Three Eras And A Ghost

That’s a reasonably typical street in Greenwich Village, with three tenements from around 1900, a house from around 1850, and an apartment house from around 1965. The space between the tenement in the center of the photo and the white-brick apartment house on the right is the driveway leading down to the apartment hose’s cellar garage and there used to be a house there. Judging by the ghost on the wall of the tenement, the missing house was just about the same size as the one to the left of the tenement. That raises the possibility that the remaining house was part of a row that extended to the right; looking at the Sanborn map from 1895 shows the entire block front as a row of identical houses. So there was a block of houses that was largely replaced some 110, 120 years ago with tenements, and then a modern apartment was put on the corner fifty years ago. All of this is part of the designation area of the Greenwich Village Historic District.

There are cities – London and Paris immediately spring to mind, although there are many others – that have streetscapes that are beautiful in their uniformity. Rows of identical houses or rows of identical apartment houses have a sort of cumulative grandeur that any one of the buildings does not have on its own. New York never really had that, because our rows of houses were usually not identical. Over time, because of development like that on this block that almost randomly replaced one era’s buildings with another, our cityscape has become less homogeneous. We have a few landmark districts that were built together or in a short period of time, but most of the districts have a range of buildings ages, types, and styles. That’s what makes the New York streets what they are, architecturally.