In the resolute spirit of another Andor Andorra, the Village of Greenwich maintains its independence in the very midst of the city of New York—­submitting to no more of a compromise in the matter of its autonomy than is evolved in the Procrustean sort of splicing which has hitched fast the extremities of its tangled streets to the most readily available streets in the City Plan.  The flippant carelessness with which this apparent union has been effected only serves to emphasise the actual separation.  In almost every case these ill-advised couplings are productive of anomalous disorder, which in the case of the numbered streets they openly travesty the requirements of communal propriety and of common-sense:  as may be inferred from the fact that within this disjointed region Fourth Street crosses Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth streets very nearly at right angles—­to the permanent bewilderment of nations and to the perennial confusion of mankind.—­THOMAS JANVIER.

It seems a far cry from the Greenwich of the last century to the Greenwich of this; from such quaint, garden-enclosed houses as the Warren homestead and Richmond Hill, from the alternately adventurous and tranquil lives of the great men who used to walk its crooked streets long and long ago, to the Studio quarter of today.  What tie between the Grapevine, Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Brannan’s, and all the ancient hostelries and mead houses and the modern French and Italian restaurants and little tea shops which are part and parcel of the present Village?  So big did the gap appear to your servant, the author, so incongruous the notion of uniting the old and the new Greenwich harmoniously that she was close to giving the problem up in despair and writing her story of Greenwich Village in two books instead of one.  But—­whether accidentally or by inspiration, who knows?—­three sovereign bonds became accidentally plain to her.  May they be as plain to you who read—­bonds between the Green Village of an older day and the Bohemian Village of this our own day, points that the old and the new settlements have in common—­more—­points that show the soul and spirit of the Village to be one and the same, unchanged in the past, unchanged in the present, probably to be unchanged for all time.  The first of these points I have already touched upon in an earlier chapter—­the deathless element of romance that has always had its headquarters here.  Every city, like every brain, should have a corner given over to dreams.  Greenwich is the dream-corner of New York.  Everyone feels it.  I found an old article in the Tribune written by Vincent Pepe which shows how the romance of the neighbourhood has crept into bricks and stone and even the uncompromising prose of real estate.