4th Street is a street in Lower Manhattan, New York City. It starts at Avenue D as East 4th Street and continues to Broadway, where it becomes West 4th Street. It continues west until the Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue), where West 4th Street turns north and confusingly intersects with West 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th Streets in Greenwich Village. Most of the street has the same 40ft width between curbstones as others in the prevailing street grid, striped as two curbside lanes and one traffic lane, with one-way traffic eastbound. The portion from Seventh to Eighth Avenues is westbound (northbound geographically) and is approximately 35ft wide, a legacy of the original Greenwich Village street grid. The section of four short blocks from MacDougal Street to University Place which forms the southern border of Washington Square Park is called Washington Square South.The north/south portion (from Sixth Avenue to 13th Street) was formerly called Asylum Street, after the Orphan Asylum Society, which stood on Asylum Street between Bank Street and Troy Street (now West 12th Street). The asylum was demolished in 1833 and the street was renamed West 4th Street. Later, the cross streets (Amos, Hammond, and Troy) were renamed West 10th, 11th, and 12th Streets, causing the current confusion.
