Neighborhood Guide

West Village

The West Village is the western portion of the Greenwich Village neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Though there are no defined boundaries, the area is usually defined as bounded by the Hudson River and either Sixth Avenue or Seventh Avenue, extending from 14th Street down to Houston Street. Bordering neighborhoods include Chelsea to the north, the South Village, and the newly invented (2009) area called Hudson Square to the south, and Greenwich Village to the east. The neighborhood is primarily residential, with a multitude of small restaurants, shops and services. The area is part of Manhattan Community Board 2.

A sub-neighborhood, the Far West Village, extends from the Hudson River to Hudson Street.The neighborhood is distinguished by streets that are "off the grid" — set at an angle to the other streets in Manhattan — sometimes confusing both tourists and city residents alike. These roads were laid out in an 18th century grid plan, approximately parallel or vertical to the Hudson, long before the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 which created the main street grid plan for later parts of the city. Even streets that were given numbers in the 19th century to make them nominally part of the grid can be idiosyncratic, at best. West 4th Street, formerly Asylum Street, crosses West 10th, 11th and 12th Streets, ending at an intersection with West 13th Street. Heading north on Greenwich Street, West 12th Street is separated by three blocks from Little West 12th Street, which in turn is one block south of West 13th Street.