Back to the North Village...

As I mentioned before, when  I got down to the North Village, which I used to know so well many years ago, the first thing that brought me up short--such as here, on East 11th Street on that LONG block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues--was how these trees that I remember as saplings way back have now become so full grown...completely changing the feel of the place.

It is also disturbing as a marker of how long I have been away, really...I may have been back during the winter not so long ago, but then I would not have seen all the foliage like I do now..

I have checked in the NY Times real estate ads, and, Holy Cow, this area really has become what they now call "The Gold Coast" of Greenwich Village (including of course all those big old apartment buildings on Lower Fifth which I showed before)...

It is as bad as the Upper East Side in the 60's had become some years back... the Housing Bubble inflated all the prices here astronomically, and you know what, they have not come down very much...

In fact, this whole area is SO sedate, and quiet, and genteel, I actually feel sad for the change from the somewhat more less-restored and less-renovated way it was before...when middle class people actually owned some of these houses ( but of course, that IS going WAY back).

Change is just an inevitable part of life, don't we all know it..

I meant to show this building before but I don't believe I did...when University Place, just to the East of Fifth Avenue, first began to gentrify in the 1970's, an old place called the Hotel Albert was done first and then as I remember this old commercial building was the first to be a real "conversion" to residential use.

I remember at the time trying to see if you could really type this place as any particular style of architecture...I would guess you would say some sort of modified Manhattan Gothic of the minimalist nature...

Finally, from some old photos someone just sent me, a REALLY old black and white shot of the Jefferson Market Courthouse ( now NYC library branch)...this is the borderline where the real West Village begins ( or, for people who grew up there many years ago, the area that was the Village REALLY...such as a woman I met about 1970 who was in her late 70's and had grown up over there "before they pushed thrugh Seventh Avenue"-- in what was then a solidly Italian-American area which changed from block to block with people from different parts of Italy...such as people from Genoa over around LeRoy street near Bleecker..

But more of that after I get back down there and do the West Village,  I hope sometime soon..that is a really big and complex area...

And yes, to me there is also a "South Village", mostly tenements, with some surprises, stretching down from Washington  Square to Houston Street...

Oh yes, to end on that vintage shot of the Jefferson Market Courthouse...with the Sixth Avenue "El" running in  the foreground...more about that El ( which we tore down and sold all the steel from which to Japan just before World War II!!-- ) and the  later very large Art Deco (or was it Moderne) Women's Detention Center ( which everyone called "the Women's House of D." which really lent the "Village Square " area over there some raffish character...all that will have to wait....