687 Greenwich Street, Townhouse 1

Mews are supposed to be old. The word belongs to stable lanes and carriage houses, to the nineteenth century. Greenwich Mews is the West Village's great exception: seven brick townhouses behind a private gate at 687 Greenwich Street, built in 1989, a full twenty years after the Greenwich Village Historic District was drawn around the site. The Landmarks Preservation Commission counts the row as Contributing to the district all the same, which makes these some of the youngest buildings in the Village to hold that standing.

The land had spent decades in a rougher trade. Five original houses came down in 1945 to make way for a trucking freight terminal, and two of the terminal's storage buildings held the site until the mews replaced them. Because the parcel sits inside the 1969 district, the project had to clear Landmarks review, and a later preservation census counted only about forty new buildings approved in the entire district since designation. A row of seven houses stands as one of the largest single additions ever permitted.

Strangest of all, nobody is credited. The Landmarks record lists both architect and developer as Not determined, an unusual anonymity for houses that pass this convincingly, with brick facades, brownstone trim, ironwork, bay windows, and double-hung sash. The Village's newest mews arrived without a byline and has kept it that way.

The iron gate off Greenwich Street is the whole premise. Beyond it, a brick-paved court runs like a private street, the seven houses facing in, each with a dedicated parking space at its own front door, an arrangement with almost no parallel this deep in the Village. A shared property manager tends the enclave, from the flower boxes to the snow, and a furnished common roof deck with a grill serves the houses.

The effect is a kind of suburban logic transplanted to Greenwich Street: you pull in off the street, park at your own steps, and close a gate behind you. For a tenant, the manager is the quiet luxury, since townhouse living usually means owning every leak and every snowfall. Here, someone else holds the shovel.

Townhouse 1 lays out three bedrooms and two and a half baths across roughly three thousand square feet, full-house scale rather than apartment scale. The row was drawn to traditional townhouse proportions, and it shows from the court: a bay window, brick and brownstone trim, true double-hung sash. What a lease here buys is the whole vertical life of a Village townhouse, your own front door, your own stoop, your own floors, without having to own the walls.

The mews sits between Christopher and West 10th Streets, in the far West Village where the neighborhood quiets toward the river. Hudson River Park is a short walk west, and the cafes and bookshops of the central Village are a few blocks east. It is one of the calmest stretches of a famously calm neighborhood, and the gate makes it calmer still.