A report on Greenwich Avenue, Greenwich Village and Greenwich Street

Greenwich Avenue, formerly Greenwich Lane, is a southeast-northwest avenue located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.

It is sometimes confused with Greenwich Street.

At that time it was called 'Road to Greenwich', as it was the only continuous road from Lower Manhattan to Greenwich Village other than Broadway.

Greenwich Village was allowed to keep the 18th century street pattern of what is now called the West Village: areas that were already built up when the plan was implemented, west of what is now Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue, resulted in a neighborhood whose streets are dramatically different, in layout, from the ordered structure of the newer parts of Manhattan.

In addition, as the meandering Greenwich Street used to be on the Hudson River shoreline, much of the neighborhood west of Greenwich Street is on landfill, but still follows the older street grid.

Both Greenwich Street – originally called Greenwich Road – and Greenwich Avenue, with which it is sometimes confused, derive their names from the formerly independent country Greenwich Village, which was subsumed by New York City as the city grew northward.