Washington Square Village

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A view of Washington Square Village from Mercer Street.

Washington Square Village (WSV) is an apartment complex in a superblock in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of New York City. WSV was developed by Paul Tishman and Morton S. Wolf and designed by S.J. Kessler and Sons. It contains 1,292 apartments in two parallel tower slabs of two buildings each, enclosing a park over a 650-car underground garage. It represents the epitome of the tower in a park approach to housing. The complex features vertical panels of bold, primary-color glazed bricks, expansive terraces. It is owned by New York University and houses faculty members, graduate students, and other members of the community. WSV is bounded by West 3rd Street, Bleecker Street, Mercer Street and LaGuardia Place to the north, south, east and west respectively. It is traversed by two driveways. The westerly driveway used to be part of Wooster Street and the easterly driveway part of Greene Street.

[edit] History

The Bleecker Street Cinema, a beloved theater that closed in 1990. The Washington Square Village apartment complex in the back. (By Robert Otter)

An aerial view of Washington Square Village

The original plan for reshaping Washington Square to create the new South Fifth Avenue.

[edit] 19th Century

In the early 1800s, the tract on which Washington Square Village now stands was in the Eighth ward in the northernmost part of the New York City. Beyond were only farms and estates stretching north from what is now Washington Square Park. Neither the Park nor the street grid of numbered streets and avenues yet existed. The Bleecker family owned an estate in the area and a Reverend Bleecker was Rector at the St. Luke's in the Fields, Trinity Parish, on Hudson Street. This church is still standing and in active use. Before the east side took shape, the west side of town had already become urbanized as the Village of Greenwich.

The Washington Square Village apartment complex is built on an old but not historically significant site. Originally, there were three city blocks where WSV now stands, which were of average size for the time. Examples of what they looked like then can be found immediately to the east and west of the block. The blocks were settled by the French and in fact called "Frenchtown" for a time. By the 1870s most of the French had moved uptown, and it became the "Latin Quarter", well known for its brothels and taverns. No churches or public buildings were built on these blocks. West Third Street was then called Amity Street and LaGuardia Place was Laurens Street. Laurens, Wooster, Greene, and Mercer are Revolutionary War heroes (as are Sullivan, Thompson, and McDougal).

[edit] 1950s: Slum Clearance and urban renewal

For the first half of the 1900s the WSV area remained a neighborhood of mostly working class flats, lofts and factories. Although never a slum, it was nevertheless slated for urban renewal by the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance, as part of a vast project led by Robert Moses. Washington Square Village was intended to be part of a broad effort in Manhattan and throughout New York City to clear what some in the city government perceived as slums and to replace the old, run-down buildings with sleek modern structures.^[1]

The project was to include a vehicular bridge from Staten Island to the Battery, and an elevated highway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, across Lower Manhattan. The plan also included a new "Fifth Avenue South" replacing West Broadway and what is now LaGuardia Place. As was the case in the 1800s with the street grid, local opposition stopped it. The only parts of the project that did happen are the superblocks where Washington Square Village and University Plaza now stand, including the adjacent widened parts of West Third and Bleecker Streets and the parkland strips along Mercer Street and LaGuardia Place between Houston and West Third.^[2]

[edit] 1957-1964: NYU acquisition, apartment complex development

Illustration of the original WSV plan. Notice the third building in the block between Bleecker and Houston, which was never built

Illustration of the original WSV plan.

Washington Square Village was proposed in July 1957 as part of a six-building, 2,004 unit complex that would stretch down to Houston Street. 54,000 square feet of shopping space was to be included.^[3]

In the 1950s, after the assembly of the superblock, Washington Square Village was constructed as a for-profit, middle class housing complex. It was marketed to people who might otherwise move out of the city or who had already moved out to the suburbs and might want to move back. Initially, the apartment complex was referred to as Tishman’s Tenements, after Paul Tishman one of the original developers.^[4] Rents for studios to three bedroom ranged from about $150 to about $300 per month with about $25 extra for underground parking. Occupancy commenced in the Fall of 1958 with the opening of the north Buildings 1 and 2. South buildings 3 and 4 were opened a year or two later with freight elevators and no penthouses. A third building was to be built in the block where the University Plaza and the Silver Towers now stand. This was never accomplished presumably for lack of demand or due to the increased cost and taxes.

The languishing rental market led to the acquisition of Washington Square Village by New York University for $25 million dollars. (The reported cost of development, according to the Housing and Redevelopment Board statistics was $20 million.) NYU bought Washington Square Village in 1964, after Paul Tishman (one of the original developers of WSV who was also sitting on the NYU board) ran into financial trouble. NYU also purchased the as yet unimproved superblock to the south and built University Plaza on it, including Silver Towers, Coles Sports and Recreation Center, 505 LaGuardia Place and a commercial building, now Morton Williams Supermarkets.

After the purchase by NYU, residents of the complex were entitled to remain in their apartments but vacant units (of which there were many) and units as they became vacated after NYU's purchase could be acquired for University use. As the neighborhood has become increasingly desirable, to say the very least, many of the original residents have continued to stay on and have been there for upwards of 35 or 40 years. It is also being used as graduate student and faculty housing.

[edit] 2008: "NYU Plans 2031" and the future of the complex

As part of the NYU Plans 2031 long-term strategic planning initiative, NYU has presented some concept plans for the redevelopment of the complex. The plans include ideas to demolish the buildings and restore the superblock to its original 6-block constituents; other ideas include the development of additional buildings in the garden between the two WSV buildings.

[edit] Trivia

John Lloyd Stephens, an amateur archaeologist who rediscovered Mayan ruins in 1839, lived in 13 LeRoy Place, a house built on the area occupied now by the Building 4 of the WSV complex.

William Lescaze accused the developers and the architects of WSV for using plans, ideas, and designs that he developed to build the WSV complex. In 1962, Lescaze filed suit, claiming $550,000 in damages for the unfair use of the materials that he developed for WSV, and for which he was never officially hired and paid.^[5]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Information about Washington Square Village from Emporis

• Photographs of the garden between the two WSV buildings