“In pursuance of the powers given in the said antenuptial deeds the trustees therein named, on March 31, 1787, agreed upon a partition of the said lands, which agreement was with the approbation and consent of the cestui que trusts, to wit:  Earl and Lady Abingdon, and Charles Fitsroy and Ann his wife, the said Susannah Skinner the second not then having arrived at age.  In making the partition, the premises were divided into three parts on a survey made thereof and marked A, B and C; and it was agreed that such partition should be made by each of the trustees naming a person to throw dice for and in behalf of their respective cestui que trusts, and that the person who should throw the highest number should have parcel A; the one who should throw the next highest number parcel B; and the one who should throw the lowest number, parcel C,—­for the persons whom they respectively represented; and the premises were partitioned accordingly.”

Eleventh Street was never cut through because old Burgher Brevoort did not want his trees cut down and argued conclusively with a blunderbuss to that effect—­a final effect.  It never has been cut through, as a matter of fact, to this day.  And by way of evening things up, Grace Church, which stands almost on the disputed site, had for architect one James Renwick, who married the only daughter of Henry Brevoort himself.  So by a queer twisted sort of law of compensation, the city gained rather than lost by what a certain disgruntled historian calls the “obstinacy of one Dutch householder.”

[Illustration:  THE BREVOORT HOUSE. “...  The atmosphere of chivalry to women, friendliness to men, and courtesy to everyone, which is, after all, just the air of France.”]

These things are all true; the most amazing thing about Greenwich Village is that the most unlikely things that you can find out about it are true.  The obvious, every-day things that are easily believed are much the most likely to be untenable reports or the day dreams of imaginative chroniclers.  You are safe if you believe all the quaint and romantic and inconsistent and impossible things that come to your knowledge concerning the Village.  That is its special and sacred privilege:  to be unexpected and always—­yes, always without exception—­in the spirit of its irrational and sympathetic role.  It needs Kipling’s ambiguous “And when the thing that couldn’t has occurred” for a motto.  And yet—­and yet—­like all true nonsense, this nonsense is rooted in a beautiful and disconcerting compromise of truth.

Cities do grow through their romances and their adventures.  The commonplaces of life never opened up new worlds nor established them after; the prose of life never served as a song of progress.  Never a great onward movement but was called impossible.  The things that the sane-and-safe gentleman accepts as good sense are not the things that make for growth, anywhere.  And the principle, applied to lesser things, holds