‘Time is of the essence’: Residents urge city officials to preserve Village area as historic district

As a young adult in the 1980s, Joel Loventhal cherished going to the same used bookstores in Greenwich Village that his father would frequent four decades prior. But now, many of those businesses are gone, he says, pushed out by the neighborhood’s high rent costs. “I’ve avoided walking that area the way I used to because it’s painful to me to see what’s happened, how much history has been destroyed, how many wonderful buildings we’ve already lost,” Loventhal, a Union Square resident, said on Zoom from his book-filled study. “Time is of the essence. This designation should have happened at least 10 years ago, or maybe 30 years ago.” Rosenthal was one of a dozen local residents who attended a Manhattan Community Board 2 meeting Thursday evening, where members of a committee voted 6-2 in support of a nonprofit campaign that aims to get parts of Greenwich Village and the East Village named as a historic district.

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