Kypseli began as open country. Until 1908, when the engineer Athanasios Georgiadis first surveyed and platted it, this was a rural fringe of estates and country houses east of Patission Street. One of those houses belonged to Konstantinos Kanaris, the fire-ship captain of the Greek War of Independence who later served as prime minister; he lived and died here, and a statue of him still stands in Kypselis Square. The transformation came fast in the 1930s. Family homes and the first modern apartment buildings in Athens rose side by side, and the neighborhood urbanized in step with elegant Kolonaki. Green spaces - the great Pedion Areos park to the south, the leafy run of Fokionos Negri - made it desirable, and the middle and upper-middle classes moved in.

Kypseli is, quietly, a museum of twentieth-century Greek architecture. The earliest houses wore neoclassical and eclectic dress, but from the 1930s the city's appetite turned international - modernism, the Bauhaus, Art Deco. Architects built tall for the era, apartment blocks of large units rarely topping six storeys, their balconies stacked like drawers. In 1937 the dictator Ioannis Metaxas inaugurated the neighborhood's municipal market on Fokionos Negri, designed by Alexandros Metaxas, and the ground-floor shops turned the street into a destination. Names like the Lanaras condominium of 1938 and the artist couple Tonis and Ioanna Spiteris's 1955 home and atelier still punctuate the blocks - a built record of a city imagining its modern self.

Fashion moved on. Beginning in the 1980s, many longtime residents decamped for the greener northern suburbs, and the elegant buildings began to empty. In the decades that followed, immigrants arriving in Athens settled into the basements and smaller flats, drawn by cheap rents in a central location, and Kypseli became one of the city's most genuinely multinational quarters. Real estate values slid even as the bones of the place stayed handsome - the better apartments along Fokionos Negri still command a premium. The neighborhood that the postwar middle class had abandoned became, by accident, a crossroads where Athens's older grandeur and its newer arrivals share the same staircases.

The heart of it all is still that one pedestrianized street. Fokionos Negri runs like a green spine through the district, a promenade lined with cafes and shaded by trees, where the rhythms of neighborhood life play out as they have for generations - the morning coffee, the evening stroll, children spilling into the linear park down its middle. Kypseli holds onto its institutions too, among them the athletic club Panellinios, founded back in 1891. The neighborhood is dense, layered, and unpolished, roughly 100,000 people packed into the sixth municipal district. It is not the manicured Athens of postcards. It is something more interesting: a real place, mid-reinvention, wearing all its eras at once.