Famous Ankles

Actually, I had a nice leisurely stroll through Greenwich Village, but this will be a short post with just a couple of pictures.

Greenwich Village is often called “the Village” or even “the West Village” (but I don’t know of anyone who actually says “West Village”).  It’s located west of Fifth Avenue, north of Houston Street, and south of 14th Street.  It’s architecturally different than a lot of the rest of Manhattan.  Low buildings predominate.  Oh, and the crooked streets.  In a land of mostly straight avenues and streets, Greenwich Village lives on old cattle paths.

But, that’s the stuff of future posts.  Here, I just want to show a couple of pictures.  For me, two places are emblematic of the Village.  First,there’s a little parklike spot called LaGuardia Place.

And set near the middle of it is Fiorello LaGuardia himself (or at least a statue of him).

It’s one of my favorite statues.  LaGuardia, of course, is a former mayor of NYC.  He was a bundle of energy and led the city during the Depression.  The artist who did this statue captured that energy.

The other area I think of is Washington Square.  That’s a big park at the foot of Fifth Avenue.  It has a magnificent arch that’s been in a lot of movies.

Until recently, Washington Square was where a lot of the weirdness in Greenwich Village centered.  It’s a much mellower place than it used to be (or so I understand) and maybe Washington Square’s loss of the “crazies” is part of that.  I may have witnessed how they do it.  When I was taking these pictures, a police car pulled into the square and drove around slowly with their lights flashing.  They never stopped, they just slooooowwwwwlllly cruised around, and then left.

So what happened to the “crazies”?  To the protestors?  To the wild artistic types?  They went to Union Square, where (as I say) something is always going on.

-H

This entry was posted on September 2, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Greenwich Village, Manhattan, Wanderings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.