history lesson

Last weekend we went on a walking tour of the Greenwich Village section of NYC. The tour was full of interesting facts and tid-bits about the societal and architectural history of this once small village on the outskirts of New York city. Check out www.walknyc.com for information on all the tours offered.
We started off in Washington Square Park, named after our first president. We learned that the park sits on top of the site of an old graveyard with the mass graves of yellow fever victims. Maybe this explains all the freaks that hang out there now, they feel right at home with all the ghosts? The day of our tour was the 96th anniversary of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The building is now used for classrooms and offices at NYU.
This little street called a "mew" was actually the back alley with stables behind the fancy row houses on the park. The street slopes towards the center where the gutter used to be. After plumbing was included in houses, the gutters were moved to the sides of the street.
The details on the house are beautiful, however, the shocking detail at the time was the lack of a prominent front stoop. Apparently it was shocking to see an entrance right at the street level, and not one where you go up the stairs, because of the ambiguity it caused of where the owners of the house would enter and where the servants would enter. All the details around the windows and doors are hand carved teak with the center window being the biggest feature.


The original fire tower for the village was on this site, so when they tore it down to build the new municipal building with the courthouse and jail they included a tower to keep watch over the village.
Anyone who's been to New York city knows how frustrating it is to try to find your way around the west village because the streets don't follow the grid of the rest of the city. This is because the village streets were originally laid out by the farmers who owned the land. Each farmer arranged their own streets to be parallel, but they didn't coordinate with their neighbors, hence the random angles where the properties met. If you take a look at a map you can make out where the different land plots were. The funny angles made funny spaces and some houses were built back in the awkward lots left over. At the time these houses were for the poor and less well-to-do because having a "street presence" was important. Today it's the opposite. The apartments in the "back-houses" are about 3-times more expensive than the street side ones!
This is one of the only wooden houses in NYC. It was the home of a wood-worker, so it was a great advertisement for his business.

This 8-1/2 foot wide house was built to fill in the driveway of the house on the left. People will do anything to live in NYC!