It Takes the Village By Steve Hendrix Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 30, 2000

"I guess it's pretty cool here," he says, shuffling in blunderbuss-bottomed pants down Fourth Avenue. It's a cloudy Saturday morning after a lively Friday night. The beer truck is at the curb of the Bar None. Two burly locals talk loud trash about their dispatcher as they wrangle cases of stale empties out the basement trap door. Hiller's interest grows livelier as he heads nowhere in particular along the ranks of fruit markets, boutiques, a thousand tiny enterprises. City dogs the size of coin purses trot beside leggy high-style shoppers on streets redolent of wet pavement, moldering garbage and creative energy. With no to-do or must-see list in hand, Hiller's first hours in New York are teaching him the hard-to-define pleasure of simply strolling the city streets. "There's a lot more going on here than at home."

Home for Hiller is Honolulu. He's a child of the sun, raised on soothing equatorial airs, top-down driving and year-round summer. His life has been 72 degrees and partly cloudy since the first grade. And it's driving him crazy. With one year to go at Honolulu's Punahou School, Hiller is jonesing to swap the azure glare of paradise for the gray shades of an East Coast metropolis. His No. 1 choice: New York University, NYU, a school he covets more for the "NY" than the "U."

"I really want to live in a big city like this," says Hiller, still awed by the experience of finding, on Bowery, an actual record store selling cases and cases of actual vinyl. "Honolulu is more like a vacation place than a place to live."

Ironically, until recently that's just what people said about New York: "It's a nice place to visit, but. . . ." No more. Gotham's rebirth is big news in high school counselors' offices from Oahu to Omaha. Parents who just a few years ago would have sent their children to Chernobyl Tech before they sent them to Manhattan now realize that New York is once again open for living. This time of the summer, in the last free days before the glories of senior year commence, a fair number of the tourists blocking New York's sidewalks are next year's freshmen and their families.

"We're trying to absorb as much of the city as we can," says Ron DeCicco, visiting with his family from Kansas City. Brian, 18, came to see NYU. His father, mother and older brother glommed on to see as many Broadway plays as possible (three so far) and to eat out three times a day. "If Brian does go to school here, we'll probably be visiting him often."

The locals have noticed. "The young kids are everywhere now, and so are their parents," says Krishna Yadav, who hawks newspapers, soft drinks and soft porn from a kiosk at the corner of Bleecker and La Guardia. Every third male who rushes past--with New York's standard 911 pace--is wearing a backpack and a goatee. The university ID cards they have to flash at every campus building seem superfluous. "Every day, even at night, they're walking around. It's good for business."

According to NYU, almost 30,000 prospective students and their chaperons this year took the twice-daily tours through the blocks of Greenwich Village that make up its campus--a jump of more than 200 percent since 1996. Applications have skyrocketed, tripling in the past decade, and now the great majority of freshmen who come to school here are from high schools outside of New York City.

"Many more people want to come here and they're coming from farther away," says John Beckman, NYU vice president for public affairs. Beckman is quick to grab a share of credit for the university's boom in the name of its own longstanding efforts at self-improvement and self-promotion. But he acknowledges a debt to the happy truth that Greenwich Village now harks back more to the stylish comfort of Ricky and Lucy Ricardo's day than to the excesses and street crime of Donald and Ivana Trump's. "There has been a complete turnaround in the perception, national and international, of New York. Parents don't have any fewer questions about safety and security, but the city can point with pride to some much stronger answers."

Hiller receives all this boosterish good news about safety--delivered by the student guide during the campus tour--with polite disinterest. He has a young person's immunity from personal fear and he thinks much, much more about whether he'll be able to get into the neighborhood clubs than whether he'll have any trouble getting home afterward. The terrifying truth is that he won't be 21 for another four years. "A guy told me I either have to look older or have some cute girls with me to get in."

Instead of cute girls, Hiller is staying with his aunt, uncle and two preschool cousins at the Chelsea Inn, a comfortable converted 19th-century town house tucked among the graphic design studios and high-end photo processors just north of the Village. It's a place long on character (you won't see that tattered ottoman replicated in Chelsea Inns across the country) and just long enough on service (daily piles of plush white towels, kitchenettes in every room) to make it a Manhattan find. About 11 p.m., after dinner at Dok Sunis, a hot-spot Korean restaurant, Hiller steps next door to make his first run at a rope line at a club called Splash.

"No way in hell, sonny," says the bouncer before Hiller even opens his mouth. Gruffly sympathetic, the big man in the muscle shirt suggests a nearby 18-and-over club, Curfew. It's a 15-block walk through the shoulder of a Saturday night, the warmup hours around midnight when diners strolling homeward mesh with clubbers just coming out. Every few blocks, Hiller passes another sidewalk lineup in the neon shadows of another club--sulking girls with black nails, young men in tailless Louis Prima cigar shirts (back-yard barbecue wear, circa 1961). At Curfew the line is younger, but not young enough. The doorman scans IDs with a flashlight at the door and Hiller, not up for another bounce, doesn't even join the queue. Walking the streets is enough for now, and he does that for another hour.

The next day, Washington Square is a neighborhood carnival. Hiller and scores of other tourists line the benches. He carries a shoe box from Diesel, clothing store to young and disaffected skateboarders. Others tote the glossy sacks of the mass, upmarket shopping that has come to the Village: Banana Republic, Gap, J. Crew. Kids on Rollerblades clack their hockey sticks around a rubber ball. A block away, La Guardia Place is closed and lined with street vendors selling cheap leather goods, Andean knitwear, goat meat on a stick. Another knot of students and their parents swim by in the company of an NYU guide.

This being New York, NYU's soaring popularity with college shoppers is not universally perceived as good news among Greenwich Village civilians. The university is scrambling to build more dorm space--high-rise style--and update its aging student center and law school around Washington Square. The construction has sparked a boisterous outcry from locals. Woody Allen, in a recent letter to the New York Times, complained of having to frame university construction out of his Village film shoots. NYU counters that providing more housing to its students keeps pressure off the area rental market, and that as a Village fixture since 1831, the university is as determined as anyone to preserve the unique flavor of the neighborhood.

"NYU is not walled off from Greenwich Village," says Beckman. "The city's sidewalks are our pathways."

Today at least, in the lee of Washington Square's massive arch, town and gown share the park happily. Little George Stranaham is playing in the fountain, which hasn't been turned on yet. "This is a great place for kids," says George's mom, Abby Stranaham, an artist. "The neighborhood is totally cleaned up from just five years ago even."

Clean enough for Honolulu parents to confidently send over their youngsters? "I don't know . . . Hawaii? That's got to be pretty nice," she says. "A lot of people have a hard time adjusting to America, especially to New York." As she ponders, Hiller doesn't bother to point out that Hawaii already is part of the United States. But she's right in one sense--it is a world away from New York City.

"He should come," Stranaham says finally. "It's a great time to be here."

Love New York, again? In and around Greenwich Village, try the Chelsea Inn at 46 W. 17th St. for funky accommodations that will remind you of crashing at a friend's overfurnished flat (800-640-6469, www.chelseainn.com; rooms with private bath start at $139); Dok Sunis, for memorable and affordable home-style Korean food in a crowded yuppie bar setting (119 First Ave., 212-477-9506); Satellite Records, for more than 30,000 electronic dance music titles on vinyl (342 Bowery, 212-780-9305; www.satelliterecords.com); Diesel, for expensive shabby urban styles (770 Lexington Ave., 212-308-0055; www.diesel.com); New York University for a solid post-secondary education (212-998-1212, www.nyu.edu; exceptional SAT scores and personal essay required). For general information on travel to the city: 800-456-8369, www.iloveny.com.