Since The 1960s
Currently, many artists and local historians mourn the fact that the bohemian days of Greenwich Village are long gone, because of the extraordinarily high housing costs in the neighborhood. The artists fled first to SoHo then to TriBeCa and finally Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn, Long Island City, and DUMBO. Nevertheless, residents of Greenwich Village still possess a strong community identity and are proud of their neighborhood's unique history and fame, and its well-known liberal live-and-let-live attitudes.
Greenwich Village is still home to celebrities, including many actresses/actors Emma Stone, Julianne Moore, Uma Thurman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, Leontyne Price, Amy Sedaris, and Barbara Pierce Bush, the daughter of former U.S. President George W. Bush; Thurman and Bush both live on West Ninth Street. Matthew Broderick grew up and still lives in the neighborhood with his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker. American designer Marc Jacobs and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper live in the community. Alt-country/folk musician Steve Earle moved to the neighborhood in 2005, and his album Washington Square Serenade is primarily about his experiences in the Village. The Village serves as home to the CEO of Etwo3 Entertainment J.R. Davies, Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Magazine and Calvin Trillin, a feature writer for The New Yorker magazine.
Greenwich Village includes several college or post-baccaulaurate institutions. Since the 1830s New York University (NYU) has had a campus there. In 1973 NYU moved its main campus from University Heights in the West Bronx to Greenwich Village. In 1976 Yeshiva University's established Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in the northern part of Greenwich Village. In the 1980s Hebrew Union College built in Greenwich Village. The New School, with its Parsons The New School for Design, a division of The New School, and the School's Graduate School expanded in the 2000s, with the newly renovated, award winning design of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at 66 Fifth Avenue on 13th Street. The Cooper Union is also located in Greenwich Village, at Astor Place, near St. Mark's Place on the border of the East Village. Pratt Institute established its latest Manhattan campus in an adaptively reused Brunner & Tryon designed loft building on 14th Street, just east of Seventh Avenue. The university campus building expansion was followed by a gentrification process in the 1980s.
The historic Washington Square Park is the center and heart of the neighborhood, but the Village has several other, smaller parks: Father Fagan, Minetta Triangle, Petrosino Square, Little Red Square, and Time Landscape. There are also city playgrounds, including Desalvio, Minetta, Thompson Street, Bleecker Street, Downing Street, Mercer Street, Cpl. John A. Seravelli, and William Passannante Ballfield. Perhaps the most famous, though, is "The Cage", officially known as the West Fourth Street Courts. Sitting on top of the West Fourth Street – Washington Square subway station (A B C D E F M trains) at Sixth Avenue, the courts are easily accessible to basketball and American handball players from all over New York. The Cage has become one of the most important tournament sites for the city-wide "Streetball" amateur basketball tournament. Since 1975 New York University's art collection has been housed at the Grey Art Gallery bordering Washington Square Park at 100 Washington Square East. The Grey Art Gallery is notable for its museum quality exhibitions of contemporary art.
The Village also has a bustling performing arts scene. It is still home to many Off Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theaters; for instance, Blue Man Group has taken up residence in the Astor Place Theater. The Village Gate (until 1992), the Village Vanguard and The Blue Note are still presenting some of the biggest names in jazz on a regular basis. Other music clubs include The Bitter End, and Lion's Den. The village also has its own orchestra aptly named the Greenwich Village Orchestra. Comedy clubs dot the Village as well, including The Boston and Comedy Cellar, where many American stand-up comedians got their start.
Each year on October 31, it is home to New York's Village Halloween Parade, the largest Halloween event in the country, drawing an audience of two million from throughout the region.
Several publications have offices in the Village, most notably the citywide newsweekly The Village Voice, and the monthly magazines Fortune and American Heritage. The National Audubon Society, having relocated its national headquarters from a mansion in Carnegie Hill to a restored and very green, former industrial building in NoHo, relocated to smaller but even greener LEED certified digs at 225 Varick Street, a short ways down Houston Street from the Film Forum.
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