Architect Explores New York City's Greenwich Village

Today, we're in Greenwich Village in New York City.

My name's Nick Potts.

I'm an architect and we're gonna be doing a walking tour

of the neighborhood.

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When New York City first started,

the main city was really centered around Wall Street,

and that's where people lived

and it's where people worked.

This was, it was farmland in the far Hinterlands.

Because it was outside of the city,

this is where things

that weren't seen as desirable ended up,

like Washington Square Park,

which at one time was the potters' field,

which was the cemetery where if you couldn't afford

a proper burial, you would end up here.

When this was redeveloped in the 1820s,

ostensibly they were supposed to remove

a lot of the bodies, but it's been estimated

there are still 20,000 burials underground.

And actually when they built the Arch,

they discovered quite a few.

So, there's definitely another city underneath

that we're not really aware of in its current incarnation.

So, this existed right around the same time

that the Commissioners' Plan laid out the street grid,

which is why the streets don't quite align

with the numbered streets and avenues

that we currently think of.

With the exception of Fifth Avenue,

which is the centerpiece that shoots right through the Arch.

Essentially, everything to the north of here

was part of the Commissioners' Plan.

The original idea of Washington Square Park

when it was redeveloped away from being a cemetery

was as a front yard for townhouse developments,

such as the one on the right,

which was built in the 1830s.

When this was redeveloped and those townhouses were built,

the upper classes felt comfortable moving up here.

The Arch itself is a kind of interesting.

It was originally built as a temporary arch out of plaster,

which was a common thing.

During the World's Fairs,

a lot of the buildings were built out of this material,

which is called staff.

Simply because it was quick, and fast, and cheap.

This one, and quite a few World's Fair buildings

in other cities that became permanent,

they would have to rebuild out of marble.

And it was really rebuilt because it was popular,

and it became a rallying point in this newly established

or relatively newly established park as a focal point.

And it's also one of the only moments

urbanistically in New York,

where we have a termination of a street.

So, it makes sense.

Like in Paris with the Champs-Elysees

and the Arc de Triomphe,

we have our little Washington Square Arch.

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Right now, we're on Washington Square North,

right in front of one of the most important

Greek Revival townhouse developments in New York.

So, the houses are our most perfect examples

of Greek Revival style.

You can see the columns at the porticos.

The fences have Greek motifs,

such as keys and anthemions,

which are the kind of flowery shapes on top of the fences.

Everything here is intact from the 1830s.

So, it's really a remarkable achievement in preservation

and how the city has kind of kept its best buildings.

When these were first built,

they were really meant to be upper class residences.

Kind of the upper crust of society did live in these.

Eventually, they became a little bit more Bohemian.

Artists would move in.

But the fabric of the buildings is,

at least from the street front, totally intact.

So, they were redeveloped in the 1930s by NYU,

who is the majority landholder here,

into an apartment building.

But remarkably, even though there's essentially

a whole new building behind them, you don't really see it.

That all happens behind the facade.

What looks like a series of individual townhouses

with their own front door,

there's an apartment building

that's accessed via a side entrance on Fifth Avenue.

So, the stoops, the marble paving, the fences,

they're all pretty much as they were in 1833.

And really the only telltale sign

is the fact the cornice is just slightly higher

to sneak in another floor.

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Right now, we're on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village.

So, if you've spent a lot of time in the Village,

you've probably realized there's not a lot of new buildings.

And generally, if there's a new building,

there's a pretty good reason why.

Case in point: the Weatherman House.

In 1970, there was a bombing in this place

by an anti-Vietnam War activist group.

Hence that building no longer existed.

And given the fact that the Village is heavily landmarked,

the conflict about what to build in its place

became a really heated event.

So, the Village was essentially baked in amber in the 1960s

when it became the first major neighborhood in Manhattan

that was given landmark status.

So, that meant is every building is assessed,

and its characters are defined,

and you really can't change anything beyond that

without going to landmarks and getting major approval.

When you're applying to landmarks,

there's a lot of assessment about window types,

window profiles of the sashes, and material.

And here, you can see the red brick is essentially the same

as what you see elsewhere.

So, they would wanna look at that

and make sure that it's contextual

with the rest of the buildings on the street.

The bombing was in 1970.

I believe this building was designed in 1970

and not built until 1978.

So, you can imagine the sort of negotiations

just to get something like this built

in a post-landmarked Greenwich Village.

What's really 1970s and post-modern about this

is that it's playing around with shape,

and kind of taking the motifs of the historic architecture

and almost making it a cut and paste.

Almost a joke on itself.

So, the top of the building, if you kind of cut off the top,

that's a Federal townhouse.

But then, Hugh Hardy, the architect,

twisted the main front,

ostensibly to give the rooms more light.

So, it's playing around with the idea

of what would a Federal townhouse in 1978,

which was when this was built, look like.

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Right now, we're on West Eighth Street

outside of the first home

of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

So, this building is really an important moment

in the change of Greenwich Village

from a residential neighborhood for the well-off

to a neighborhood for Bohemians.

So, these three buildings

were originally three Greek Revival townhouses

built in the 1830s.

In the 1930s, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bought these

and combined them into one single house and a studio.

And then, in the late 1930s,

they eventually became a museum.

There's a studio in the back facing MacDougal Alley.

Because she was an amateur artist,

she wanted a place where she could make art

and live amongst artists,

and still have her the trappings of a large house.

Eventually, this became the Whitney Museum

and this is the Studio School,

but you can still see the building as it is

looks much as it did.

What's interesting is that even though it looks like

one building, it is still very clearly

three separate townhouses.

You can see the three bays of each,

and it's been unified under this pink stucco facade

with a monumental very Art Deco entrance with the eagle.

So, it's a mixture of the 1830s and 1930s styles.

So, you see a lot of the motifs of Art Deco style.

You see fluting.

You see abstracted kind of vaguely classical motifs.

But everything is very kind of abstracted,

softened, and almost sanded down.

The original Federal townhouses weren't seen

as being contemporary or artistic aesthetic,

and so you see these reshapings.

But because this was in style in 1931,

we've got a 1931 facade on what were 100-year-old buildings

at the time.

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Right now, we're on Waverly Place

between Sixth Avenue and the park.

So, in the 1920s, there was a huge trend for Bohemians

to move into the Village.

The developers of these buildings

were trying to appeal to the creative class

and kind of remake these fusty 1830s buildings

into something new and contemporary,

oftentimes using very kind of fantastical styles.

And the building behind me

is a really great example of this.

It's really, stylistically,

it's somewhere between like,

you can see a little European style, Art Deco.

It's maybe a little bit Flemish.

It's just doing a whole lot.

It's really to project nothing else than fun and whimsy.

And a building like this, which was renovated in the 1920s,

was really taking the ideas

of someone named Frederick Sterner,

who was renovating buildings around Gramercy Park

in a similar sort of Neo-Mediterranean European style.

The windows that were used in these

we see a lot in Greenwich Village.

It was these studio windows.

And you think about the narrow vertical slits

of a Greek Revival townhouse,

really not conducive to painting.

And so, even if these weren't fully marketed

towards artists, the horizontal-paned window

projected studio and creativity.

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Right now, we are on the corner of Grove Street,

where it meets Seventh Avenue.

So, this is one of these kind of amazing scars

of Greenwich Village, as it was being integrated

into the street grid of New York City.

And the building back to my left

is kind of a perfect example of that.

You can see where the Seventh Avenue

literally sliced off a corner of the building,

and they kept the front and kind of exposed the side.

Seventh Avenue was sliced through

the existing Greenwich Village fabric in the 1920s,

primarily to run the independent subway underneath.

But to do that, there was obviously a cost.

And to this day,

Seventh Avenue doesn't quite have the same density

or the feeling of the rest of the Village.

Frankly, because there are these weird moments

where you're looking at the backs and sides of buildings

that had never been meant to be seen.

They literally would just demolish a corner of the building

and slap a corner of new facade on it.

Thankfully, that one,

probably the reason that that building was preserved

rather than torn down is that the door where the stair is,

the red brick on the left,

that was the front of the building.

It would've had two more windows.

Like any other New York City fabric building,

it's three bays wide.

The more brownish brick on the right

was never meant to be seen.

It was a light court that was a tenement building.

So, you can kind of see where the apartments

had a light shaft.

On most brick buildings,

there's usually a face brick on the facade side,

which has a slightly higher level of finish.

Maybe a nicer glaze.

Maybe a prime spot in the oven

versus the brick that's used on the back of a building,

which is much more workaday.

Kind of just, kind of raw clay without any additives

or any kind of thought about its appearance.

You can kind of understand the economics

of a brick building,

where you don't wanna spend money

on things people don't see.

Even though these moments are kind of awkward,

it's really a great,

almost like an X-ray snapshot into the workings of our city.

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Right now, we're on the corner of Bedford Street

and Commerce Street outside the oldest house in the Village.

So, this is really a very classic

late-18th century Federal style.

The detailing is incredibly simple.

The lintils of the windows,

rather than a very kind of carved expression,

or frankly even a brick arch,

they're a slab of stone.

So, it's a very kind of almost like

rudimentary means of construction.

It's simple, it's straightforward, it's honest.

That sort of recessed door,

you see them in some of these Federal-style houses.

Again, it's a very simple expression.

You're not seeing a portico or any sort of porches.

Because of that, you don't have shelter.

And so, the shelter is really happening

within the footprint of the house.

What's really interesting about this one,

unlike others that you see the exposed side wall,

and these two almost peepholes that are showing

where the hearths are.

So, it has two fireplaces.

Kind of a classic side wall expression.

But again, we don't usually see this on a corner.

So, it's interesting to kind of have that revealed to us.

And the wood is covering everything else.

The building is brick frame.

So, it's a little bit strange

why they would've applied the siding.

But if the chimneys were exposed,

you would see the vertical angle

going all the way up to the roof.

And here, we're just seeing where the fireplace is.

This interestingly was modified in the early 20th century.

So, it has our studio window,

again, to appeal to a new Bohemian class.

So, even though this house is very old

and it's in a great state of preservation,

it still has been modified for a new lifestyle.

So, these houses were almost always two and a half stories

when they were first built.

As the land became more valuable,

as people became aware of the fact

that they could rent out apartments within their townhouses,

you'll see these expansions

into fully three-story buildings,

sometimes going even into four-story buildings.

A street like this, that's primarily 1799 through 1830.

The expansions happened in the 1850s and beyond.

So, a house like this,

typically a Federal and Greek Revival townhouse

will have a Flemish bond,

where the brick is horizontal and short.

And that's because the brick of these buildings

is several layers thick,

and it's a way of weaving layers of brick together.

When you see expansions of these houses,

you almost inevitably see a change in the brick type

to a more common bond,

which is a standard horizontal, horizontal, horizontal,

with a stretcher course,

where the tying together happens

essentially every four or five rows

rather than within the weaving of the brick.

And it's a great way of telling

whether a house has been expanded vertically.

So, you're seeing changes happen.

Sometimes you can date a building

that had a vertical expansion to its cornice.

If it has an Italianate cornice,

which is more curvy and superfluous,

that tells you this happened in the 1860s and the 1870s.

So, you can kind of read

a bit of the kind of prevailing styles

in what's going on with the expansions.

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Right now, we're on the corner of Grove

and Christopher Streets in the West Village.

So, right now we're in kind of the heart

of the more Bohemian parts of the village.

So, neighborhoods like this were exactly what Jane Jacobs,

when she was writing about these sorts of neighborhoods,

was talking about.

There's eyes on the street.

There's liveliness.

There's a diversity of types of uses, types of people.

And that's really what causes

the stability of a neighborhood like this,

is there's enough to adapt and shift over time.

You see restaurants at the bases of buildings.

So, there's activity 24/7.

We have buildings like the Northern Dispensary

that are serving the community need.

This one, in fact, had been here since the 1830s

as a free community clinic.

Very simple, kind of workaday sort of buildings.

You see some kind of high-style details on a civic building

like the Northern Dispensary.

You see, again, our Greek key motif and anthemion

in the iron work.

But otherwise, it's a pretty simple,

straightforward red brick building.

When this was originally developed in the 1830s,

they were working people.

They were people who worked in brass foundries,

places like P.E. Guerin that's still in business

up on Jane Street.

Bricklayers, house painters,

people who worked in the docks more towards the river.

So, it's really a neighborhood for people to live

and live their everyday lives.

These were originally townhouses and residential buildings.

And that's kind of the beauty of these 20-foot townhouses

is it's a really great module

for creating a storefront on the ground floor

and kind of a testament to the adaptability

of this building type.

A neighborhood like this has almost become the victim

of its own success.

You've noticed it hasn't changed since the 1960s

because to preserve it,

to keep it from becoming something else,

it had to become essentially baked in its final form.

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