Park West Village

Park West Village is a multi-building rental apartment complex on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, listed here at 784 Columbus Avenue, with PWV Management as manager on record. It is a complex rather than a single building: the original mid-century towers built on the Manhattantown urban renewal site between West 97th and West 100th Streets. The newer towers on the same superblock at 775, 805 and 808 Columbus Avenue are separate developments and are indexed as their own records.

The superblock runs from Columbus Avenue to Central Park West, so Central Park, the Reservoir and the North Meadow are a block east. Riverside Park and the Hudson are four blocks west. The B and C run under Central Park West with a stop at 96th Street and another at 103rd, and the 1, 2 and 3 stop at 96th Street and Broadway.

The site’s history is one of the most notorious episodes of postwar urban renewal in New York. Under the federal Title I program overseen by Robert Moses, six blocks of tenements were sold to private sponsors in the early 1950s for a project called Manhattantown. The sponsors collected rent from the existing tenants for years without building anything, and the resulting scandal reached congressional hearings in 1954. The site was taken over and completed as Park West Village, whose towers opened around the turn of the 1960s.

With 2,500 apartments it is the largest rental complex on the Upper West Side in this index. Its towers are set back from the street among lawns and parking, a layout typical of the period, and the apartments tend to be larger and more plainly finished than those in the new towers built beside them in the 2000s. That later redevelopment of part of the superblock, known as Columbus Square, also brought ground-floor shops along Columbus Avenue, including a supermarket.