Greenwich Village | Page 2

his three-cornered hat and knee-breeches, and his
old-world air so homely and so picturesque. Our great streets, hemmed
by stone and marble and glittering plate glass, crowded with
kaleidoscopic cosmopolitan traffic, ceaselessly resonant with twentieth
century activity, do not seem a happy setting for our old-fashioned and
beloved presiding shade. Where could he fall a-nodding, to dream
himself back into the quaint and gallant days of the past? Where would
he smoke his ancient Dutch pipe in peace? One has a mental picture of
Father Knickerbocker shaking his queued head over so much noise and
haste, so many new-fangled, cluttering things and ways, such a
confusion of aims and pursuits on his fine old island! And he would be
a wretched ghost indeed if doomed to haunt only upper New York. But
it happens that he has a sanctuary, a haven after his own heart, where
he can still draw a breath of relief, among buildings small but full of
age and dignity and with the look of homes about them; on restful,
crooked little streets where there remain trees and grass-plots; in the
old-time purlieus of Washington Square and Greenwich Village!
The history of old New York reads like a romance. There is scarcely a
plot of ground below Fourteenth Street without its story and its
associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good
and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in
the dry prose of registries and records. Let us just take a glance, a
bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know as
Washington Square, as it was when the city of New York bought it for
a Potter's Field.
Perhaps you have tried to visualise old New York as hard as I have
tried. But I will wager that, like myself, you have been unable to
conjure up more than a nebulous and tenuous vision,--a modern New
York's shadow, the ghostly skeleton of our city as it appears today. For
instance, when you have thought of old Washington Square, you have
probably thought of it pretty much as it is now, only of course with an
old-time atmosphere. The whole Village, with all your best imaginative
efforts, persists--does it not?--in being a part of New York proper.
It was not until I had come to browse among the oldest of Manhattan's

oldest records,--(and at that they're not very old!)--those which show
the reaching out of the fingers of early progress, the first shoots of
metropolitan growth, that the picture really came to me. Then I saw
New York as a little city which had sprung up almost with the speed of
a modern mushroom town. First, in Peter Minuit's day, its centre was
the old block house below Bowling Green; then it spread out a bit until
it became a real, thriving city,--with its utmost limits at Canal Street!
Greenwich and the Bowery Lane were isolated little country hamlets,
the only ones on the island, and far, far out of town. They appeared as
inaccessible to the urban dwellers of that day as do residents on the
Hudson to the confirmed city people nowadays;--nay, still more so,
since trains and motors, subways and surface cars, have more or less
annihilated distance for us.
Washington Square was then in the real wilds, an uncultivated region,
half swamp, half sand, with the Sand Hill Road,--an old Indian
trail,--running along the edge of it, and Minetta Creek taking its
sparkling course through its centre. It was many years before Minetta
was even spanned by a bridge, for no one lived anywhere near it.
Peter Stuyvesant's farm gave the Bowery its name, for you must know
that Bouwerie came from the Dutch word Bouwerij, which means farm,
and this country lane ran through the grounds of the Stuyvesant
homestead. A branch road from the Bouwerie Lane led across the
stretch of alternate marsh and sand to the tiny settlement of Greenwich,
running from east to west. The exact line is lost today, but we know it
followed the general limit of Washington Square North. On the east
was the Indian trail.
Sarah Comstock says:
"The Indian trail has been, throughout our country, the beginning of the
road. In his turn, the Indian often followed the trail of the beast. Such
beginnings are indiscernible for the most part, in the dusk of history,
but we still trace many an old path that once knew the tread of
moccasined feet."
[Illustration: MAP OF OLD GREENWICH VILLAGE. A section of

Bernard Ratzer's map of New York and its suburbs, made in the
Eighteenth Century, when Greenwich was more than two miles from
the city.]
Here, between the short lane that ran from the Bouwerij toward the first
young sprout of Greenwich, and the primitive Sand Hill