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.