz club since 1935 and remains one of the best rooms for jazz anywhere. Small, no talking, cash-heavy, and worth booking.
Where to walk
Bedford Street — number 75½ is the narrowest house in New York at nine and a half feet wide, and Chumley’s, the speakeasy at 86 Bedford, has no sign on the door because it never had one.
Grove Court, off Grove Street, is a private mews of six brick houses behind an iron gate.
Commerce Street bends sharply for no visible reason.
Jefferson Market Library on Sixth Avenue, a Gothic Revival former courthouse with a clock tower, is free to walk into.
Washington Mews, off Fifth just north of the square, is a cobbled lane of converted stables.
Washington Square Park is the centre of the neighbourhood and effectively NYU’s campus.
The West Village, the part west of Seventh Avenue, is quieter, prettier and considerably more expensive.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
SoHo
Cast-iron warehouses, Belgian block streets and a hundred and fifty years of the same cycle: industry, then artists, then shops.