Block Party: West 9th Street

group hug, block two

The first edition of Block Party took me to Eastchester, a neighborhood I had never been to before. The second randomly generated block, on the other hand, was in more familiar territory – I had walked past it only three days prior to my visit. The block in question? West 9th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan's Greenwich Village.

I began my journey with a quick lunch at Bagel Pub – a somewhat more affordable option than & Son Steakeasy down the block. My egg bagel was disturbingly orange, but it was a tasty bagel at good prices for Manhattan, and the interior was lovely – definitely a place I'd visit again.

The theme of nice interiors continued with the PATH station across the street – one of only two in Manhattan not directly adjacent to a subway stop. The entrance is filled with beautiful mosaics:

I kept walking, stopping briefly at "West 9 Finest Deli" (seemed fine enough, though West 9 Only Deli would be accurate as well), before running into a group of three young men with a film camera whom I'd previously spotted at Bagel Pub.

"What's your film about?" I asked them.

They looked at each other hesitantly. "You do it this time," says one of them. The chosen filmmaker doesn't look very happy to have been voluntold.

"It's about a guy who wants to fuck some buildings."

I'm not sure what to say about that, so I wish them luck and keep walking. I understand why they've chosen this block, though. It's filled with attractive, beautiful buildings – mainly rowhouses, each different from the next. I'm particularly struck by a four-story building with colorful flowers in planters and vines running up its stucco exterior. But every building seems to have an interesting window, or material, or sign, or something else exuding charm.

Beauty is everywhere on the block, and across the city, but other parts of the block are filled with that other Manhattan mainstay: construction. Walking down the block, I noticed no fewer than five instances of scaffolding, along with three other construction zones. The beauty of old houses, it seems, isn't effortless – it's necessary to maintain them, lest they fall into disarray.

Across the street from a tall building flanked by scaffolding was a man whose strange getup included a full suit and hard hat but no socks, standing with a few similarly behatted individuals. He rebuffed my request for more information – I'm giving a tour, I can't talk – but others were more friendly. I spent some time looking at a house undergoing a gut renovation – the Eastern European–accented construction workers kindly let me take pictures.

The constant construction gives West 9th Street a buzz of opportunity, and one that's borne out by elements beyond building. You can start a restaurant! You can find a job in fashion! You can talk to filmmakers making wildly creative films! Many of the numerous passersby are NYU students, on their way to class and to adulthood, finding themselves and ways to contribute to society. And yet of course, the buildings are old, covered with plaques memorializing the long-dead. The block doesn't feel modern. West 9th Street is long past gentrification, and no one is trying to build a glass skyscraper here, or anything truly new. They're just changing what comes before.

There's another tension brought by the constant construction, this impregnable impulse towards improvement. There's a constant striving, but the work is never finished. I went back to the block on the day that Bagel Pub was celebrating the removal of scaffolding stretching from their store to the deli – but I'm not sure that there will ever be a day where there's no scaffolding on the block. The beauties of the past and desires for the future make it harder to experience the present. But there's still a great amount to revel in on the block. And we can remain confident that, with the work people are putting in now, it will continue to be so in the future. Such is the difficulty, such is the beauty of renewal.

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