A report on Greenwich Village and Jane Jacobs

Jacobs as chair of a Greenwich Village civic group at a 1961 press conference

Cover of The Death and Life of Great American Cities

453–461 Sixth Avenue in the Historic District

Jacobs fought to prevent Washington Square Park, pictured, from being demolished for a highway

The intersection of West 4th and West 12th Streets

Jacobs lived at 69 Albany Avenue (white porch) in Toronto's Annex for 35 years

Street signs at intersection of West 10th and West 4th Streets

Jacobs with Ecotrust foreman Spencer Beebe in Portland, Oregon, 2004

Map of old Greenwich Village. A section of Bernard Ratzer's map of New York and its suburbs, made ca. 1766 for Henry Moore, royal governor of New York, when Greenwich was more than 2 miles (3 km) from the city.

A "Jane's Walk" group pauses at Fort York National Historic Site in Toronto

Gay Street at the corner of Waverly Place; the street's name refers to a colonial family, not the LGBT character of Greenwich Village

Whitney Museum of American Art's original location, at 8–12 West 8th Street, between Fifth Avenue and MacDougal Street; currently home to the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.

The Cherry Lane Theatre is located in Greenwich Village.

The annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is the world's largest Halloween parade.

The Stonewall Inn, a designated U.S. National Historic Landmark and National Monument, as the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots and the cradle of the modern gay rights movement.

The Washington Square Arch, an unofficial icon of Greenwich Village and nearby New York University

396-397 West Street at West 10th Street is a former hotel which dates from 1904, and is part of the Weehawken Street Historic District

Washington Mews in Greenwich Village; an NYU building can be seen in the background

Christopher Park, part of the Stonewall National Monument

Jefferson Market Library, once a courthouse, now serves as a branch of the New York Public Library.

90 Bedford Street, used for establishing shot in Friends

Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from urban renewal and slum clearance – in particular plans by Robert Moses to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood.

- Jane Jacobs

The Greenwich Village of the 1950s and 1960s was at the center of Jane Jacobs's book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which defended it and similar communities, while criticizing common urban renewal policies of the time.

- Greenwich Village

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Bogardus Plaza, the south end of Hudson Street

Hudson Street (Manhattan)

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Hudson Street is a north–south oriented street in the New York City borough of Manhattan running from Tribeca to the south, through Hudson Square and Greenwich Village, to the Meatpacking District.

Writer and activist Jane Jacobs lived at 555 Hudson Street, above a candy shop. Jacobs' fought and won in her battle against Robert Moses and his efforts to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have destroyed fourteen blocks along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written from this apartment and described the day-to-day activities – 'the ballet of Hudson Street' – from outside her window.

An 1893 redrawing of the 1807 version of the Commissioners' grid plan for Manhattan, a few years before it was adopted in 1811

Commissioners' Plan of 1811

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The original design for the streets of Manhattan above Houston Street and below 155th Street, which put in place the rectangular grid plan of streets and lots that has defined Manhattan on its march uptown until the current day.

The city blocks of Portland, Oregon; Savannah, Georgia; and Manhattan shown at the same scale

"A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia" (1683) by Thomas Holme, the first map of the city.

A portion of a map of the city from 1776; De Lancey Square and the grid around it can be seen on the right

The Mangin–Goerck Plan of 1803; the "warning label" can be seen at the bottom under "Plan of the City of New York"

The only known image of John Randel Jr., the Commission's chief surveyor, by an unknown artist, probably Ezra Ames.

The park-like grounds of the American Museum of Natural Historycalled "Theodore Roosevelt Park" since 1958, but officially part of Central Parkis the only one of the planned public spaces of the Commissioners' Plan which still exists; it was to be "Manhattan Square".

This one of John Randel's survey bolts marked the location of what would have been Sixth Avenue and 65th Street; the location later became part of Central Park

One of Randel's 92 detailed "Farm Maps", showing how the Manhattan grid would sit on the island's topography and extant farms and homesteads. This one is bounded by West 36th Street, Sixth Avenue, West 15th Street, and the Hudson River.

Central Park is by far the largest interruption of the Commissioners' grid, running from Central Park South (59th Street, at the right) to 110th Street (on the left), and from Fifth Avenue (at the top) to Central Park West (Eighth Avenue, at the bottom), and at 843 acre, taking up a little over 6% of the area of Manhattan island.

Andrew Haswell Green, a critic of the Commissioners' Plan, headed the Central Park Commission, which created the street plan for Manhattan above 155th Street

The Knapp map of 1870 shows the progress made in laying out streets above 155th Street as called for in the Central Park Commission's 1868 plan

In 1945, Sixth Avenue was officially renamed "Avenue of the Americas", and was adorned with circular signs for each member country of the Organization of American States, such as this one for Venezuela. The name never caught on with New Yorkers, though, who still insist on calling it "Sixth Avenue". After decades of requiring only one official name, the city at last began to co-sign the avenue with both names. Currently, "Avenue of the Americas" is generally only seen on business stationery and official city documents, or heard from the mouths of tourists.

Frederick Law Olmsted, vociferous critic of the Commissioners' Plan (c.1860)

Clement Clarke Moore objected to the Plan, but made a fortune developing his estate once the Plan's streets were laid down through it. (1897)

Lewis Mumford, a vehement critic of the Commissioners' Plan

Thomas Janvier, an illustration from In Old New York (1894)

Dutch artist Piet Mondrian drew inspiration from the vibrancy of the grid, displaying it in paintings such as Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942).

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.

Urban activist Jane Jacobs noted "street[s] that go on and on ... dribbling into endless amorphous repetitions ... and finally petering into the utter anonymity of distances," and famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright wrote of its "deadly monotony," calling it a "man trap of gigantic dimensions."

SoHo, Manhattan

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Neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City.

Niblo's Garden, seen here around 1887, was an entertainment venue on Broadway near Prince Street from 1823 to 1895

The E. V. Haughwout Building at Broadway and Broome Street was built in 1856–57, and has a cast-iron facade by Daniel D. Badger

SoHo also contains former industrial buildings in other architectural styles, and is also dotted with smaller structures like this Federal style house built in 1819–20.

428 Broadway (428-432) was built in 1888–89 and was designed by Samuel A. Warner in the Queen Anne style

Cast-iron buildings at 453–467 Broome Street between Mercer and Greene Streets

Chelsea Career & Technical Education High School, located just outside SoHo

Nevertheless, through the efforts of Jane Jacobs, Tony D'Apolito, Margot Gayle, and other local, civic, and cultural leaders, as well as SoHo artist residents themselves, the project was derailed.

SoHo and Greenwich Village generally have a higher rate of college-educated residents than the rest of the city.