New York City (Fodor's, 2012) - Fodor's [39]
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TOP ATTRACTIONS IN GREENWICH VILLAGE AND THE WEST VILLAGE
75½ Bedford Street.
Rising real-estate rates inspired the construction of New York City’s narrowest house—just 9½ feet wide and 32 feet deep—in 1873. Built on a lot that was originally a carriage entrance for the Isaacs-Hendricks House next door, this sliver of a building was home to actor John Barrymore and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. | 75½ Bedford St., between Commerce and Morton Sts., Greenwich Village | 10014 | Subway: A, B, C, D, E, F, M to W. 4th St.
Gay Street.
A curved, one-block lane lined with small row houses, Gay Street is named after Sydney Howard Gay, managing editor of the long-defunct New York Tribune, who lived here during the Civil War with his wife and fellow abolitionist Lucretia Mott. In the 1930s this darling thoroughfare and nearby Christopher Street became famous nationwide when, from No. 14, Ruth McKenney wrote her somewhat zany autobiographical stories published in The New Yorker and later in My Sister Eileen, based on what happened when she and her sister moved to Greenwich Village from Ohio. | Between Christopher St. and Waverly Pl., Greenwich Village | 10014 | Subway: 1 to Christopher St./Sheridan Sq.; A, B, C, D, E, F, M to W. 4th St.
Patchin Place.
This little cul-de-sac off West 10th Street between Greenwich and 6th avenues has 10 diminutive 1848 row houses. Around the corner on 6th Avenue is a similar dead-end street, Milligan Place, with five small homes completed in 1852. The houses in both quiet enclaves were originally built for waiters who worked at 5th Avenue’s high-society Brevoort Hotel, long since demolished. Later Patchin Place residents included writers Theodore Dreiser, e. e. cummings, Jane Bowles, and Djuna Barnes. Milligan Place became popular among playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill. | Greenwich Village | Subway: A, B, C, D, E, F, M to W. 4th St.
Fodor’s Choice | Washington Square Park.
NYU students, street musicians, skateboarders, jugglers, chess players, and those just watching the grand opera of it all generate a maelstrom of activity in this physical and spiritual heart of the Village. The partially restored 9½-acre park had inauspicious beginnings as a cemetery, principally for yellow fever victims—an estimated 10,000–22,000 bodies lie below. (A headstone was actually unearthed in 2009.) At one time, plans to renovate the park called for the removal of the bodies; however, local resistance prevented this from happening. In the early 1800s the park was a parade ground and the site of public executions; bodies dangled from a conspicuous Hanging Elm that still stands at the northwest corner of the square. Today that gruesome past is all but forgotten, as playgrounds attract parents with tots in tow, dogs go leash-free inside the popular dog runs, and everyone else seems drawn toward the large central fountain.
The triumphal European-style Washington Memorial Arch stands at the square’s north end, marking the start of 5th Avenue. In 1889 Stanford White designed a wood-and-papier-mâché arch, originally situated a half block north, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of George Washington’s presidential inauguration. The arch was reproduced in Tuckahoe marble in 1892, and the statues—Washington as General Accompanied by Fame and Valor on the left, and Washington as Statesman Accompanied by Wisdom and Justice on the right—were added in 1916 and 1918, respectively. Completion of the renovation, which includes upgrading the northeast, southeast, and southwest quadrants