Category: History

The charm of the Village is undeniably wrapped up in the unusual street layouts. But that ‘charminess’ can be confusing. In earlier issues, we explored early streets, such as the “Monument Lane” aka “Road to the Obelisk” aka “Greenwich Lane,” and crooked West 4th Street. The rhetorical question is, “Why did the city fathers make the choices they did?”

In July, readers of Village View read about what were called the NYC Draft Riots of 1863, but they were actually a race riot in Lower Manhattan, which killed more than 100 Black New Yorkers, and drove the entire Black population, most of them freed slaves, from Lower Manhattan.

We recently celebrated Juneteenth, a holiday enacted since the George Floyd murder in 2020. It is a holiday few understand and which has irony right here in our own community.

I love maps of all kinds–ancient mariners’ maps, explorers’ maps, geography maps, demographic maps, trail maps and city plans. I may be a history buff but I am definitely a map nerd. For years, ever since I noticed there was once a street called “Monument Lane” on an old Village map, I’ve wondered about the location of the street and the monument.

For nearly 170 years Union Square has been a gathering place—for commerce, for entertainment, for labor and political events and for recreation. The park owes its name to its location at the intersection—or union—of two major roads in New York City, Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) and Bowery Road (now Fourth Avenue).

To stop this potential disaster from destroying one of the oldest intact corners of Lower Manhattan, the community and city went to work, demanding the developer to restore (the intact 19th century painted signage on the buildings

The historic Our Lady of Guadalupe Church at 229-231 West 14th Street was founded in 1902 in two adjacent 1850 townhouses that had belonged to the storied Delmonico Family; the current Spanish Baroque facade dates to 1921.

Parks are often the heart of a neighborhood, but public markets can serve that vital uniting function as well. A case in point is the Jefferson Market, bounded by Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, Christopher Street and West Tenth Street, forming a triangular block.