NYRA × Vitsœ Office Takeover and Pop-up Shop

Join us next week as New York Review of Architecture takes over Vitsœ’s New York showroom. For five days, NYRA will transform the Greenwich Village space into our office and pop-up holiday shop.

Stop by to meet NYRA staff and snag a copy of our latest issue, some sweet merch, and designed objects perfect for holiday gift-giving. Throughout the week, NYRA contributors will lead architectural walking tours of the Village that situate the enduring legacy of Jane Jacobs, excavate bygone buildings and infrastructure, and retrace the steps of Gilded Age reformers.

There are limited spots available for each tour and we anticipate they will sell out. Register and see all of them here, and find their descriptions below.

Join NYRA contributors on walking tours around Greenwich Village during our office takover of Vitsœ’s New York showroom. There are limited spots available for each tour and we anticipat they will sell out. Register for the tours using the links below, and read on for the tour descriptions.

Wednesday 12/10

• 12:30 p.m.: The Lies Buildings Tell with Kavyashri Cherala
• 4:00 p.m: How the Grid Conquered the West Village with Avi Garelick

Thursday 12/11

• 5:00 p.m: How the Grid Conquered the West Village with Avi Garelick

Friday 12/12

• 2:00 p.m: The Lies Buildings Tell with Kavyashri Cherala
• 4:30 p.m: Where Fuel Once Flowed, with Laura del Pino
• 5:30 p.m: Walking the City with (and Against) Jane Jacobs with Andy Battle

Saturday 12/13

• 1:00 p.m: Where Fuel Once Flowed, with Laura del Pino
• 2:00 p.m: The Lies Buildings Tell with Kavyashri Cherala
• 3:00 p.m: Walking the City with (and Against) Jane Jacobs with Andy Battle

Friday 12/12 at 5:30 p.m. and Saturday 12/13 at 3:00 p.m.

Few writers have had as significant an impact on their subjects as Jane Jacobs, whose theories of urban space—“mixed-use,” “sidewalk ballet,” “organized complexity,” and “eyes on the street”—established the terms by which urban policy is still often discussed. In this tour, we will embark on a collective investigation of Jacobs’s ideas using her prescribed method: walking. In traversing Greenwich Village, Jacobs’s adopted home and the seedbed of her way of looking at the city, we will visit the places that nurtured her ideas while discussing what those ideas are, what they capture, and what they miss.

About the guide:
Andy Battle is a historian, editor, and teacher living in New York City. He teaches classes on urban history at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. His article on Jane Jacobs, “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” appeared in NYRA #45.

Wednesday 12/10 at 12:30 p.m., Friday 12/12 at 2:00 p.m. and Saturday 12/13 at 2:00 p.m.

In this housing-focused tour, we’ll read Greenwich Village’s façades as confessions. Rowhouses, mews, converted stables, and brownstones quietly reveal the logic of the spaces inside through window patterns, cornice misalignments, and hidden details behind false fronts. The Village becomes a case study in how New York projects its neuroses onto brick and brownstone, even as interiors are constantly renovated. Our route takes us from the intimate scale of West 8th Street’s irregular lots, through Minetta Street, Patchin Place, Grove Court, MacDougal–Sullivan Gardens, and 131–135 MacDougal Street, before moving to Westbeth Artists Housing and culminating at I. M. Pei’s Silver Towers. We’ll explore how interior constraints shape what we see from the street, turning façades into a record of adaptation, compromise, and sometimes, deliberate contrast.

About the guide:
Kavya Cherala is an architect and writer. She is a recipient of the AIA New York Women in Architecture Recognition Award, a Forefront Fellow with the Urban Design Forum, and has been recognized as an emerging leader by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. Her reflection on the spectacle of demolition, “Bowled Over,” appeared in NYRA #32.

Wednesday 12/10 at 4:00 p.m. and Thursday 12/11 at 5:00 p.m.

As hard as it is to believe now, the early twentieth century was a time when development capital was wary of Greenwich Village. While large garden apartment complexes sprung up along new transit lines uptown and in the South Bronx, the crooked, ungridded streets of Greenwich Village threatened to choke urban growth. Quaint village charm wasn’t worth much to investors when those same streets were overstuffed by working families, disease, and high mortality rates.

This tour tells the story of how a Gilded Age growth coalition of reformists and capitalists fought “congestion” by advocating for the extension of Seventh Avenue and the IRT Subways through the Village. Their eventual success raised property values and created a key commuter link to the growing downtown business district. But along the way, hundreds of buildings were demolished and thousands of residents displaced, while the promise of new affordable worker housing disappeared. Retracing the steps of reformers like Mary Simkhovitch and Ben Marsh, along with erstwhile capitalist allies like Henry Morgenthau and Alexander Cassatt, we will bring their story to life and trace its impacts in the present day. Revealing scores of buildings still visibly altered by the avenue extensions, and vestigial slivers of bulldozed blocks awkwardly littering the landscape, the tour will be an interactive, embodied exploration of the imposition of grid onto chaos.

About the guide:
Avi Garelick is a freelance researcher and educator specializing in New York’s development patterns. Despite a long background in informal education, this is his first time walking backwards. Coauthored with Andrew Schustek, “Moneyball” appeared in NYRA #34/35.

Friday 12/12 at 4:30 p.m. and Saturday 12/13 at 1:00 p.m.

North of SoHo, the city once opened into an urban archipelago of service stations, repair shops, and garages known as Gasoline Alley. Its fragments shaped the daily choreography of the neighborhood: trucks idling at the curb, taxis cutting across irregular lots, mechanics working in narrow bays carved out by earlier street widenings. Almost all of it is gone now. This walk traces what remains of that landscape and what replaced it, moving from the lingering service edges of Lafayette Street to the last gas station downtown at 51–63 Eighth Avenue. As we follow these ghost infrastructures, we examine how land value, mobility, and taste conspire to erase “messier” urban spaces, and how their disappearance renders the city more palatable—smoothed, curated, and increasingly detached from the frictions that once animated it.

About the guide:
Laura del Pino is an architect, educator, and researcher investigating the spatial, infrastructural, and ecological forces shaping contemporary urban environments. She is an adjunct professor at the New York Institute of Technology and Kean University. This walk draws from her essay published in Urban Omnibus, “Four and a Half Gasoline Stations.”