4 Best Sights in West Village, New York City

The CMA encourages children ages 1 to 15 to get creative through a variety of mediums. Along with the requisite children's museum offerings like pencils, chalk, and paint, you'll find a clay bar; a media lab with mounted cameras and a recording studio; a small slide and colorful ball pond that kids can play in; an airy exhibition space with rotating exhibits (and workshops inspired by exhibits); a permanent collection of children's art from more than 50 countries; and classes in ceramics, origami, animation, filmmaking, and more. Check the website for a busy calendar of events.

You might have to share a bench in this tiny park with George Segal's life-size sculptures of a lesbian couple: titled Gay Liberation, the white-painted bronzes were cast in 1980 but not installed until 1992. Standing next to them is a gay male couple, captured mid-chat.

Artist and film director Julian Schnabel lives here. But that's not why it's worth making a point to stand across the street and marvel at this pink structure of wonder. Plopped atop a former horse stable, this 12-floor pink Venetian-style palace rises 170 feet above the low-level skyline of the West Village. The facade is highlighted by Renaissance-style porticos and the name engraved halfway up, Palazzo Chupi—a reference to a popular brand of Spanish lollipop and the pet name for Schnabel's wife. When it was completed in 2008, there were rumors that various celebrities—Bono, Madonna, the Olsen Twins—were going to buy one of the five apartments inside. (The only famous person who actually did buy a place was actor Richard Gere.) The building immediately became a divisive flashpoint for West Villagers: some passionately hated it while others loved it. Over time, the haters have thinned out and now most locals love Palazzo Chupi.

Steeped in New York City history and shaded by graceful gingko trees, this somewhat-hard-to-find section of Leroy Street has 15 classic Italianate brownstone and brick town houses (1851–54). Novelist Theodore Dreiser wrote An American Tragedy at No. 16, and poet Marianne Moore resided at No. 14. (Robert De Niro later lived here for decades—in mid-2012 he sold it for $9.5 million.) The colorful (and corrupt) Mayor Jimmy Walker (first elected in 1926) lived at No. 6; the lampposts in front are "mayor's lamps," which were sometimes placed in front of the residences of New York mayors. This block is often used as a film location: No. 4 was the setting of the Audrey Hepburn thriller Wait Until Dark. Before 1890, the James J. Walker Park, on the south side of the street near Hudson, was a graveyard where, according to legend, the dauphin of France—the lost son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—is buried.