West of Sixth Avenue (Greenwich Village): West of Sixth Avenue (Greenwich Village)
Sixth Avenue itself is mainly tawdry stores and plastic eating houses, but on its west side, across Father Demo Square and up Bleecker, are some of the Village's prettiest residential streets. Turn left on Leroy Street and cross over Varick Street, where, confusingly, Leroy Street becomes St Luke's Place for a block. The houses here, dating from the 1850s, are among the city's most graceful, one of them (recognizable by the two lamps of honor at the bottom of the steps) is the ex-residence of Jimmy Walker , mayor of New York in the 1920s. Walker was for a time the most popular of mayors, a big-spending, wisecracking man who gave up his work as a songwriter for the world of politics and lived an extravagant lifestyle that rarely kept him out of the gossip columns.
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