Part 1 (1/2)
Greenwich Village.
by Anna Alice Chapin.
A FIRST WORD
”'Tis an awkward thing to play with souls,”--and, to my mind, Greenwich Village has a very personal soul that requires very personal and very careful handling. This little foreword is to crave pardon humbly if my touch has not been light, or deft, or sure. There are so many things that I may have left out, so many ways in which I must have erred.
And I want to thank people too,--just here. So many people there are to thank! I cannot simply dismiss the matter with the usual acknowledgment of a list of authorities--to which, by the bye, I have tried to cling as though they were life-buoys in a stormy sea of research!
There are the kindly individuals,--J.H. Henry, Vincent Pepe, William van der Weyde, J.B. Martin, and the rest,--who have so generously placed their own extensive information and collected material at my disposal. And there are the small army of librarians and clerks and secretaries and so on, who have given me unlimited patience and most encouraging personal interest.
And finally, beyond all these, are the Villagers who have taken me in, and made me welcome, and won my heart for all time. Everyone has been so kind that my ”thank you” must take in all of Greenwich.
It is said that hospitality, neighbourliness and genuine cordiality are traits of any well-conducted village. Then be sure that our Village in the city is not behind its rustic fellows. For, wherever you stray or wherever you stop within its confines, you will always find the latch-string hung outside.
”Does a bird need to theorise about building its nest, or boast of it when built? All good work is essentially done that way--without hesitation, without difficulty, without boasting.... And now, returning to the broader question, what these arts and labours of life have to teach us of its mystery, this is the first of their lessons--that the more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work of people who ... are striving for the fulfilment of a law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet attained.... Whenever the arts and labours of life are fulfilled in this spirit of striving against misrule, and doing whatever we have to do, honourably and perfectly, they invariably bring happiness, as much as seems possible to the nature of man.”
--JOHN RUSKIN.
CHAPTER I
_The Chequered History of a City Square_
... I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early a.s.sociation, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare--the look of having had something of a social history.--HENRY JAMES (in ”Was.h.i.+ngton Square”).
There is little in our busy, modern, progressive city to suggest Father Knickerbocker, with 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 gla.s.s, crowded with kaleidoscopic cosmopolitan traffic, ceaselessly resonant with twentieth century activity, do not seem a happy setting for our old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 gra.s.s-plots; in the old-time purlieus of Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a.s.sociations, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Ca.n.a.l 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.
Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 (or Sandy Hill) Trail lay a certain waste tract of land. It was flanked by the sand mounds,--part of the Zantberg, or long range of sand hills,--haunted by wild fowl, and utterly aloof from even that primitive civilisation. The brook flowed from the upper part of the Zantberg Hills to the Hudson River, and emptied itself into that great channel at a point somewhere near Charlton Street. The name Minetta came from the Dutch root,--_min_,--minute, diminutive. With the popular suffix _tje_ (the Dutch could no more resist that than the French can resist _ette_!) it became _Mintje_,--the little one,--to distinguish it from the _Groote Kill_ or large creek a mile away. It was also sometimes called _Bestavaar's Killetje_, or Grandfather's Little Creek, but _Mintje_ persisted, and soon became Minetta.