The streets were laid out before the 1811 grid and do not line up with it. The buildings on them are brick houses of three and four floors.
What the West Village looks like
The streets here do not line up with the rest of Manhattan. They were laid out in the eighteenth century, roughly square to the Hudson. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 put its grid over everything to the north instead. West 4th Street crosses West 10th, West 11th and West 12th and then ends at West 13th.
Most of the buildings on those blocks are brick houses of three and four floors, with stoops up to the front door and shutters at the windows. has the oldest house in the Village at number 77, put up in 1799. Number 75½ next door is nine feet six inches wide.
More than fifty blocks of this were made a historic district in 1969. For the next forty years it was the largest in the city. An owner has to keep the front of a building when they work on it, which is most of why these streets still look the way they do.
The shops are on and , and a block off either one the traffic drops away. , and are residential for most of their length, with street trees over the roadway. runs west from them toward the river.
Crews work here often. A block is short enough that a unit and its trucks take up most of one, and the streets are narrow and one way. Two of the front doors already have people standing outside them most days.
Films shot in the West Village
Two buildings here play apartments in shows that were otherwise made in Los Angeles.
Friends, 1994 to 2004
Bedford Street looking north to the Grove Street corner. Street View
The building Monica and Rachel live in is 90 , on the corner of . Only the outside of it is in the show, since Friends was made in Los Angeles. When Matthew Perry died in October 2023, people left flowers and handwritten signs on that corner for days.
Sex and the City, 1998 to 2004
Carrie Bradshaw's front steps are at 66 Perry Street. The apartment behind them was a set at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City. People have not stopped coming, and in January 2025 the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved a gate across the bottom of the stoop after the owner told the commission that visitors had tried to climb in at the windows.
What the West Village can double for
the West Village can stand in for low rise residential Manhattan, a townhouse block with stoops and street trees and a nineteenth century village street.
