Greenwich Village is one of the oldest sections of New York City, so you'd think the street names of this former country outpost would have been set and established by the mid-19th century.

But a look at an antique map from 1865 proves otherwise. Sure, most of the streets carry the same name they do today; you could certainly use the map to get around from 14th Street to Houston.

Still, a surprising number of streets have names that are unfamiliar and feel, well, wrong. Take 13th Avenue, on the far left side of the map, for starters (below, at Gansevoort Street, in the 1920s).

Never part of the original street grid and built on landfill in the 1830s, this neglected road went from West 11th Street to 25th Street along the Hudson River. Any plans to extend it or improve it seemed to end in the early 20th century, when almost all of it disappeared from the cityscape.

From 13th Avenue let's go to Troy Street, the old-time name for West 12th Street, which then turns into Abingdon Place, another vanished name. Why it was called Troy is unclear, but perhaps it was the name of an 18th or 19th century landowner. The street got its name in 1827, according to oldstreets.com.

Six blocks south of Troy is Amos Street, which the map helpfully explains is now West 10th Street. Who was Amos? That would be Charles Christopher Amos, according to nycgo.com, the heir to landowner Sir Peter Warren. Amos also lent his name to Charles and Christopher Streets.

Closer to Washington Square is another ghost street: Clinton Place, today's West Eighth Street. (Above photo shows 31-33 East Eighth Street, formerly 41-39 Clinton Place in 1928.)

"Eighth Street (Sixth Avenue to the Bowery) was named Clinton Place in memory of Dewitt Clinton, an American statesman, whose widow lived a few doors away on University Place," explains the Village Alliance. "The street kept the name Clinton Place until the turn of the century."

Laurens Place, below Washington Square, was a poor tenement strip in the mid-19th century dubbed "rotten row." Rechristening it LaGuardia Place and then below Houston Street West Broadway gave it much-needed cachet.

Amity Street's name origin is also unknown (above, showing the "Midnight Mission for Fallen Women"). "Opened in 1806, it was renamed West 3rd Street in 1875," notes oldstreets.com. Toward the East Village was elite, terraced Albion Place, "a row of 12 houses on the south side of East 4th Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue."

Finally, I'm curious about St. Georges Place, which appears to be the new name of East 13th Street at Second Avenue. Was a church with the same name nearby, or could this have been a long-forgotten row of posh houses similar to St. Luke's Place and St. Marks Place?

[Map: Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. via Raremaps.com; second image: NYPL; third image: oldnyc.org; fourth image: NYPL]