_The Green Village_
God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb down Greenwich
way!--THOMAS JANVIER.
Did you know that "Greenwich Village" is tautology? That region known
affectionately as "Our Village" is Greenwich, pure and simple, and
here is the "why" of that statement.
The word _wich_ is derived from the Saxon _wick_, and originally had
birth in the Latin _vicus_, which means village. Hence, Greenwich
means simply the Green Village, and was evidently a term describing
one of the first small country hamlets on Manhattan. Captain Sir. Peter
Warren, on whom be peace and benedictions, is usually given the credit
of having given Greenwich its name, the historians insisting that it
was the name of his own estate, and simply got stretched to take in
the surrounding countryside. This seems rather a stupid theory. The
Warrens were undoubtedly among the earliest representative residents
in the little country resort, but by no stretch of imagination could
any private estate, however ample or important, be called a village.
But Greenwich was the third name to be applied to this particular
locality.
Once upon a time there was a little settlement of Indians--the tribe
was called the Sappocanicon or Sappokanikee. Like other redmen they
had a gift for picking out good locations for their huts or
wigwams--whatever they were in those days. On this island of Manhattan
they had appropriated the finest, richest, yet driest piece of ground
to be had. There were woods and fields; there was a marvellous trout
stream (Minetta Water); there was a game preserve, second to none,
presented to them by the Great Spirit (in the vicinity of Washington
Square). There was pure air from the river, and a fine loamy soil for
their humble crops. It was good medicine.
They adopted it far back in those beginnings of American history of
which we know nothing. When you go down to the waterfront to see the
ships steam away, you are probably standing where the braves and
squaws had their forest home overlooking the river.
But their day passed. Peter Minuit--who really was a worth-while man
and deserved to be remembered for something besides his thrifty deal
in buying Manhattan for twenty-four dollars--cast an eye over the new
territory with a view to developing certain spots for the Dutch West
India Company. He staked out the Sappokanican village tentatively, but
it was not really appropriated until Wouter Van Twiller succeeded
Minuit as director general and Governor of the island.
Van Twiller was not one of the Hollanders' successes. R.R. Wilson says
of him, "Bibulous, slow-witted and loose of life and morals, Van
Twiller proved wholly unequal to the task in hand." Representing the
West India Company, he nevertheless held nefarious commerce with the
Indians--it is even reported that he sold them guns and powder in
violation of express regulations--and certainly he was first and
forever on the make. But before he was removed from office (because of
these and other indiscretions) he had founded Our Village,--so may his
soul rest in peace!
Not that he intended to do posterity a favour. He never wanted to help
anyone but himself. But, in the first year of his disastrous
governorship, he got the itch of tobacco speculation. He knew there
was money in it.
He, too, looked over the Indian village above the river, and he, too,
found it good. He made it the Company's Farm Number 3, but he did not
work it for the company. Not he! He worked it for Wouter Van Twiller,
as he worked everything else. He eliminated the Indians by degrees,
whether by strategy or force history does not say. R.R. Wilson says it
was "rum and warfare." Anyway, they departed to parts unknown and Van
Twiller built a farm and started an immense tobacco plantation. As the
tobacco grew and flourished the place became known by the Dutch as the
Bossen Bouwerie--the farm in the woods. It was one of the very
earliest white settlements on the whole island. R.R. Wilson says, "Rum
and warfare had before this made an end of the Indian village of the
first days. Its Dutch successor, however, grew from year to year."
[Illustration: JEFFERSON MARKET. The old clock that has told the hours
of justice for Greenwich Village during many years.]
The names of these first Dutch residents of the Bossen Bouwerie--or
Sappocanican as it was still occasionally called--are not known, but
it is certain that there were a number of them. In the epoch of Peter
Stuyvesant someone mentioned the houses at "Sappokanigan," and in
1679, after the British had arrived, a descriptive little entry was
made in one of those delightfully detailed journals of an older and
more precise generation than ours. The diary was the one kept by the
Labadist missionaries--Dankers and Sluyter--and was only recently
unearthed by Henry Murphy at The Hague. It runs as follows:
"We crossed over the island, which takes about
three-quarters of an hour to do, and came to the North
River, which we followed a little within the woods to
Sapokanikee. Gerrit having a sister and friends, we rested
ourselves and drank some good beer, which refreshed us. We
continued along the shore to the city, where we arrived at
an early hour in the evening, very much fatigued, having
walked this day about forty miles. I must add, in passing
through this island we sometimes encountered such a sweet
smell in the air that we stood still; because we did not
know what it was we were meeting."
It is odd that the Dutch names in Greenwich have died out as much as
they have. There is something in Holland blood which has a way of
persisting. They--the old Manhattan Dutch anyway--had a certain
stubborn individuality of their own, which refused to give way or
compromise. I have always felt that the way the Dutch ladies used to
drink their tea was a most illuminating sidelight upon their racial
characteristics. They served the dish of tea and the sugar
separately--the latter in a large and awkward hunk from which they
crunched out bites as they needed them. Now I take it that there was
no particular reason for this inconvenient and labourious method,
except that it was _their way_. They were used to doing things in an
original and an unyielding fashion. I believe a real old-world
_Mevrouw_ would have looked as coldly askance upon the innovation of
putting the sugar _in_ the tea, as she looked at the pernicious
ingress of the devil-endowed Church of England.
In 1664 came the English rule in what had been New Amsterdam and with
it British settlers and a new language. So the Bossen Bouwerie became
Green Wich (later clipped in pronunciation to _Grinnich_), the Green
Village, and a peaceful, remote little settlement it remained for many
a long year.
Now came the rich and great in search of country air, health, rest or
change of scene. Colonial society was not so different from twentieth
century society. They, too, demanded occasional doses of rustic
scenery and rest cures; and they began to drift out to the green
little hamlet on the Hudson where they could commune with nature and
fortify themselves with that incomparable air. Captain Warren, Oliver
de Lancey, James Jauncey, William Bayard and Abraham Mortier all
acquired estates there. The road to Greenwich was by far the most
fashionable of all the Colonial drives.
Greenwich Road ran along the line of our present Greenwich Street, and
gave one a lovely view of the water. At Lispenard's Salt Meadows
(Canal Street) it ran upon a causeway, but the marshes overflowed in
the spring, and soon they opened another road known as the Inland Road
to Greenwich. This second lane ran from the Post Road or Bowery,
westward over the fields and passing close to the site of the Potter's
Field. This, I understand, was the favourite drive of the fashionable
world a century and a half ago.
If anyone wants to really taste the savour of old New York, let him
read the journals of those bygone days. Better than any history
books will they make the past live again, make it real to you with its
odd perfumes, and its stilted mannerisms, and its high-hearted courage
and gallantry.
I know of no quainter literature than is to be found in these very old
New York papers. The advertisements alone are pregnant with
suggestions of the past--colour, atmosphere, the subtle fragrance and
flavour of other days. We read that James Anderson of Broadway has
just arrived from London "in the brig Betsy" with a load of "the best
finished boot legs." Another gentleman urges people to inspect his
"crooked tortoise-shell combs for ladies and gentlemen's hair, his
vegetable face powder--his nervous essence for the toothache, his
bergamot, lemon, lavendar and thyme"--and other commodities.
Sales were advertised of such mixed assortments as the following:
"For Sale:
"A negro wench.
"An elegant chariot.
"Geneva in pipes, cloves, steel, heart and club, scale
beams, cotton in bales, Tenerisse wines in pipes, and
quarter casks."
In several old papers you find that two camels were to be seen in a
certain stable, at a shilling a head for adults and sixpence for
children. The camels were a novelty and highly popular.
Take this item, for instance, from the good old _Daily Advertiser_,
chronicler of the big and little things of Manhattan's early days. It
gives a fine example of old-style journalism. Observe the ingenuity
with which a page of narrative is twisted into the first sentence. The
last two are the more startling in their abrupt fashion of leaving the
reader high and dry. The cow is starred; obviously the man appears a
minor actor:
"On Thursday afternoon, as a man of genteel appearance was
passing along Beekman Street, he was attacked by a cow, and
notwithstanding his efforts to avoid her, and the means he
used to beat her off, we are sorry to say that he was so
much injured as to be taken up dead. The cow was afterward
killed in William Street. We have not been able to learn the
name of the deceased"!!
Some of the items contain genuine if unconscious humour,--such as the
record of the question brought up before the City Council: "Whether
attorneys are thought useful to plead in courts or not?" Answer: "It
is thought not."
Then there is the proclamation that if any Indian was found drunk in
any street, and it could not be ascertained where he got the liquor,
the whole street was to be fined!
Among the earlier laws duly published in the press was that hogs
should not be "suffered to goe or range in any of the streets or
lands." In 1684 eight watchmen were appointed at twelve-pence a
night. But read them for yourselves,--they are worth the trouble you
will have to find them!
There were many queer trades in New York, and all of them, or nearly
all, advertised in the daily journals. In column on column of yellowed
paper and quaint f-for-s printing, we read exhortations to employ this
or that man, most of them included in the picturesque verse whose
author I do not know:
_"Plumbers, founders, dyers, tanners, shavers,
Sweepers, clerks and criers, jewelers, engravers,
Clothiers, drapers, players, cartmen, hatters, nailers,
Gaugers, sealers, weighers, carpenters, and sailors!"_
And read the long-winded, yet really beautiful old obituary notices;
the simple news of battles and high deeds; the fiery, yet pedantic,
political editorials. Oh, no one knows anything about Father
Knickerbocker until he has read the same newspapers that Father
Knickerbocker himself read,--when he wasn't writing for them!
The Revolution had passed and Greenwich was a real village, and
growing with astonishing rapidity, even in that day of lightning
development.
In 1807 they started to do New York over, and they kept at it
faithfully and successfully until 1811. Then began the laying out of
streets according to numbers and fixed measurements, instead of by
picturesque names and erratic cow-path meanderings. Gouverneur
Morris, Simeon de Witt and John Rutherford were appointed by the city
to take charge of this task, and, as one writer points out, they did
not do it as badly as they might have done, nor as we are inclined to
think they did when we try to find our way around lower New York
today. The truth is that Greenwich had grown up, and always has grown
up ever since, in an entirely independent and obstinate fashion all
its own. There was not the slightest use in trying to make its twisty
curlicue streets conform to any engineering plan on earth; so those
sensible old-time folk didn't try. William Bridges, architect and city
surveyor, entrusted with the job, mentions "that part of the city
which lies south of Greenwich Lane and North Street, and which was not
included in the powers vested in the commissioners." And so Our
Village remains itself, utterly and arrogantly untouched by the
confining orthodoxy of the rest of the town!
The passing of the British rule was the signal for variously radical
democratic changes, not only in customs and forms, but in nomenclature.
After they had melted up a leaden statue of King George and made it into
American bullets, they went about abolishing every blessed thing in the
city which could remind them of England and English ways. The names of
the streets were, of course, nearly all intrinsically English. A few of
the old Dutch names persisted--Bleecker, Vandam, and so on--but nearly
every part of the town was named for the extolling of Britain and
British royalty. Away then, said New York, with the sign manuals of
crowns and autocracy!
In 1783, when the English evacuated Manhattan, the _Advertiser_
published: "May the remembrance of this DAY be a lesson to princes!" and
in this spirit was the last vestige of imperial rule systematically
expunged from the city. Crown Street was a red rag to the bull of Young
America; it was called Liberty, and thus became innocuous! Queen Street
doffed its ermine and became homely and humble, under the name of Cedar.
King Street was now Pine. King George Street was abolished altogether,
according to the chronicles. One is curious to know what they did with
it; it must be difficult to lose a street entirely! A few streets and
squares named for individual Englishmen who had been friendly to America
were left unmolested--Abingdon Square, and also Chatham Street, which had
been given its appellation in honour of the ever popular William Pitt,
Earl of Chatham; Chatham Square, indeed, exists to this day.
Greenwich was at all times a resort for those who could afford it, an
exclusive and beautiful country region where anyone with a full purse
could go to court health and rest among the trees and fields and river
breezes. It was destined to become the most popular, flourishing and
prosperous little village that ever grew up over night. Those
marvellously healthy qualities as to location and air, that fine,
sandy soil, made it a haven, indeed, to people who were afraid of
sickness. And in those days the island was continually swept by
epidemics--violent, far-reaching, and registering alarming mortality.
Greenwich seemed to be the only place where one didn't get yellow
fever or anything else, and terrorised citizens began to rush out
there in droves, not only with their bags and their baggage, and their
wives and children, but with their business too!
John Lambert, an English visitor to America in 1807, writes:
"As soon as yellow fever makes its appearance, the
inhabitants shut up their shops and fly from their homes
into the country. Those who cannot go far on account of
business, remove to Greenwich, situate on the border of the
Hudson about two or three miles from town. The banks and
other public offices also remove their business to this
place and markets are regularly established for the supply
of the inhabitants."
Things went so fast for Greenwich during the biggest of the yellow
fever "booms" that one old chronicler (whose name I regret not being
able to find) declares he "saw the corn growing on the corner of
Hammond Street (West Eleventh) on a Saturday morning, and by the next
Monday Niblo and Sykes had built a house there for three hundred
boarders!"
Devoe says that:
"The visits of yellow fever in 1798, 1799, 1803 and 1805
tended much to increase the formation of a village near the
Spring Street Market and one also near the State Prison; but
the fever of 1882 built up many streets with numerous wooden
buildings for the uses of the merchants, banks (from which
Bank Street took its name), offices, etc."
"'The town fairly exploded,'" quotes Macatamney,--from what writer he
does not state,--"'and went flying beyond its bonds as though the
pestilence had been a burning mine.'"
It was in 1822 that Hardie wrote:
"Saturday, the 24th of August our city presented the
appearance of a town beseiged. From daybreak till night one
line of carts, containing boxes, merchandise and effects,
was seen moving towards Greenwich Village and the upper
parts of the city. Carriages and hacks, wagons and horsemen,
were scouring the streets and filling the roads; persons
with anxiety strongly marked on their countenances, and with
hurried gait, were hustling through the streets. Temporary
stores and offices were erecting, and even on the ensuing
day (Sunday) carts were in motion, and the saw and hammer
busily at work. Within a few days thereafter the custom
house, the post office, the banks, the insurance offices and
the printers of newspapers located themselves in the village
or in the upper part of Broadway, where they were free from
the impending danger; and these places almost
instantaneously became the seat of the immense business
usually carried on in the great metropolis."
Bank Street got its name in this way, the city banks transferring
their business thither literally overnight, ready to do business in
the morning.
Miss Euphemia M. Olcott in her delightful recollections of the past in
New York, gives us some charming snapshots of a still later Greenwich
as she got them from her mother who was born in 1819.
"She often visited in Greenwich Village, both at her
grandfather's and at the house of Mr. Abraham Van Nest,
which had been built and originally occupied by Sir. Peter
Warren. But she never thought of going _so far_ for less
than a week! [She lived at Fulton and Nassau streets.] There
was a city conveyance for part of the way, and then the old
Greenwich stage enabled them to complete the long journey.
This ran several times a day, and when my mother committed
her hymn:
_"'Hasten, sinner, to be wise,
Ere this evening's stage be run'_
she told us that for some years it never occurred to her
that it could mean anything in the world but the Greenwich
stage."
In further quoting her mother, she tells of Sir. Peter's house
itself--then Mr. Van Nest's--as a square frame residence, with gardens
both of flowers and vegetables, stables and numbers of cows, chickens,
pigeons and peacocks. In the huge hall that ran through the house
were mahogany tables loaded with silver baskets of fresh-made cake,
and attended by negroes.
In our next chapter we are going back to meet this house a bit more
intimately, and find out something of those who built it and lived in
it, that fine gentleman, Sir. Peter Warren and his beautiful
lady,--Susannah.
But let us not forget.
Greenwich was not exclusively a settlement of the rich and great nor
even solely a health resort and refuge. There were, besides the fine
estates and the mushroom business sections, two humbler off-shoots:
Upper and Lower Greenwich. The first was the Skinner Road--now
Christopher Street; the second lay at the foot of Brannan Street--now
Spring. To the Upper Greenwich in 1796 came a distinction which would
seem to have been of doubtful advantage,--the erection of the New York
State Prison. It stood on Amos Street, now our Tenth, close to the
river and was an imposing structure for its time--two hundred feet in
length with big wings, and a stone-wall enclosure twenty feet in
height.
Strange to say the Greenwichers did not object to the prison. They
were quite proud of it, and seemed to consider it rather as an
acquisition than a plague spot. No other village had a State Prison
to show to visitors; Greenwich held its head haughtily in consequence.
A hotel keeper in 1811 put this "ad." in the _Columbia_:
"A few gentlemen may be accommodated with board and lodging
at this pleasant and healthy situation, a few doors from the
State Prison. The Greenwich stage passes from this to the
Federal Hall and returns five times a day."
Janvier says that the prison at Greenwich was a "highly volcanic
institution." They certainly seemed never out of trouble there. Behind
its walls battle, murder and sudden death seemed the milder
diversions. Mutiny was a habit, and they had a way of burning up parts
of the building when annoyed. On one occasion they shut up all their
keepers in one of the wings before setting fire to it, but according
to the _Chronicle_ "one more humane than the rest released them before
it was consumed."
Hugh Macatamney declares that these mutinies were caused by terrible
brutality toward the prisoners. It is true that no one was hanged in
the jail itself, the Potter's Field being more public and also more
convenient, all things considered, but the punishments in this New
York Bridewell were severe in the extreme. Those were the days of
whippings and the treadmill,--a viciously brutal invention,--of bread
and water and dark cells and the rest of the barbarities which society
hit upon with such singular perversity as a means of humanising its
derelicts. The prison record of Smith, the "revengeful desperado" who
spent half a year in solitary confinement, is probably of as mild a
punishment as was ever inflicted there.
In the grim history of the penitentiary there is one gleam of humour.
Mr. Macatamney tells it so well that we quote his own words:
"A story is told of an inmate of Greenwich Prison who had
been sentenced to die on the gallows, but at the last
moment, through the influence of the Society of Friends, had
his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and was placed
in charge of the shoe shop in the prison. The Quakers worked
for his release, and, having secured it, placed him in a
shoe shop of his own. His business flourished, and he was
prominently identified with the progress of the times. He
had an itching palm, however, and after a time he forged the
names of all his business friends, eloped with the daughter
of one of his benefactors and disappeared from the earth,
apparently. 'Murder will out' A few years after the forger
returned to the city, and established himself under an
assumed name in the making of shoes, forgetting, however, to
maintain complacency, and thinking that no one would
recognise him. In a passion at what he considered the
carelessness of one of his workmen regarding the time some
work should have been delivered, he told the man he should
not have promised it, as it caused disappointment. 'Master,'
said the workman, 'you have disappointed me worse than
that.' 'How, you rascal?' 'When I waited a whole hour in the
rain to see you hanged.'"
In 1828 and 1829 the prisoners were transferred to Sing Sing, and the
site passed into private hands and the Greenwich State Prison was no
more. I believe there's a brewery there now.
It is an odd coincidence that the present Jefferson Market Police
Court stands now at Tenth Street,--though a good bit further inland
than the ancient State's Prison. The old Jefferson Market clock has
looked down upon a deal of crime and trouble, but a fair share of
goodness and comfort too. It is hopeful to think that the present
regime of Justice is a kindlier and a cleaner one than that which
prevailed when the treadmill and the dark cell were Virtue's methods
of persuading Vice.
Someone, I know not who, wrote this apropos of prisons in Greenwich:
_"In these days fair Greenwich Village
Slept by Hudson's rural shores,
Then the stage from Greenwich Prison
Drove to Wall Street thrice a day--
Now the sombre 'Black Maria'
Oftener drives the other way."_
But I like to think that the old clock, if it could speak, would have
some cheering tales to tell. I like to believe that ugly things are
slipping farther and farther from Our Village, that honest romance and
clean gaiety are rather the rule there than the exception, and that,
perhaps, the day will sometime dawn when there will be no more need of
the shame of prisons in Greenwich Village.
The early social growth of the city naturally centred about its
churches. Even in Colonial days conservative English society in New
York assembled on Sunday with a devotion directed not less to fashion
than to religion. We must not forget that America was really not
America then, but Colonial England. A graceful militarism was the
order of the day, and in the fashionable congregations were redcoats
in plenty. The Church of England, as represented and upheld by Trinity
Parish, was the church where everyone went. If one were stubborn in
dissenting--which meant, briefly, if one were Dutch--one attended such
of those sturdy outposts of Presbyterianism as one could find outside
the social pale. But one was looked down upon accordingly.
It is not hard to make for oneself a colourful picture of a typical
Sunday congregation in these dead and gone days. Trinity was the
Spiritual Headquarters, one understands; St. Paul's came later, and
was immensely fashionable. Though it was rather far out from Greenwich
the Greenwich denizens patronised it at the expense of time and
trouble. A writer, whose name I cannot fix at the moment, has
described the Sabbath attendance:--ladies in powder and patches
alighting from their chaises; servants, black of skin and radiant of
garment; officers in scarlet and white uniforms (Colonel "Ol" de
Lancey lost his patrimony a bit later because he clung to his!)--a
soft, fluttering, mincing crowd--most representative of the Colonies,
and loathed by the stiff-necked Dutch.
Trinity got its foothold in 1697, and the rest of the English
churches had holdings under the Trinity shadow. St. Paul's (where Sir.
Peter Warren paid handsomely for a pew, and which is today perhaps the
oldest ecclesiastic edifice in the city, and certainly the oldest of
the Trinity structures) was built in 1764, on the street called Vesey
because of the Rev. Mr. Vesey, its spiritual director. The "God's
Acre" around it held many a noted man and woman. Yet, as it is so far
from the ground in which we are now concerning ourselves, it seems a
bit out of place perhaps. But one must perforce show the English
church's beginnings, soon to find a more solid basis in St. John's
Chapel, dear to all New Yorkers even nowadays when we behold it
menaced by that unholy juggernaut, the subway.
St. John's was begun in 1803 and completed in 1807. It was Part of the
old King's Farm, originally granted to Trinity by Queen Anne, who
appears to have done quite a lot for New York, take it all in all. It
was modelled after St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, in London, and always
stood for English traditions and ideals. This did not prevent the
British from capturing the organ designed for it and holding it up for
ransom in the War of 1812. The organ was made in Philadelphia, but was
captured en route by the British ship _Plantagenet_, a cruiser with
seventy-four guns, which was in the habit of picking up little boats
and holding them at $100 to $200 each. Luckily the church bell had
been obtained before the war!
In regard to the organ, the _Weekly Register_ of Baltimore has this to
say:
"A great business this for a ship of the line.... Now a
gentleman might suppose that this article would have passed
harmless."
St. John's Park, now obliterated and given over to the modernism of
the Hudson River Railroad Company, used, in the early fifties, to be
still fashionable. Old New Yorkers given to remembrance speak
regretfully of the quiet and peace and beauty of the Old Park--which
is no more. But St. John's is still with us, "sombre and unalterable,"
as one writer describes it, "a stately link between the present and
the past."
And doubtless nearly everyone who reads these pages knows of St.
John's famous "Dole"--the Leake Dole, which has been such a fruitful
topic for newspaper writers for decades back.
John Leake and John Watts, in the year 1792, founded the Leake and
Watts' Orphan House and John Leake, in so doing, added this curious
bequest:
"I hereby give and bequeathe unto the rector and inhabitants
of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the State of New York
one thousand pounds, put out at interest, to be laid out in
the annual income in sixpenny wheaten loaves of bread and
distributed on every Sabbath morning after divine service,
to such poor as shall appear most deserving."
This charity has endured through the years and is now the trust of St.
John's. I have been told--though I do not vouch for it--that the bread
is given out not after divine service but very early in the morning,
when the grey and silver light of the new day will not too mercilessly
oppress the needy and unfortunate, some of them once very rich, who
come for the Dole.
In 1822 St. Luke's was built--also a part of the elastic Trinity
Parish, and probably the best-known church, next to old St. John's,
that stands in Greenwich Village today.
The prejudices of the English Church in early New York prevented the
Catholics from gaining any sort of foothold until after the British
evacuation. In 1783 St. Peter's, the first Roman Catholic Church, was
erected at Barclay Street, and much trouble they had, if account may
be relied on. The reported tales of an escaped nun did much to
inflame the bigoted populace, but this passed, and today St. Joseph's,
which was built in 1829, stands on the corner of Washington Place and
Sixth Avenue.
It is not far away, by the bye, that the old Jewish cemetery is to be
found. Alderman Curran quaintly suggested that an unwarned stranger
might easily stub his toe on the little graveyard on Eleventh Street.
It is Beth Haim, the Hebrew Place of Rest, close to Milligan Lane. The
same Eleventh Street, which (as we shall see later) was badly
handicapped by "the stiff-necked Mr. Henry Brevoort" cut half of Beth
Haim away. But a corner of it remains and tranquil enough it seems,
not to say pleasant, though almost under the roar of the Elevated.
The Presbyterian churches got a foothold fairly early;--probably the
first very fashionable one was that on Mercer Street. Its pastor, the
Reverend Thomas Skinner, is chiefly, but deservedly, renowned for a
memorable address he made to an assembly of children, some time in
1834. Here is an extract which is particularly bright and lucid:
"Catechism is a compendium of divine truth. Perhaps,
children, you do not know the meaning of that word.
Compendium is synonymous with synopsis"!!!
[Illustration: THE CRADLE OF BOHEMIA. The first and most famous French
restaurant in New York.]
The old Methodist churches were models of Puritanism. In the
beginning they met in carpenter shops, or wherever they could. When
they had real churches, they, for a long time, had separate entrances
for the sexes.
It was after I had read of this queer little side shoot of asceticism
that I began to fully appreciate what a friend of mine had said to me
concerning the New Greenwich.
"The Village," he said, "is a protest against Puritanism." And, he
added: "It's just an island, a little island entirely surrounded by
hostile seas!"
The Village, old and new, _is_ a protest. It is a voice in the
wilderness. Some day perhaps it will conquer even the hostile seas.
Anyway, most of the voyagers on the hostile seas will come to the
Village eventually, so _it_ should worry!
The Green Village is green no longer, except in scattered spots where
the foliage seems to bubble up from the stone and brick as
irrepressibly as Minetta Water once bubbled up thereabouts. But it is
still the Village, and utterly different from the rest of the city.
Not all the commissioners in the world could change the charming,
erratic plan of it; not the most powerful pressure of modern business
could destroy its insistent, yet elusive personality. The Village has
always persistently eluded incorporation in the rest of the city.
Never forget this: Greenwich was developed as independently as Boston
or Chicago. It is not New York proper: it is an entirely separate
place. At points, New York overflows into it, or it straggles out into
New York, but it is first and foremost itself. It is not changeless at
all, but its changes are eternal and superbly independent of, and
inconsistent with, metropolitan evolution.
There was a formative period when, socially speaking, the growth of
Greenwich was the growth of New York. But that was when Greenwich was
almost the whole of fashionable New York. Later New York plunged
onward and left the green cradle of its splendid beginnings. But the
cradle remained, still to cherish new lives and fresh ideals and a
society profoundly different, yet scarcely less exclusive in its way,
than that of the Colonies. It has been described by so many writers in
so many ways that one is at a loss for a choice of quotations. Perhaps
the most whimsically descriptive is in O. Henry's "Last Leaf."
"In a little district west of Washington Square the streets
have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips
called 'places.' These 'places' make strange angles and
curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist
once discovered a valuable possibility in this street.
Suppose a collector with a bill for paint, paper and canvas
should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself
coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!"
And Kate Jordan offers this concerning Waverly Place:
"Here Eleventh and Fourth streets, refusing to be separated
by arithmetical arrangements, meet at an unexpected point as
if to shake hands, and Waverly Place sticks its head in
where some other street ought to be, for all the world like
a village busybody who has to see what is happening around
the corner."
But what of the spirit of Greenwich? The truth is that first and
foremost Greenwich is the home of romance. It is a sort of Make
Believe Land which has never grown up, and which will never learn to
be modern and prosaic.
It is full of romance. You cannot escape it, no matter how hard you
try to be practical. You start off on some commonplace stroll
enough--or you tell yourself it will be so; you are in the middle of
cable car lines and hustling people and shouting truck drivers, and
street cleaners and motors and newsboys, and all the component parts
of a modern and seemingly very sordid city--when, lo and behold, a
step to the right or left has taken you into another country
entirely--I had well-nigh said another world. Where did it come
from--that quaint little house with the fanlight over the door and the
flower-starred grassplot in front? Did it fall from the skies or was
it built in a minute like the delectable little house in "Peter Pan"?
Neither. It has stood there right along for half or three-quarters of
a century, only you didn't happen to know it. You have stepped around
the corner into Greenwich Village, that's all.
"In spots there is an unwonted silence, as though one were in some
country village," says Joseph Van Dyke. "... There are scraps of this
silence to be found about old houses, old walls, old trees."
Here, as in the fairy tales, all things become possible. You know that
a lady in a mob-cap and panniers is playing inside that shyly
curtained window. Hark! You can hear the thin, delicate notes quite
plainly: this is such a quiet little street. A piano rather out of
tune? Perish the thought! Dear friend, it is a spinet,--a harpsichord.
Almost you can smell pot-pourri.
Perhaps it was of such a house that H.C. Bunner wrote:
_"We lived in a cottage in old Greenwich Village,
With a tiny clay plot that was burnt brown and hard;
But it softened at last to my girl's patient tillage,
And the roses sprang up in our little backyard;"_
The garden hunger of the Village! It is something pathetic and yet
triumphant, pitiful and also splendid. It is joyous life and growth
hoping in the most unpromising surroundings: it is eager and gallant
hope exulting in the very teeth of defeat. Do you remember John
Reed's--
_"Below's the barren, grassless, earthen ring
Where Madame, with a faith unwavering
Planted a wistful garden every spring,--
Forever hoped-for,--never blossoming."_
Yet they do blossom, those hidden and usually unfruitful
garden-places. Sometimes they bloom in real flowers that anyone can
see and touch and smell. Sometimes they come only as flowers of the
heart--which, after all, will do as well as another sort,--in
Greenwich Village, where they know how to make believe.
Here is how Hugh Macatamney describes Greenwich:
"A walk through the heart of this interesting locality--the
American quarter, from Fourteenth Street down to Canal, west
of Sixth Avenue--will reveal a moral and physical
cleanliness not found in any other semi-congested part of
New York; an individuality of the positive sort transmitted
from generation to generation; a picturesqueness in its old
houses, 'standing squarely on their right to be individual'
alongside those of modern times, and, above all else, a
truly American atmosphere of the pure kind."
He adds:
"Please remember, too, that in 1816 Greenwich Village had
individualism enough to be the terminus of a stage line from
Pine Street and Broadway, the stages 'running on the even
hours from Greenwich and the uneven hours from Pine
Street.'"
You walk on through Greenwich Village and you will expect romance to
meet you. Even the distant clang of a cable car out in the city will
not break the spell that is on you now. And if you have a spark of
fancy, you will find your romance. You cannot walk a block in
Greenwich without coming on some stony wall, suggestive alley, quaint
house or vista or garden plot or tree. Everything sings to you there;
even the poorest sections have a quaint glamour of their own. It
gleams out at you from the most forbidding surroundings. Sometimes it
is only a century-old door knocker or an ancient vine-covered
wall--but it is a breath from the gracious past.
And as you cannot go a step in the Village without seeing something
picturesque so you cannot read a page of the history of Greenwich
without stumbling upon the trail of romance or adventure. As, for
example, the tale of that same Sir. Peter Warren, whose name we have
encountered more than once before, as proper a man as ever stepped
through the leaves of a Colonial history and the green purlieus of Old
Greenwich!