Greenwich Village Part 1

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 "Washington 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-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 gra.s.s-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 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 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 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.

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."

[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.

Minetta was a fine fishing brook, and the adjacent region was full of wild duck; so, take it all in all, it was a game preserve such as sportsmen love. It seems that the old Dutch settlers were fond of hunting and fishing, for they came here to shoot and angle, as we would go into--let us say--the Adirondacks or the Maine woods!

"A high range of sand hills traversed a part of the island, from Varick and Charlton to Eighth and Green streets," says Mary L. Booth, in her history. "To the north of these lay a valley through which ran a brook, which formed the outlet of the springy marshes of Washington Square...."

And here, on the self-same ground of those "springy marshes," is Washington Square today.

The lonely Zantberg,--the wind-blown range of sand hills; the cries of the wild birds breaking the stillness; the quietly rippling stream winding downward from the higher ground in the north, and now and then, in the spring of the year, overflowing its bed in a wilderness of brambles and rushes;--do these things make you realise more plainly the sylvan remoteness of that part of New York which we now know as Downtown?

A glance at Bernard Ratzer's map--made in the beginning of the last half of the eighteenth century for the English governor, Sir. Henry Moore--shows the only important holdings in the neighbourhood at that time: the Warren place, the Herrin (Haring or Harring) farm, the Eliot estate, etc. The site of the Square, in fact, was originally composed of two separate tracts and had two sources of t.i.tle, divided by Minetta Brook, which crossed the land about sixty feet west of where Fifth Avenue starts today. Westward lay that rather small portion of the land which belonged to the huge holdings of Sir. Peter Warren, of whom more anon.

The eastern part was originally the property of the Herrings, Harrings or Herrins,--a family prominent among the early Dutch settlers and later distinguished for patriotic services to the new republic. They appear to have been directly descended from that intrepid Hollander, Jan Hareng of the city of Hoorn, who is said to have held the narrow point of a dike against a thousand Spaniards, and performed other prodigious feats of valour. In the genealogical book I read, it was suggested that the name Hareng originated in some amazingly large herring catch which (I quote verbatim from that learned book) "astonished the city of Hoorn,"--and henceforth attached itself to the redoubtable fisherman!

The earliest of the family in this city was one Jan Pietersen Haring, and his descendants worked unceasingly for the liberty of the republic and against the Tory party. In 1748, Elbert Haring received a grant of land which was undoubtedly the farm shown in the Ratzer map. A tract of it was sold by the Harring (Herring) family to Cornelius Roosevelt; it pa.s.sed next into Jacob Sebor's hands, and in 1795 was bought by Col. William S. Smith, a brilliant officer in Washington's army, and holder of various posts of public office.

There was a Potter's Field, a cemetery for the poor and friendless, far out in the country,--i.e., somewhere near Madison Square,--but it was neither big enough nor accessible enough. In 1789, the city decided to have another one. The tract of land threaded by Minetta Water, half marsh and half sand, was just about what was wanted. It was retired, the right distance from town and excellently adapted to the purposes of a burying ground. The ground, popular historians to the contrary, was by no means uniformly swampy. When filled in, it would, indeed, be dry and sandy,--the sandy soil of Greenwich extends, in some places, to a depth of fifty feet. Accordingly, the city bought the land from the Herrings and made a Potter's Field. Eight years later, by the bye, they bought Colonel Smith's tract too, to add to the field. The entire plot was ninety lots,--eight lots to an acre,--and comprised nearly the entire site of the present square. The extreme western part, a strip extending east of Macdougal Street to the Brook, a scant thirty feet,--was bought from the Warren heirs.

Minetta Lane, which was close by, had a few aristocratic country residents by that time, and everyone was quite outraged by the notion of having a paupers' graveyard so near. Several rich people of the countryside even offered to present the city corporation with a much larger and more valuable plot of ground somewhere else; but the officials were firm. The public notice was relentlessly made, of the purchase of ground "bounded on the road leading from the Bowerie Lane at the two-mile stone to Greenwich."

When you next stroll through the little quiet park in the shadow of the Arch and Turini's great statue of Garibaldi, watching the children at play, the tramps and wayfarers resting, the tired horses drinking from the fountain the S.P.C.A. has placed there for their service and comfort, the old dreaming of the past, and the young dreaming of the future,--see, if you please, if it is not rather a wistfully pleasant thought to recall the poor and the old and the nameless and the humble who were put to rest there a century and a quarter ago?

The Aceldama of the Priests of Jerusalem was "the potter's field to bury strangers in," according to St. Matthew; and in the Syriac version that meant literally "the field of sleep." It is true that when they made use of Judas Iscariot's pieces of silver, they twisted the syllables to mean the "field of blood," but it was a play upon words only. The Field of Sleep was the Potter's Field, where the weary "strangers" rested, at home at last.

There is nothing intrinsically repellent in the memories attached to a Potter's Field,--save, possibly, in this case, a certain scandalous old story of robbing it of its dead for the benefit of the medical students of the town. That was a disgraceful business if you like! But public feeling was so bitter and retributive that the practice was speedily discontinued. So, again, there is nothing to make us recoil, here among the green shadows of the square, from the recollection of the Potter's Field. But there _is_ always something fundamentally shocking in any place of public punishment. And,--alas!--there is that stain upon the fair history of this square of which we are writing.

For--there was a gallows in the old Potter's Field. Upon the very spot where you may be watching the sparrows or the budding leaves, offenders were hanged for the edification or intimidation of huge crowds of people. Twenty highwaymen were despatched there, and at least one historian insists that they were all executed at once, and that Lafayette watched the performance. Certainly a score seems rather a large number, even in the days of our stern forefathers; one cannot help wondering if the event were presented to the great Frenchman as a form of entertainment.

In 1795 came one of those constantly recurring epidemics of yellow fever which used to devastate early Manhattan; and in 1797 came a worse one. Many bodies were brought from other burying grounds, and when the scourge of small-pox killed off two thousand persons in one short s.p.a.ce, six hundred and sixty-seven of them were laid in this particular public cemetery. During one very bad time, the rich as well as the poor were brought there, and there were nearly two thousand bodies sleeping in the Potter's Field.

People who had died from yellow fever were wrapped in great yellow sheets before they were buried,--a curious touch of symbolism in keeping with the fantastic habit of mind which we find everywhere in the early annals of America. Mr. E.N. Tailer, among others, can recall, many years later, seeing the crumbling yellow folds of shrouds uncovered by breaking coffin walls, when the heavy guns placed in the Square sank too weightily into the ground, and crushed the trench-vaults.

It would be interesting to examine, in fancy, those lost and sometimes non-existent headstones of the Field,--that is, to try to tell a few of the tales that cling about those who were buried there. But the task is difficult, and after all, tombstones yield but cheerless reading. That the sleepers in the Potter's Field very often had not even that shelter of tombstones makes their stories the more elusive and the more melancholy. One or two slight records stand out among the rest, notably the curious one attached to the last of the stones to be removed from Washington Square. I believe that it was in 1857 that Dr.

John Francis, in an address before the Historical Society of New York, told this odd story, which must here be only touched upon.

One Benjamin Perkins, "a charlatan believer in mesmeric influence,"

plied his trade in early Manhattan. He seems to have belonged to that vast army of persons who seriously believe their own teachings even when they know them to be preposterous. Perkins made a specialty of yellow fever, and insisted that he could cure it by hypnotism. That he had a following is in no way strange, considering his day and generation, but the striking point about this is that, when he was exposed to the horror himself, he tried to automesmerise himself out of it. After three days he died, as Dr. Francis says, "a victim of his own temerity."

And still the gallows stood on the Field of Sleep, and also a big elm tree which sometimes served as the "gallows tree." Naturally, Indians and negroes predominated in the lists of malefactors executed. The redmen were distrusted from the beginning on Manhattan,--and with some basic reason, one must admit;--as for the blacks, they were more severely dealt with than any other cla.s.s. The rigid laws and restrictions of that day were applied especially rigidly to the slaves. A slave was accounted guilty of heavy crimes on the very lightest sort of evidence, and the penalties imposed seem to us out of all proportion to the acts. Arson, for instance, was a particularly heinous offence--when committed by a negro. The negro riots, which form such an exceedingly black chapter in New York's history, and which horrify our more humane modern standards with ghastly pictures of hangings and burnings at the stake, were often caused by nothing more criminal than incendiarism. One very bad period of this sort of disorder started with a trifling fire in Sir. Peter Warren's house,--the source of which was not discovered,--and later grew to ungovernable proportions through other acts of the same sort.

As late as 1819, a young negro girl named Rose Butler was hanged in our Square before an immense crowd, including many women and young children. Kindly read what the New York _Evening Post_ said about it in its issue of July 9th:

"Rose, a black girl who had been sentenced to be hung for setting fire to a dwelling house, and who was respited for a few days, in the hope that she would disclose some accomplice in her wickedness, was executed yesterday at two o'clock near the Potter's Field."

And in Charles H. Haswell's delightful "Reminiscences," there is one pa.s.sage which has, for modern ears, rather too Spartan a ring: