How the Grid Conquered the West Village

Join us next week as New York Review of Architecture takes over Vitsœ’s New York showroom. For five days, NYRA will transform the Greenwich Village space into our office and pop-up holiday shop.

Stop by to meet NYRA staff and snag a copy of our latest issue, some sweet merch, and designed objects perfect for holiday gift-giving. Throughout the week, NYRA contributors will lead architectural walking tours of the Village that situate the enduring legacy of Jane Jacobs, excavate bygone buildings and infrastructure, and retrace the steps of Gilded Age reformers.

Tour description:
As hard as it is to believe now, the early twentieth century was a time when development capital was wary of Greenwich Village. While large garden apartment complexes sprung up along new transit lines uptown and in the South Bronx, the crooked, ungridded streets of Greenwich Village threatened to choke urban growth. Quaint village charm wasn’t worth much to investors when those same streets were overstuffed by working families, disease, and high mortality rates.

This tour tells the story of how a Gilded Age growth coalition of reformists and capitalists fought “congestion” by advocating for the extension of Seventh Avenue and the IRT Subways through the Village. Their eventual success raised property values and created a key commuter link to the growing downtown business district. But along the way, hundreds of buildings were demolished and thousands of residents displaced, while the promise of new affordable worker housing disappeared. Retracing the steps of reformers like Mary Simkhovitch and Ben Marsh, along with erstwhile capitalist allies like Henry Morgenthau and Alexander Cassatt, we will bring their story to life and trace its impacts in the present day. Revealing scores of buildings still visibly altered by the avenue extensions, and vestigial slivers of bulldozed blocks awkwardly littering the landscape, the tour will be an interactive, embodied exploration of the imposition of grid onto chaos.

About the guide:
Avi Garelick is a freelance researcher and educator specializing in New York’s development patterns. Despite a long background in informal education, this is his first time walking backwards. Coauthored with Andrew Schustek, “Moneyball” appeared in NYRA #34/35.