Greenwich Village Building Set

The Greenwich Village Building Set is a buildable model made from 450 LEGO® bricks. It features a collection of architecturally and culturally significant places in Greenwich Village — from Village Cigars and the Stonewall Inn to Jefferson Market Library and the quaint streets surrounding Washington Square Park. Designed by Peacham and produced by Village Preservation, the Greenwich Village Building Set reproduces in miniature New York City’s most storied neighborhood.¹

“Greenwich Village is known and beloved throughout the world for its charming architecture, quirky streets, and rich history,” says Andrew Berman, Executive Director of Village Preservation. “The Greenwich Village Building Set captures this neighborhood’s centuries-long history and its delightful landmarks. Not only will this set captivate and engage a new audience of Greenwich Village lovers, it will also support efforts to document and protect the neighborhood’s irreplaceable history.”

The Greenwich Village Building Set celebrates the neighborhood’s rich diversity of architectural styles, ranging from the classical to the vernacular: the dramatic gables of Jefferson Market Library, the imposing facades of Washington Square North, and the modest carriage houses of MacDougal Alley.²

Eccentric and Baffling Streets

Greenwich Village’s street layout is famously unruly: a patchwork of conflicting approaches to urban planning. West of Sixth Avenue, the Village’s organic eighteenth-century street layout collides with the rigid grid system outlined in the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811.³ This collision created a medley of triangular blocks, further complicated in the early 20th century by the southward extension of Seventh Avenue. The result is today’s West Village — what Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace refer to as “a corner of Manhattan still famed for the eccentric and baffling pattern of its streets.”⁴

The layout of the Greenwich Village Building Set reflects the neighborhood’s arrangement of streets, including an angled street on the left side of the set, which evokes the West Village’s irregular topography. The set follows a loosely defined geography that spans from Seventh Avenue South to University Place. Rendered in miniature, from left to right, are Village Cigars, the Christopher Street IRT Station, Hess Triangle, the Stonewall Inn, Jefferson Market Library, MacDougal Alley, Washington Square Park, Washington Arch, and the Greek Revival rowhouses of Washington Square North. The sets come packaged in a custom ear-lock box with a matte finish. Each set includes a 92-page booklet that contains step-by-step building instructions and historical information about the places depicted.

Iconic Signage by Vocal Type Company

Signage plays an important role in creating a sense of place. The character of a neighborhood is shaped not only by its people, its architecture, and its street layout, but also by its visual culture. To help capture the spirit of Greenwich Village, Peacham incorporated two of the neighborhood’s most iconic signs into the design of the building set: Village Cigars and the Stonewall Inn.

Village Cigars sits on a triangular block, at the intersection of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue South. It opened in 1922 as United Cigars and was renamed Village Cigars around 1970. This store has long been known for its eye-catching red and white signs — an assemblage of handmade letters featuring rounded serifs and dramatic swashes. Close inspection reveals that these letters vary in height, width, weight, and axis, sometimes within a single word. To faithfully capture the idiosyncrasies of these letterforms, Peacham enlisted type designer Tré Seals of Vocal Type Company, who recreated this legendary signage one letter at a time. Seals’s work is based on the horizontal sign from the building’s Seventh Avenue facade, and it perfectly reproduces the nuances of the original, including the uneven letter spacing.⁵

The Stonewall Inn is modest in appearance, which presented a unique challenge when rendering it in LEGO. The buildings at 51-53 Christopher Street were originally built as horse stables in the 1840s. In the 1930s, the two buildings were joined together and given a plain brick-and-stucco facade. A defining feature of the building was a large vertical sign that hung outside 53 Christopher Street from approximately 1934 to 1989.⁶ This sign figures prominently in historical photographs of the building. Its inclusion in the Greenwich Village Building Set serves as a visual signifier for one of the world's most significant cultural landmarks.

The set’s Stonewall sign uses the typeface Marsha, also designed by Tré Seals. Marsha is inspired by the vertical sign that hung outside The Stonewall Inn in the late 1980s. The font is named after legendary LGBTQ+ activist and Stonewall Uprising veteran Marsha P. Johnson. Like the Village Cigars lettering, Marsha also reflects the irreverence of the source material, including the backwards W. “Although the Stonewall sign was removed in 1989, it was an important part of the streetscape for many decades,” says Andrew Berman, “and we’re delighted to give it a new life, albeit at a very small scale.”

The first edition of the Greenwich Village Building Set launched in June 2024, a second edition went on sale in November 2024, and a third edition launched in May 2025. Reflecting on the project, Christopher Devine, founder and creative director of Peacham, says, “Our goal is simple: we aim to make historic preservation fun, cool, and accessible, especially for younger audiences. We hope the Greenwich Village Building Set inspires the next generation of architects, activists, historians, and preservationists.”

This project was featured in Print Magazine, Untapped New York, and New York Magazine’s The Strategist.