Anna Alice Chapin - Greenwich Village

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[Illustration: MILLIGAN COURT. A typical, fragmentary survival
of Old Greenwich.]

GREENWICH VILLAGE

By

ANNA ALICE CHAPIN

Author of "Wonder Tales from Wagner,"
"Masters of Music," etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ALLAN GILBERT CRAM

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1925

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

To

VINCENT C. PEPPE

WHO FIRST SUGGESTED THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK, AND WHOSE UNTIRING
EFFORTS HAVE HAD MUCH TO DO WITH THE SUCCESS OF GREENWICH VILLAGE AS A
POPULAR RESIDENCE SECTION,

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. THE CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE

II. THE GREEN VILLAGE

III. THE GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN

IV. THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL

V. "TOM PAINE, INFIDEL"

VI. PAGES OF ROMANCE

VII. RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR

VIII. VILLAGERS

IX. AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS

A LAST WORD

ILLUSTRATIONS

Milligan Court _Frontispiece_

Map of Old Greenwich Village

Oldest Building on the Square

Jefferson Market

The Cradle of Bohemia

Old St. John's

Washington Arch

The Butterick Building

59 Grove Street

Grove Court

The Brevoort House

Grove Street

The Dutch Oven

Patchin Place

Washington Square South

Macdougal Alley

A Greenwich Studio

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 association, 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 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 (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 title, 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 passed 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 space, 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 class. 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
passage which has, for modern ears, rather too Spartan a ring:

"A leading daily paper referred to her (he speaks of Rose)
execution in a paragraph of five lines, without noticing any
of the unnecessary and absurd details that are given in the
present day in like cases; neither was her dying speech
recorded...."

Thomas Janvier declares that she was accused of murder, but all other
authorities say that poor Rose's "wickedness" had consisted of
lighting a fire under the staircase of her master's house, with, or
so it was asserted, "a malicious intent." One sees that it was quite
easy to get hanged in those days,--especially if you happened to be a
negro! The great elm tree, on a branch of which Rose was hanged, stood
intact in the Square until 1890. I am glad it is gone at last!

Old Manhattan was as strictly run as disciplinary measures and rules
could contrive and guarantee. The old blue laws were stringently
enforced, and the penalty for infringement was usually a sharp one. In
the unpublished record of the city clerk we find, next to the item
that records Elbert Harring's application for a land-grant, a note to
the effect that a "Publick Whipper" had been appointed on the same
day, at five pounds quarterly.

Public notices of that time, printed in the current press, remind the
reader of some of these aforementioned rules and regulations. We read
that "Tapsters are forbid to sell to the Indians," and that
"unseasonable night tippling" is also tabooed; likewise drinking after
nine in the evening when curfew rings, or "on a Sunday before three
o'clock, when divine service shall be over."

I wonder whether little old "Washington Hall" was built too late to
come under these regulations? It was a roadhouse of some repute in
1820, and a famous meeting place for celebrities in the sporting
world. It was, too, a tavern and coffee house for travellers (its
punch was famous!) and the stagecoaches stopped there to change
horses. At this moment of writing it is still standing, on the south
of Washington Square,--I think number 58,--with other shabby
structures of wood, which, for some inscrutable reason, have never
been either demolished or improved. Now they are doomed at last, and
are to make way for new and grand apartment houses; and so these,
among the oldest buildings in Greenwich, drift into the mist of the
past.

And in that same part of the Square--in number 59 or 60, it is
said--lived one who cannot be omitted from any story of the Potter's
Field: Daniel Megie, the city's gravedigger. In 1819 he bought a plot
of ground from one John Ireland, and erected a small frame house,
where he lived and where he stored the tools of his rather grim trade.
For three years he dwelt there, smoothing the resting places in the
Field of Sleep; then, in 1823, a new Potter's Field was opened at the
point now known as Bryant Park, and the bodies from the lower cemetery
were carried there. Megie, apparently, lost his job, sold out to
Joseph Dean and disappeared into obscurity. It is interesting to note
that he bought his plot in the first place for $500; now it is
incorporated in the apartment house site which is estimated at about
$250,000!

There is a legend to the effect that Governor Lucius Robinson later
occupied this same house, but the writer does not vouch for the fact.
The Governor certainly lived somewhere in the vicinity, and his
favourite walk was on Amity Street,--why can't we call it that now,
instead of the cold and colourless Third Street?

I find that I have said nothing of Monument Lane,--sometimes called
Obelisk Lane,--yet it was quite a landmark in its day, as one may
gather from the fact that Ratzer thought it important enough to put in
his official map. It ran, I think, almost directly along North
Washington Square, and, at one point, formed part of the "Inland Road
to Greenwich" which was the scene of Revolutionary manoeuvres.
Monument Lane was so called because at the end of it (about Fifteenth
Street and Eighth Avenue) stood a statue of the much-adored English
general, James Wolfe, whose storming of the Heights of Abraham in the
Battle of Quebec, and attendant defeat of the Marquis de Montcalm,
have made him illustrious in history. After the Revolution, the statue
disappeared, and there is no record of its fate.

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