“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—­