Washington Square Village
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Washington Square Village is a apartment complex, in a superblock in Greenwich Village. It consists of four buildings . It is owned by New York University and houses faculty and graduate students. WSV is bounded by West 3rd Street, Bleecker Street, Mercer Street and LaGuardia Place to the north, south, east and west respectively. It is traversed by two driveways. The westerly driveway used to be part of Wooster Street and the easterly driveway part of Greene Street.
[edit] History
In the early 1800's the tract on which Washington Square Village now stands was in-the Eighth ward in the northernmost part of the New York City. Beyond were only farms and estates stretching north from what is now Washington Square Park. Neither the Park nor the street grid of numbered streets and avenues yet existed. The Bleecker family owned an estate in the area and a Reverend Bleecker was Rector at the St. Luke's in the Fields, Trinity Parish, on Hudson Street. This church is still standing and in active use. Before the east side took shape, the west side of town had already become urbanized as the Village of Greenwich.
The street grid beginning at First Street and First Avenue on the east side could not be advanced across town because of local opposition. The streets of Greenwich Village remain askew to this day because locals challenged the notion of rearranging blocks that had already been built. WSV apartment complex is built on an old but not historically significant site. Originally, there were four city blocks where WSV now stands. The blocks were of average size for the time. Examples of what they looked like then can be found immediately to the east and west of the block. The blocks were settled by the French and in fact called "Frenchtown" for a time. By the 1870's most of the French had moved uptown, and it became the "Latin Quarter", well known for its brothels and taverns. No churches or public building were built on these blocks. West Third Street was then called Amity Street and LaGuardia Place was Laurens Street. Laurens, Wooster, Greene, and Mercer are Revolutionary War heroes (as are Sullivan, Thompson, and McDougal).
For the first half of the 1900's the WSV area remained a neighborhood of mostly working class flats, lofts and factories. Although never a slum, it was nevertheless slated for "urban renewal" as part of a vast project associated with Robert Moses. The project was to include a vehicular bridge from Staten Island to the Battery with a superhighway up the spine of lower Manhattan, and north through Washington Square. This plan, also named Lower Manhattan Expressway would have created a new "Fifth Avenue South" replacing West Broadway and what is now LaGuardia Place. As was the case in the 1800's with the street grid, local opposition stopped it. The only parts of the project that did happen are the superblocks where Washington Square Village and University Plaza now stand, including the adjacent widened parts of West Third and Bleecker Streets and the parkland strips along Mercer Street and LaGuardia Place between Houston and West Third.
In the 1950's' after the assembly of the superblock, Washington Square Village was constructed as a for-profit, middle class housing complex. It was marketed to people who might otherwise move out of the city or who had already moved out to the suburbs and might want to move back. Rents for studios to three bedroom ranged from about $150 to about $300 per month with about $25 extra for underground parking. Occupancy commenced in the Fall of 1958 with the opening of the north Buildings 1 and 2. South buildings 3 and 4 were opened a year or two later with freight elevators and no penthouses. A third building was to be built in the middle of the north and south buildings. This was never accomplished presumably for lack of demand.
The languishing rental market and the abandonment by NYU of its Bronx (University Heights) campus, led to the acquisition of Washington Square Village by New York University. NYU also purchased the as yet unimproved superblock to the south and built University Plaza on it, including Silver Towers, Coles Sports and Recreation Center, 505 LaGuardia Place and a commercial building, now Associated Supermarket. After the purchase by NYU, residents of the complex were entitled to remain in their apartments but vacant units (of which there were many) and units as they became vacated after NYU's purchase could be acquired for University use. As the neighborhood has become increasingly desirable, to say the very least, many of the original residents have continued to stay on and have been there for upwards of 35 or 40 years.
[edit] Trivia
John Lloyd Stephens, an amateur archaeologist who rediscovered Mayan ruins in 1839, lived in a house built on the area occupied now by the Building 4 of the WSV complex.
