Next Stop, the West Village

LIKE any other real New Yorker, I hate to leave the apartment. But I must, of course, to go to the job, restock the cupboards and walk the dogs.

The “Sex and the City” brownstone at 66 Perry.

Once I'm out, though, it's not that bad, because I step out onto Perry Street in the West Village, on the block between Bleecker and West Fourth Streets, which the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission described as "a delightful and interesting street" when it designated the Greenwich Village Historic District in 1969 and protected more than 2,000 historically significant buildings, including all the ones on my block.

This clean, tree-lined stretch of Perry, still delightful and interesting, and thanks to the commission, still residential, intimate and human in scale, a survivor of the city's earlier fabric, is also one of the prettiest streets in Manhattan.

Over at No. 66, a stately Italianate brownstone from 1866, another busload of tourists, mostly women, has swarmed the block, and they are taking turns posing for pictures as they sit on the high stoop. They're on the daily "Sex and the City" Tour ( each), and these are the very steps that Carrie Bradshaw, the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker, ran up and down at her apartment, which on the show was supposed to be in the East 70s.

I mention this not because Villagers like to show off, which we do, or because our geography is a fetish, which it is, but to illustrate why we Villagers are the hardest working tribe in New York.

"Yo," I say as I pass them, "You know this house is from the 1800s, and so are most of the others on the street. If you like No. 66, check out the brownstone at No. 70, the best on the block, French Second Empire. Look over there - more Italianate, and over there, there are old Federals, there's a Beaux-Arts, over there a bit of Romanesque Revival."

They appear unimpressed and say nothing in return, but I've just performed one of the labors that come with being a Villager: imparting Village lore to everyone and anyone.

A friend visiting and walking with me on, say, Bedford Street, will hear, "That's the oldest house in the Village that's still standing, from 1799" (No. 77), and "That's the narrowest house in the city - nine and a half feet wide; Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there (No. 75 ½)." On Grove Street, it's "They say John Wilkes Booth plotted Lincoln's assassination here" (No. 45). On Bank Street, it's "Here's where Lauren Bacall lived when she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village 1942" (No. 75).

Small-town chauvinism? Fact, or myth and exaggeration? In the Village, we mix it all together and call it history. If you want to be here, be prepared to take on the unpaid job of learning it, repeating it, and along with the buildings, preserving it. Living in the Village isn't all Magnolia cupcakes.

The other day, a hot one, Stephen Saunders, the owner of the End of History, the little shop on Hudson Street off Perry with the huge selection of 1950s and '60s glass, was peeling off dozens of movie posters that had been plastered over some scaffolding on the corner. He said he'd also taken them down a couple of days before but they had gone right back up. "What kind of people would do this in a historic district?" he said as he went about his Village duty.

It also falls to us Old Villagers to keep the neighborhood's reputation alive, handing down the oral history so the Village will forever be remembered as the one true American artistic and intellectual bohemia, the place from which every American enlightenment sprung: Beatniks, sexual freedom, Abstract Expressionism, gay lib, women's lib, folk music, counterculturalism and so on. I sometimes add that the Village was where humans learned to control fire.

We must be sure to take the New Villagers to the White Horse Tavern and always say, "This is where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death in 1953." I first heard that in the '60s, and despite the fact that he died days after that drinking bout and in spite of evidence that his death was probably caused by drugs given him by a doctor for his gout, the story is still repeated.

His picture still hangs at the White Horse, no longer the dark longshoreman's bar of Thomas's day, or with the Bob Dylan-filled jukebox of mine. Now young Wall Streeters and their like fill the bar after work, and tourists fill the outside dining tables on weekends.

Old Villagers always begin discussions by sadly explaining that the Village just isn't what it used to be. That was passed on to me when I moved here, in early 1979. Then the crime rate fell, and everyone figured it was safe to start moving downtown, and these days, the moneyed gentrification that followed is blamed.