I have a urban fantasy world in which I base most of my stories. In this world magic is mostly a genetic trait and all families have a certain magical gift. I need last names for Mage families that have some element of their magical gifts and ethnic origins. What I need now is a last name family of Creole Nercomancer that is better DeMorte which is the one I came up with

Hi, I'm looking for some neighborhood/location information for a story taking place in NY.
My main character is living in NYC with his grandparent's, and one night he meets an NYU student working at a 24 hour diner. So my question is: what area would be both close enough to NYU for a student to work there and close enough for my main character to walk to from his grandparent's? For what it's worth his grandparents were middle class, living in the place would have bought in the '50s . Ideally I wanted them to live in a small house,but I can change it to an apartment if that would be more realistic.
I've tried looking through the entries on Manhattan Neighborhoods and Greenwich/West Village, NYU entries on Wikipedia, and also trying to google things like 'residential neighborhoods'. I've also tried looking through entries tagged 'new york' in the community.
Thanks for all your help!
EDT: Thanks to everyone who responded! The answers seem pretty evenly split between the East/West Village and somewhere in Queens that's on the subway. I guess it's a question of whether it's feasible for my MC to take a 45-ish minute subway ride into the city really late at night. I guess if the diner has *really* good cheesecake?
The setting is 1999 Japan, and what I need to know if there were any incidents before 1999 in which a female student accused a female teacher of sexual harassment. It doesn't matter if the teacher was tried or anything like that; I just need to know if an accusation like that ever happened. I don't know how to search for that in Google, so on Wikipedia I searched "sex scandals" and "Japanese sex offenders," but I was only pulling up information on men. I don't know any Japanese, so if you have a news source, I need it in English.
Thanks for any help!