Your Friendly Neighborhood Maggie Gyllenhaal Still Roams In Jane Jacobs’ West Village

Life on the stretch of Hudson Street in the West Village which Jane Jacobs wrote about in her 1961 book Death and Life of Great American Cities goes on pretty much as she described it:

. . . [L]ately residents are “having more babies,” says Fran DeMastri, a veteran daytime bartender at Jacobs’s old haunt, the White Horse Tavern. (Bars keep the street “reasonably populated until three in the morning and . . . always a safe street to come home to,” Jacobs wrote.) Neighbors who may not know their local “fruit man,” as Jacobs did, keep tabs on nearby celebs. Sitting at the White Horse at noon, executive recruiter John Carreras replaces Jacobs’s survey of longshoremen and tailors with a tally of nearby names: Lou Reed, Julianne Moore, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Stipe, Hilary Swank . . .