The arch at Washington Square in the heart of the Village is one of New York’s iconic scenes. Visit on a warm spring day and you’ll find busking street performers and political activists gathering under it. Greenwich Village’s bohemian roots still influence the neighborhood as one of city’s simultaneously most stimulating and relaxed neighborhoods.

Greenwich Village began as farmland and evolved to the home of the city’s wealthy class in the early 19th century. A potter’s field called Washington Square was developed into a leafy green park, while developers created handsome row-houses along its edges which remain some of the finest in the city. New York University would eventually grow from erecting its first building here, to dominating the area.

In the 20th century, Greenwich Village became the home of intellectuals, writers, radicals, and artists. The area retains that identity, and the coffeehouses, bookstores, Art-house cinemas, jazz clubs, and Off-Broadway theatre are comforting to lovers of NYC counter-culture.

It became famous as the center of ‘Beat’ culture in the 1950s and 1960s; and evolved into a bohemian enclave with the likes of writers Kerouac and Ginsberg and musicians like Bob Dylan on the scene, along with the rest of the city’s creative cognoscenti.

Today, a mix of residents are drawn by its lively energy and commercial activity around Union Square and on Broadway and Sixth Avenue. It contains several Landmarked Historic Districts. NYU is housed in a several buildings near Washington Square, along with the New School, and Parsons School of Design. They all shape the young and academic character of the area. Inexpensive restaurants stand side-by-side with some of the city’s finest. NYC’s “Village” neighborhoods stretch across Manhattan from Houston Street, north to 14th Street; with the borders of central Greenwich Village as roughly between Third and Sixth Avenues. The Village includes the West Village, which possesses a separate and distinct historic character west of Seventh Avenue to the Hudson River.

Straddling the border of the West Village and Chelsea neighborhoods, the adjacent Meatpacking District takes its name from a long history as one of the city’s food major processing centers. Its historic 19th Century warehouses, factories, ice houses, and distinctive streets of Belgian block pavers have been repurposed as restaurants, trendy boutiques, creative office space, private clubs and hotels, with a lively nightlife scene. The Whitney Museum of American Art anchors the neighborhood today as an internationally known cultural institution.