It was just before sunset and there were 10 children milling about in Peter Greer's front yard in the Greenwich Village neighborhood north of Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

Some were busy yanking lemons from a fragrant citrus tree next to Greer's driveway, some were patting his exuberant dog and one small boy was trying his hardest to escape his mother's clutches and ride his bicycle out onto the street.

Only one of these children, 13-year-old Virginia, was Greer's. The rest belonged to Louise Reid and her sister-in-law Ivy Reid, who were respectively hanging on to the bike rider and cradling an 11-month-old baby.

"This is the reason I live here," Greer said, gesturing at the noisy, cheerful bunch. "They've all grown up together. There are 38 kids from this corner to that corner."

It is one of Thousand Oaks' oldest neighborhoods, an area of about 3,100 people, subdivided and settled in the mid-1920s as vacation getaways, complete with cabins overlooking the Conejo Creek. Right next to what was then Ventura Boulevard and is now Thousand Oaks Boulevard, it was home to many of the city's pioneers, including the Hodencamps and the Flittners.

It is bordered to the south by Greenwich Drive, to the north by Benson Drive, to the west by Hodencamp Drive and the Moorpark Freeway to the east.

No one knows quite how the name came about.

City Planner Mike Sangster said he thought it might have been selected in homage to old England, or it could just have been the whim of some fanciful developer.

Miriam Sprankling, curator of history at the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Newbury Park, said the area is often referred to as Old Town--in fact residents who have lived in Greenwich Village for years are more likely to call it that than by its technical name.

Sprankling could not confirm where the name came from, but had one suggestion. The land was purchased in 1887 by a man named Greenbury Crowley, who came from Missouri. He and his descendants farmed the land for three generations before it was sold to a developer. Crowley's nickname was Green.

"Maybe they decided to name it after the original Green," Sprankling said.

Four years ago, Greenwich Village achieved a certain unwanted notoriety around town, the kind of reputation that still makes one city planner wince a little and refer to it as "troubled."