ABSTRACT
W hen I came back to New York City from college in1962, the area below Houston Street was an industrial slum that I might have walked through reluctantly on the way from Greenwich Village to its north or Chinatown to its east. Industrial debris littered streets that were clogged with trucks and truckers during the working daytimes but deserted at night. Its streets were not numbers typical of most of Manhattan but names: Mercer, Greene, Wooster, Crosby running from north/south; Prince, Spring, Broome, and Grand running from east/west. Its geometry differed from that typical elsewhere in the city. Its rectangular blocks, though roughly observing a perpendicular grid, were far longer from north to south than from east to west. The area immediately to its north on Houston Street, running between Mercer Street on the east and upper West Broadway on the west (later called La Guardia Place) and then as far uptown as West Third Street was roughly similar to proto-SoHo until condemned by the city in the early 1950s, its industrial detritus demolished and some of its paved streets eliminated. In its place came an impressive residential urban renewal complex called Washington Square Village with a private garden unusually large for Manhattan above a car garage. Having built too much on the available property, the builder Paul Tishman was persuaded to give it to a “community institution” that was permitted to exceed the rules.
