Greenwich Village eBook

Anna Alice Chapin
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 220 pages of information about Greenwich Village.

Greenwich Village eBook

Anna Alice Chapin
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 220 pages of information about Greenwich Village.

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.

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Project Gutenberg
Greenwich Village from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.