Neighborhood Guide

West Village

The West Village is the western (and original) portion of the Greenwich Village neighborhood in the New York City boroughof Manhattan. The area is bounded by the Hudson River on the west and either Sixth Avenue or Seventh Avenue on the east, extending from 14th Street down to Houston Street. The Far West Village extends from the Hudson River to Hudson Street. Bordering neighborhoods include Chelsea to the north, the South Village, and the newly invented (2009) area called Hudson Square to the south, and Central 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 and the Sixth Precinct of the New York Police Department. The Sixth Precinct also covers an area east of the West Village between Sixth Avenue and Broadway from Houston to 14th 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 perpendicular 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.

The Meatpacking District at the north end of this neighborhood, also known as the "Gansevoort Historic District" is filled with trendy boutiques and nightclubs. It is also the area's most concentrated site of grand larceny. In February 2013 the NYPD passed out 3,500 fliers to bars and clubs in the Sixth Precinct warning people to guard their valuables, especially at district's clubs, due to the rise in grand larceny rates. Police have said these crimes mosty happen in the Meatpacking District from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. Grand larceny in New York refers to stealing property worth $1,000 or more or property taken from the person of another without the threat of force (robbery), among other definitions. In the summer of 2012, a female went to three clothing stores in the West Village. At each store, she went into the dressing room and cut off the security tags of clothing worth more than $1,000. Another example of grand larceny is when a person attempts to take a person's unattended bag from a bar as these belongings usually include debit and credit cards and cell phones.

Beginning in the early 1980s, residential development spread in the far West Village, between the Hudson River and Hudson Street from West Houston to West 14th Streets

Provided by Wikipedia