Certainly one of the most picturesque areas in the city Greenwich Village is a charming maze of narrow, tree-lined streets with a very human scale to it, lacking the skyscrapers of Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
The Village, as it is affectionately referred to, started off as a sleepy farm-oriented suburb to the north (or uptown) of the urban, clamorous mass of Manhattan - which in the 1700s centered around today’s Financial District. A series of epidemics - Cholera, Yellow Fever and Smallpox - struck the city in the 17 and 1800s and residents - looking for less crowded places to live began moving into the Greenwich Village area. But as the epidemics subsided the people liked the country air of the village so much that they decided to stay.
Besides the lack of skyscrapers - walking around the Village you’ll notice something else unusual as well. The streets don’t follow the strict grid plan that the rest of Manhattan follows (with the exception of the old Financial District). The grid system that for the most part the streets of Manhattan are laid out on dates back to 1811. The City was rapidly expanding northward at the time and city planners wanted an efficient way to organize the city and sell parcels of land. Residents of Greenwich Village however protested, preferring their streets stay the way they are, many of them following Indian paths and old colonial property lines dating back to the 1600s.
Happily for us the streets weren’t subjected to the rather boring grid plan and for this we are forever grateful. For it is these streets that give us one of NYC’s most lovable and inviting neighborhoods.