40°43′41″N 73°59′50″W / 40.72806°N 73.99722°W / 40.72806; -73.99722

Washington Square Village (WSV) is an apartment complex in a superblock in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. WSV was developed by Paul Tishman and Morton S. Wolf. To design the housing complex, the developer selected architects S. J. Kessler and Sons, with Paul Lester Weiner as consultant for site planning and design; landscape architects were Sasaki, Walker & Associates.

WSV contains 1,292 apartments in two parallel tower slabs of two buildings each, enclosing a park over a 650-car underground garage. WSV represents the epitome of the tower in a park approach to housing. The complex features vertical panels of bold, primary-color glazed bricks, and terraces. It is owned by New York University and houses faculty members, graduate students, and other members of the community. WSV is bounded by West 3rd Street, Bleecker Street, Mercer Street, and LaGuardia Place to the north, south, east and west respectively. It is traversed by two driveways of which the westerly one was formerly part of Wooster Street, and the easterly, Greene Street.

In the early 19th century, the tract on which Washington Square Village now stands was in the Eighth ward in the northernmost part of the New York City. Beyond were only farms and estates stretching north from what is now Washington Square Park. Neither the Park nor the street grid of numbered streets and avenues yet existed. The Bleecker family owned an estate in the area and a Reverend Bleecker was Rector at the St. Luke's in the Fields, Trinity Parish, on Hudson Street. This church is still standing and in active use. Before the east side took shape, the west side of town had already become urbanized as the Village of Greenwich.

There were three average sized city blocks where WSV now stands. Examples of what they looked like then can be found immediately to the east and west of the block. The blocks were settled by the French and called "Frenchtown" for a time. By the 1870s most of the French had moved uptown, and it became the "Latin Quarter", well known for its brothels and taverns. No churches or public buildings were built on these blocks. West Third Street was then called Amity Street and LaGuardia Place was Laurens Street. Laurens, Wooster, Greene, and Mercer are Revolutionary War heroes (as are Sullivan, Thompson, and McDougall).

John Lloyd Stephens, an amateur archaeologist who rediscovered Mayan ruins in 1839, lived in 13 LeRoy Place, a house built on the area occupied now by the Building 4 of the WSV complex. In 1892, Nikola Tesla moved his laboratory to the 4th floor of a factory building at 33-35 South Fifth Avenue (now LaGuardia Place), on the western boundary of Washington Square Village. In March 1895, a fire destroyed the laboratory and caused the loss of ten years of Tesla's research.

For the first half of the 20th century the WSV area remained a neighborhood of mostly working class flats, lofts and factories. Although never a slum, it was nevertheless slated for urban renewal by the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance, as part of a vast project led by Robert Moses. Washington Square Village was intended to be part of a broad effort in Manhattan and throughout New York City to clear what some in the city government perceived as slums and to replace the old, run-down buildings with sleek modern structures.

The project was to include a vehicular bridge from Red Hook, Brooklyn to Battery Park, and an elevated highway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, across Lower Manhattan. The plan also included a new "Fifth Avenue South" replacing West Broadway and what is now LaGuardia Place. As was the case in the 19th century with the street grid, local opposition stopped it. The only parts of the project that did happen are the superblocks where Washington Square Village and University Plaza now stand, including the adjacent widened parts of West Third and Bleecker Streets and the parkland strips along Mercer Street and LaGuardia Place between Houston and West Third.