COLUMBUS Day allows New Yorkers to honor the city’s renowned Italian heritage. But this year the city faces a plan that aims to go further: a drive to landmark Manhattan’s South Village.
The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation urges us to preserve the neighborhood east of Seventh Avenue and bordered on the north by Washington Square Park and West Fourth Street.
The area’s famous streets – Bleecker, Carmine, MacDougal, Sullivan, Jones, Minetta – formed the cradle of the Village’s Italian-immigrant community, says architectural historian Andrew Dolkart. Yet it was left out of the original Greenwich Village Historic District designation in 1969 – perhaps because of its working-class, Italian character.
In those days, academics often reviled working-class neighborhoods. Italian-Americans in particular were seen as an intellectually inferior ethnic group, argues Donald Tricarico, author of “The Italians of Greenwich Village.”
Working-class architecture was deemed unworthy of the attention of elite architects and preservationists, who were mainly interested in the neighborhoods of the rich.
Of course, most of the Italians have long since left the Village for the suburbs and been replaced by other groups – just as they dislodged their predecessors, the patricians who’d built many of the lovely federal homes still standing. But they left behind a form of neighborhood life celebrated by Jane Jacobs in her masterpiece, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”
As the ultimate high-density, low-rise, mixed-use working-class neighborhood, Greenwich Village was Jacobs’ most important urban lab. Villagers lived, worked, shopped and played all in the same streets, sidewalks and land.
But planners at the turn of the 20th century saw this urban form as unsafe and destructive and set out to outlaw it. They developed the concept of zoning, by which the city government required that residential use be separated from work and commerce – an attempt to convert teeming working-class neighborhoods into serene aristocratic neighborhoods.
Villagers – and the rest of New York – have been living with the ruinous consequences of these misguided ideas ever since, as work has been pushed out of neighborhoods, leaving many residential streets unpeopled for long hours of the day.
Indeed, New York City’s zoning code of 1961 (published the same year as Jacobs’ book) rigidified the old separation even further, making it almost impossible for homeowners in commercial or manufacturing areas to refinance their houses. This sent many working-class neighborhoods into downward spirals.
Dolkart argues that landmarking the South Village would correct a historic injustice and might well tell the story of its working-class roots. Problem is, it won’t bring back working-class Italians or even street life.
Much of the inappropriate development in the South Village is a product of a zoning code provision -“community-facility zoning,” which allows nonprofit groups “bulk bonuses” to build outsized structures forbidden to everybody else.
Even as the city’s zoning code sets strict standards to maintain light and air, it exempts nonprofits – like New York University – from these requirements, as if the rules don’t matter if the social purpose is “high” enough.
Thus NYU’s administrative buildings and contracted dormitories loom over the residential neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan – and break the dynamic street pattern by excluding retail.
It would be nice to recognize the Italian contribution by landmarking the South Village, and so preserve (to quote GVSHP’S proposal) its fine “complement of intact working-class architecture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
But it would be even better to end the nonprofit bonus – which gives powerful, wealthy entities an extra incentive to wipe out “the Italian eateries, coffeehouses and social institutions” that once helped give the South Village its soul. That can save a few more neighborhoods still vibrant in the 21st century.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.