By Michele Herman
The first time I came to the Far West Village was a Saturday evening exactly two decades ago. I was flanked by my best friend and my boyfriend, because we were grad students and traveled in these lopsided groups, and in our hands we held $1 student vouchers to an off-off-off Broadway show at something called the Westbeth Theatre. We traveled Downtown from Morningside Heights, got off the number 1 train and started walking west. There, at dusk on the west side of Seventh Ave., far from the familiar Village of falafel stands and leather shops, the world was settled and serene. We passed Ye Olde Waverly Inn, where a tree grew through the dining room, and the famously confused W. Fourth St. As we peered into the brick row houses of Bank St., I found myself coveting it all. I wanted the ceiling moldings that some handy husband had no doubt lovingly cleaned with an old toothbrush. I wanted the table lamps, every one of which cast a soft impractical glow, but what did it matter — these Villagers were clearly already enlightened.
More than anything, I wanted that sense of serviceability that had always fascinated me about Manhattan far more than its taller, newer and more obvious attractions. I loved the way New Yorkers took what had been bequeathed by their forebears and made it work so well for them. It was such a different ethos from the postwar world I came from in Connecticut, where my school and my house and my supermarket were all younger than I was, and so spread out a person could get lost.
Here in the West Village the narrow streets were still paved with cobblestone, the homes made with brick cut by a pair of 19th-century hands, and the parlors lined with hardcover books: the set of Hemingway, the Faulkner, the Calvino and the Gide. The work of sturdy, wise women like Jane Jacobs and Karen Horney and Grace Paley would be on those shelves too, and you never knew — their rear ends might be plunked on this brocaded sofa or that Stickley rocker.
We were a student of international affairs, a student of art history and me, the student with no discipline at all: the student of writing. We walked west on Bank St. until it graciously disappeared to accommodate a huge shabby sunken playground. Though I was supposed to be the one with the imagination, in my wildest dreams that Saturday night I never thought I’d become a decade-long denizen of that playground, spending most evenings of the 1990s emptying its sand from my sneakers and the small sneakers of my two sons.
Bank St. resumed on the far side of Hudson St., and still we walked west, smelling tides now, possibly even the faintest whiff of the Atlantic, past more brick houses on a less grand scale, past marine-supply businesses, old stables and warehouses. Like time travelers, we had walked so far we found ourselves, enchanted, in a 19th-century maritime village. Just before the Hudson River, we passed under an old elevated rail line and arrived at this vast courtyarded former factory called Westbeth, where we saw a play about a bartender that none of us can remember.
The friend long since went the way of most Manhattan grad students: she left town. But the boyfriend became my husband, and we stayed. The following year, when we were done with Columbia and looking for a place to live on the Upper West Side, a realtor called and said she had this cute little place on Jane St. The next thing I knew we were proud residents of the maritime village, in a tiny apartment with wide-planked floors stained from oily barrels. We’ve been in the neighborhood ever since, digging our roots and our children’s as deep as the pile drivers that incessantly pound through our 19th-century landfill. In Manhattan, leave it to a realtor to change your destiny.
This village within the Village has been under threat since long before our arrival. Though we got here too late to march with Jane Jacobs, we were privileged to join with her torchbearers in the endless war to protect its history and integrity and to keep some semblance of a human scale. After all, as much as construction methods and technology leap ahead, permitting 20-story buildings with on-site weight rooms on tiny lots that once housed ships’ chandlers and longshoremen, we humans are still pretty much the same size, and we still bloom best with a little sunlight in our windows, a breeze on a balmy night and a glimpse of horizon to maintain our balance.
Now, 20 years after that first trip to the Far West Village, my imagination has failed me again. I understood that the new waterfront park that replaced the old working piers would not come cheap, but I didn’t realize how deep the extracted pound of flesh would cut. We Far West Villagers use the word “to go” a lot lately, as in “the whole stretch is about to go.” The bad news comes almost daily: Superior Ink is going, the little studio on 11th St. is going, Diane Von Furstenberg is going, and so on. Land is so valuable that the unthinkable is beginning to happen: pristine Greek-Revival row houses just beyond the protection of the historic district are being snatched up as teardowns.
No one but New York Magazine and The Times’ architecture critic calls this progress. Pragmatists call it the free-market system, and inevitable. They say we are deluded to think we can stop the march of developers. We hear the argument that Landmarks has already given us goodies in the form of the Gansevoort Meat Market protection and we can’t be greedy.
All we can do now is appeal to Mayor Bloomberg to do something he does well: a cost-benefit analysis. Of course the economic pressures are great. But he — and his charges at City Planning, Landmarks and the Board of Standards and Appeals — must see that the history and continuity we stand to lose are far dearer in the long run than the glittery gains of unchecked development.
I imagine a trio of students stumbling upon the Far West Village 20 years from now. How I hope they will find a neighborhood where people actually live and work instead of Any Waterfront Resort, U.S.A. And maybe then it will be possible to write a reminiscence without turning it into a polemic.
