3 Review(s)

"The Houses of Greenwich Village" is an overview of eighteen historical townhouses in New York's Greenwich Village, a neighbourhood beloved both for its architecture and its residents. Beginning with the Robert Blum House - among the oldest houses in the area, built in 1827 and last renovated in 1893 - Kevin D. Murphy traces the neighbourhood's architecture and culture chronologically, ending with Matthew Baird's Modernist House, which was built in 2005. In addition to archival photographs of the buildings as they were, Murphy's text is accompanied by 200 full-colour photographs of the interiors and exteriors of these townhouses, specially commissioned for this book by Paul Rocheleau. For a district defined largely by the creative movements it fostered, this type of visual history is a natural choice, evoking nostalgia for a golden age of art and literature as well as providing a glimpse into some of New York's most sumptuous private residences.Over the past two centuries, Greenwich Village has witnessed the births of bohemianism, the avant-garde, the gay rights movement, folk rock, the AIDS epidemic and protests against two unpopular wars; it has been home to hundreds of artists, writers and musicians including Henry James, Norman Rockwell, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, and Bob Dylan.The 'decline' of the neighbourhood as affluent New Yorkers moved north at the turn of the twentieth century helped make the area a hotbed of eccentric, radical counterculture activity and although its heyday as a community of impoverished innovators is long gone and real estate prices have skyrocketed in the last twenty years, the glory days of Greenwich Village live on in legend.