{"id":186819,"date":"2026-04-06T06:01:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T06:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/186819\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T06:01:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T06:01:18","slug":"willys-garden-fifth-avenue-nyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/186819\/","title":{"rendered":"Willy\u2019s Garden Fifth Avenue NYC"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York is all about secret sanctuaries and private oases. But I\u2019d say Greenwich Village is Gotham\u2019s land of clandestine gardens, a neighborhood of many lush green spaces behind 19th century buildings and churchyards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To come across another of these secret gardens\u2014a block from Washington Square Park no less, with a mystery bronze statue at the end of a wide concrete walkway\u2014would be a delightful way to welcome spring.<\/p>\n

Lucky for me, that\u2019s what happened on a recent Saturday walk down lower Fifth Avenue. <\/p>\n

Beyond a colonnade-style entrance between the former stables of Washington Mews and \u201cThe Row\u201d of 1830s townhouses<\/a> on Washington Square North, my eyes caught sight of a slender patch of green. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Though it\u2019s not open to the public on weekends, I managed to get past the colonnade and down the path into the garden. <\/p>\n

A canopy of pink and white petals overhead, patches of ivy crawling up walls, a couple of bird baths, bushes and flowers budding closer to the ground\u2014it\u2019s the kind of not overly manicured garden that reflects the Village\u2019s historical refusal to adhere to convention (or the street grid).<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s not just an accidental, no-name garden. This is \u201cWilly\u2019s Garden,\u201d<\/a> on a slender stretch of New York University\u2019s Greenwich Village campus. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

According to the Park Odyssey blog<\/a>, the 8,000 square foot garden\u2014named for who exactly, no one seems to know\u2014is landscaped by NYU and \u201cfunctions as the entrance to the university\u2019s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and some faculty residences.\u201d<\/p>\n

All the garden\u2019s greenery is part of a plan. \u201cThe garden was planted in zones: woodland, flowering meow, berry patch, and Three Sisters,\u201d all species \u201ccollected by the Lenape peoples,\u201d per the now defunct Local Ecologist website, via Park Odyssey.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The statue at the end has an appropriately cast-off history. It\u2019s a bronze of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote\u2014one of three replicas of an 1835 statue on display at the Palacio de las Cortes in Madrid.<\/p>\n

In 1986, the mayor of Madrid presented the replica Cervantes to the city of New York, which placed it in Bryant Park. But when Bryant Park underwent a renovation in the late 1980s, the city donated it to NYU in 1989. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Its found a home in this easy-to-miss garden, which makes the most of its location on the lower Fifth Avenue of carriage houses and cobblestones. <\/p>\n

Take a walk through it on a weekday. Unlike some of Greenwich Village\u2019s other hidden gardens that lie behind fences and gates, it\u2019s open to the public five days a week but feels like a private oasis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York is all about secret sanctuaries and private oases. But I\u2019d say Greenwich Village is Gotham\u2019s land…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":{"0":"post-186819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-city-news","12":"tag-ny"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}