A report on List of numbered streets in Manhattan, Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Village, Broadway (Manhattan) and Commissioners' Plan of 1811

The New York City borough of Manhattan contains 214 numbered east–west streets ranging from 1st to 228th, the majority of them designated in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811.

Greenwich Village is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west.

From this beginning, Sixth Avenue traverses SoHo and Greenwich Village, roughly divides Chelsea from the Flatiron District and NoMad, passes through the Garment District and skirts the edge of the Theater District while passing through Midtown Manhattan.

All numbered streets carry an East or West prefix – for example, East 10th Street or West 10th Street – which is demarcated at Broadway below 8th Street, and at Fifth Avenue at 8th Street and above.

Sixth Avenue was laid out in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811.

Although the numbered streets begin just north of East Houston Street in the East Village, they generally do not extend west into Greenwich Village, which already had established, named streets when the grid plan was laid out by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811.

There were a few interruptions in the grid for public spaces, such as the Grand Parade between 23rd Street and 33rd Street, which was the precursor to Madison Square Park, as well as four squares named Bloomingdale, Hamilton, Manhattan, and Harlem, a wholesale market complex, and a reservoir.

The western part of Greenwich Village is known as the West Village; the dividing line of its eastern border is debated but commonly cited as Seventh Avenue or Sixth Avenue.

As Greenwich Village was once a rural, isolated hamlet to the north of the 17th century European settlement on Manhattan Island, its street layout is more organic than the planned grid pattern of the 19th century grid plan (based on the Commissioners' Plan of 1811).

The west ends of most of these streets is the Bowery and Third Avenue, except for 3rd Street (formerly Amity Place), which continues to Sixth Avenue; and 4th Street, which extends west and then north to 13th Street in Greenwich Village.

In the late 1900s and early 1910s, several large automobile showrooms, stores, and garages were built on Broadway, including the U.S. Rubber Company Building at 58th Street, the B.F. Goodrich showroom at 1780 Broadway (between 58th and 57th Streets), the Fisk Building at 250 West 57th Street, and the Demarest and Peerless Buildings at 224 West 57th Street.

Broadway became one-way from Columbus Circle south to Herald Square (34th Street) on March 10, 1957, in conjunction with Sixth Avenue becoming one-way from Herald Square north to 59th Street and Seventh Avenue becoming one-way from 59th Street south to Times Square (where it crosses Broadway).

On March 10, 1957, Sixth Avenue was reconfigured to carry one-way traffic north of its intersection with Broadway in Herald Square.

From 1797 until 1829, the bucolic village of Greenwich was the location of New York State's first penitentiary, Newgate Prison, on the Hudson River at what is now West 10th Street, near the Christopher Street pier.

Sights along Sixth Avenue include Juan Pablo Duarte Square; with the polychrome High Victorian Gothic Jefferson Market Courthouse, currently occupied by the Jefferson Market Library; the surviving stretch of grand department stores of 1880 to 1900 in the Ladies' Mile Historic District that runs from 18th Street to 23rd Street; the former wholesale flower district; Herald Square at 34th Street, site of Macy's department store; Bryant Park from 40th to 42nd Streets; and the corporate stretch above 42nd Street, which includes the Bank of America Tower, W. R. Grace Building, International Center of Photography, Rockefeller Center — including the Time-Life Building, News Corp. Building, Exxon Building and McGraw-Hill Building, as well as Radio City Music Hall.

The Bayard streets still exist as the core of SoHo and part of Greenwich Village: Mercer, Greene, and Wooster Streets, LaGuardia Place/West Broadway (originally Laurens Street), and Thompson, Sullivan, MacDougal, and Hancock Streets, although the last has been subsumed by the extension of Sixth Avenue.

Broadway marks the boundary between Greenwich Village to the west and the East Village to the east, passing Astor Place.

Because Broadway preceded the grid that the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 imposed on the island, Broadway crosses midtown Manhattan diagonally, intersecting with both the east–west streets and north–south avenues.

Goerck had shown their relationship to the Bloomingdale Road to the west, much of which would become part of Broadway, and the East Post Road to the east, a road which would be demapped by the Commissioners Plan'.