7. There’s a Picasso Sculpture at NYU

Part of an urban renewal project, University Village was built on three demolished superblocks in Greenwich Village. The NYU portion of this project was designed by architects I.M. Pei and James Ingo Freed (of Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners). Two of the three 30-story towers are dormitories for graduate students and NYU faculty, and are now called the Silver Towers after an NYU alumni and donor Julius Silver. The main plaza of University Village contains a sculpture by Pablo Picasso and Carl Nesjär.

It may be surprising to those that might still find the tower-in-the-park design incongruous to the low-rise Greenwich Village neighborhood that these buildings, and the entire superblock was designated an official New York City landmark in 2008, the culmination of an advocacy effort by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation to prevent the construction of an additional two new towers on this superblock.