7 Ave, West Village

West 12th has some crazy expensive and enormous apartment buildings -- especially around the Washington and Greenwich Street area. They all are ridiculously expensive, have pretty great views and are very modern and very new. A friend of mine lives in one of them and it's pretty wild. She even has rooftop pool. The pool is tiny but there are so few in the city, you consider that a total luxury. Directly across Washington at 12th is a restaurant that seems to be the place where all of the luxury residents hang out: Barbuto. It's nice on a warm day when it's an open space, but other than that, I don't get this place. The food is overpriced and just decent and the crowd is yuppie to the max. Across 12th from Barbuto seems to be the restaurant's polar opposite. Tortilla Flats is a frat-crazy Mexican restaurant with terrible but cheap food, shots being handed out like candy and nightly themes like Bingo on Wed and Trivia on Sunday. The prizes are always some form of liquor and the crowd is pretty raucous.
From Greenwich east is almost entirely super expensive condos with a few super expensive older apartments sprinkled in. The Beatrice Inn is at West 4th but has yet to reopen. It used to be a pretty popular place to live and then opened as a nightclub about a year or so ago. It was closed after some kind of regulation violation and hasn't yet re-opened. It was beautiful inside but the ceilings are really low and the crowd was atrocious. The other corner of 12th and West 4th is an insanely popular restaurant called Cafe Cluny. I have yet to go there but I walk past it every day and I have yet to see it not busy -- even at 8 am on a Wednesday. The rest of the block is a bunch of really beautiful townhouses that pretty much just old, rich people live in. The corner of 12th and Greenwich Ave is a massive Equinox Gym. It used to be the West sides's only movie theatre and now it's a gym. I have a love - hate for that, though. I work out at this gym and it doesn't even feel like a gym. It's the nicest Equinox in the city and it's almost better to shower here than at home: it's that nice.
There are so many beautiful town and rowhouses stretching up to 5th Ave from this point, I can only suggest that someone walk down the street and look at all of them. Even the newer buildings did a pretty good job of fitting into the aesthetic. It's a very villagey street as far as residential goes. A lot of famous people have lived or do live on this street. Meryl Streep lives at 19. Andrew McCarthy, David Byrne, the founder of Macy's, Edna St. Vincent Millay. . . the list is pretty comprehensive. If you hang out here long enough, you'll probably bumb into one of them (only probably not Ms. Millay).