West 8th Street – once the storied heart of Greenwich Village – is in trouble. In the block between Fifth and Sixth avenues, at least 16 storefronts sit empty. In windows that once beckoned to hipsters and trendsetters, telephone numbers of realtors now blink at passersby.

Concerned residents met Wednesday at the Jefferson Market Library to discuss “What’s Next for West 8th Street?” While some signs of hope appear, such as new specialty food establishments, residents remain unsure whether the street will ever recapture its earlier luster.

The poet Allen Ginsberg lived on West 8th Street in 1964; Bette Davis was at 17 W. 8th Street in 1928, and Edmund Wilson lived at 15 W. 8th Street in 1916. Jack Kerouac, Jimi Hendrix, and others lived there, too, over the years.

The Beat bookstores and jazz clubs are long gone, but so are the neighborhood meat markets, the grocery stores and clothing stores that once gave the street its character. Even a few of the discount shoe stores, which anchored the street for more than two decades, are leaving.

“The street is undergoing a change,” Cormac Flynn, who has lived on West 8th Street for four decades, said. Asked whether the street would get better or worse, he said, “That’s the big question.”

The street “looks drearier than it ever did,” said George Jochnowitz, who has lived nearby, on East 8th Street, since 1951.

At the Wednesday meeting, the executive director of the business improvement group the Village Alliance, Honi Klein, addressed members of the West 8th Street Block Association. She said there were three reasons contributing to the eruption of vacancies. First, some building owners had more than one store offering similar merchandise and decided to close a self-competing storefront. Second, in the past five years, 14th Street has become the destination for shoe stores. Third, several buildings have been sold, and merchant leases have not been renewed.

Still, according to Ms. Klein, there are positive developments: Eva’s Restaurant is expanding and Le Pain Quotidien is expanding for the third time. A wine shop and a Belgian waffles restaurant are opening soon. There’s also a Japanese pastry shop called the Choux Factory and a Mexican restaurant, Pio Maya, the president of Square Foot Reality, Howard Aaron, said.

Mr. Aaron, who represents 21, 23, and 25 W.8th St., all of which are currently for rent, said the Broadway Panhandler, a store that sells kitchen supplies, is moving to East 8th Street from Broome Street.

The Village Alliance also has hired a consulting firm to conduct a retail analysis. The report will be available in about six weeks.

Streets just to the north – West 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th between Fifth and Sixth avenues – have long been considered among the most desirable in the entire Village, dowager empresses lined with elegant brownstones and pre-war apartment blocks. Eighth Street, however, is their dowdy sister.

“Eighth Street has been a Sleeping Beauty for decades,” the writer, Linda Ann Loschiavo, who has written a play about Mae West and the nearby Jefferson Market courthouse, said. “The street slumbered when the original resident socialites moved uptown.” Artists and bohemians continued to give it energy, she said, before upscale eateries and bookstores mushroomed and kept the excitement going through about 1980.

Mr. Jochnowitz recalls that, years ago, the street had a more intellectual air, with bookstores such the Marboro Bookshop. A Princeton University historian, Sean Wilentz, whose father and uncle ran the fabled 8th Street Bookshop, said the block was once “the crossroads of the Village. On any given weekend, people could not fit on the sidewalk.” He fondly recalled one shop in particular, the Discophile, a mecca for connoisseurs of hard-to-find records.

There’s little doubt that West 8th Street can be revivified, the president of the Washington Square Lower Fifth Avenue block association, Gil Horowitz, said. Mr. Horowitz said he hoped to bring about a renaissance and restore the look of the street’s glory years.

Visual artist Sharon Woolums has suggested restoring the original, muted Art Deco colors to the storefronts. Industrial designer Lisa Smith has discussed taking photos of nearby Bleecker Street, west of Seventh Avenue, an area that is a “success story,” she said, and making a PowerPoint presentation to the board of the Village Alliance as an example of what could happen on West 8th Street.