"Yet we are free who live in Washington Square, We dare to think as uptown wouldn’t dare, Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious; What care we for a dull old world censorious, When each is sure he’ll fashion something glorious?"

So we find that the romance of Colonial days still blooms freshly below Fourteenth Street and that people still rush to the Village to escape the world and its ways as eagerly as they fled a hundred years ago.  But the third and last point of unity is perhaps the most striking.  Always, we know, Greenwich has refused rebelliously to conform to any rule of thumb.  We know that when the Commissioners checker-boarded off the town they found they couldn’t checker-board Greenwich.  It was too independent and too set in its ways.  It had its lanes and trails and cow-paths and nothing could induce it to become resigned to straight streets and measured avenues.  It would not conform, and it never has conformed.  And even more strenuously has its mental development defied the draughtsman’s compass and triangle.  Greenwich will not straighten its streets nor conventionalise its views.  Its intellectual conclusions will always be just as unexpected as the squares and street angles that one stumbles on head first.  Its habit of life will be just as weirdly individual as its tangled blocks.  It asks nothing better than to be let alone.  It does not welcome tourists, though it is hospitality itself to wayfarers seeking an open door.  It is the Village, and it will never, never, no never be anything else—­the Village of the streets that wouldn’t be straight!

Janvier, who has already been quoted extensively, but who has written of Greenwich so well that his quotations can’t be avoided, says:  “In addition to being hopelessly at odds with the surrounding city, Greenwich is handsomely at variance with itself.”

New York, and especially Greenwich, grew by curious and indirect means, as we have seen.  This fact and a lively and sympathetic consciousness of it, leads often to seemingly irrelevant digressions.  Yet, is it not worth a moment’s pause to find out that the stately site of Washington Square North, as well as other adjacent and select territory, was originally the property of two visionary seamen; and that the present erratic deflection of Broadway came from one obstinate Dutchman’s affection for his own grounds and his uncompromising determination to use a gun to defend them, even against a city?

So, lest what follows appears to be a digression or an irrelevance, let me venture to remind you that the Village has always grown not only with picturesque results but by picturesque methods and through picturesque mediums.  It is frankly, incurably romantic.  Sir.  Peter Warren’s estates, or part of them, were sold off in parcels by the fine old custom of dice-throwing.  Here is the official record of that episode, by the bye: