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New York - New York City - Sheridan Square Sheridan Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West Fourth Street, is reached from Washington Square by Waverly Place. This is the focal point for tourist night life in Greenwich Village; revelers from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens arrive, as evening approaches, on the IRT subway, by bus, taxi, and private car to visit night clubs and bars that abound in the square itself, line West Fourth Street to Washington Square, and dot the neighborhood north and west. This, too, is a center for Villagers who frequent more modest establishments -- unpretentious saloons, lunch wagons, and cafeterias. A cafeteria, curiously enough, is one of the few obviously Bohemian spots in the Village, and evenings the more conventional occupy tables in one section of the room and watch the "show" of the eccentrics on the other side. The square, named for General Philip H. Sheridan, though a blaze of light by night, is, by day, an uninteresting hodgepodge of buildings of varying sizes and ages, suggesting little of the charm that lies beyond its limits. At the northeastern end is a small park, containing a bronze STATUE OF GENERAL SHERIDAN, sculptured by Joseph P. Pollia and erected in 1936. Beyond the park is the NORTHERN DISPENSARY, a simple triangular brick building, erected about 1830, and curious for the fact that two of its sides are on one street (Waverly Place) and the third side on two streets (Christopher and Grove Streets). A block south of the square at 27 Barrow Street is GREENWICH HOUSE, a seven-story structure of Georgian Colonial design, a settlement house. Its social and educational activities and its powerful influence for civic improvement have given it a national reputation. Among its experiments in education and sociology is the Nursery School, founded in 1921 to provide a place for working mothers to leave their children. Wide Seventh Avenue, running north, offers little of interest. On the northeast corner of Eleventh Street is ST. VINCENT'S HOSPITAL, established 1849, New York's first charity hospital depending on voluntary contributions. Across the avenue a PLAQUE on the Sheridan Theater designates the site where Georges Clemenceau, who later became the wartime premier of France, lived in 1870 practicing and teaching medicine. At the juncture of West Twelfth Street and Eighth Avenue is ABINGDON SQUARE, named for a daughter of Vice-Admiral Warren, Charlotte, who married the Earl of Abingdon. This large, irregular square is surrounded by tall, modern apartment buildings and older warehouses and business establishments. At Sheridan Square Fourth, Street turns northwest, and to the bewilderment of visitors, crosses all the westbound streets, from Tenth to Thirteenth. In the late 1890's the region thus traversed was the domain of a notorious but colorful gang of thugs known as the Hudson Dusters. A high percentage of them were cocaine addicts and thus especially vicious and ferocious. Their exploits were favorite grist for the journalists' mill and the Dusters became one of the best-known gangs of the time. It is perhaps in the district southwest of Sheridan Square that one finds best the atmosphere of Greenwich Village. Along winding streets, interspersed with ugly tenements and occasional apartment buildings, are the age-worn dwellings of the burghers of the early nineteenth century who fled from the pestilence-ridden city -- houses with steep roofs, often of slate, with old chimney pots; old brass knobs on handsome doors; highceilinged rooms, small-paned windows; carved mantels over huge fireplaces; "ship carpenter's" woodwork, and gates and area-fences with Georgian ironwork. Informal gardens in the rear are much in use, as are the Italian garden restaurants that thrive throughout the Village. On narrow Grove Street, just west of the square, at No. 59, a bronze PLAQUE memorializes the site where Tom Paine, greatest literary force of the Revolution, died in 1809. It was then the home of Mme. Nicolas de Bonneville, whose husband had befriended Paine after his release from prison in France. When the De Bonnevilles came into disfavor with the Napoleonic government Paine invited them to America. He provided for them as best he could but, toward the end, impoverished himself, he lived in a rooming house on Herring Street (now Bleecker Street) until Madame de Bonneville brought him under her care. His last days were made miserable with the importunings of religious fanatics who wanted the old deist to recant his "atheistic" teaching. His last request, that he be buried in a Quaker churchyard, was refused. GROVE COURT, entered from the bend in Grove Street, is used for access to the houses around it. Of charming scale and simplicity are the frame and brick houses of the 1830's. At the corner where Grove Street intersects Bedford, there is a bizarre group -- a farmhouse remodeled with high twin gables, a stable converted into a small house, and a prosaic old threestory frame building. Facing the foot of Grove Street, on Hudson Street, on land that was part of Trinity Church farm, ST. LUKE'S CHAPEL was opened in 1822. It is a simple low building of yellow brick with an effective square tower. Under the approach to the baptismal font, reminiscent of old England, is a wooden figure of Saint Christopher, brought from South America in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The vicarage to the north is the oldest existing in the city. The Leake Dole of Bread, distributed every Saturday after ten o'clock service, was provided for in the will of John Leake, who, in 1792, bequeathed one thousand pounds for "sixpenny loaves of wheaten bread" to be distributed to "such poor as shall appear most deserving." Barrow Street, below Grove, was originally named Reason Street, in honor of Paine famous Age of Reason. The street's name was corrupted to "Raisin Street," and some time later it became Barrow. Commerce Street, a block south, is a short, backwater street, hardly deserving of its name. Near the bend of Commerce Street is the CHERRY LANE THEATER, a converted barn, which, in the postwar period, served the experimental New Playwrights group. A group of two-story-anddormer houses, near Bedford and Commerce Streets, dates from the early nineteenth century. Said to be the narrowest house in New York, 751/2 Bedford Street is nine and one-half feet wide, thirty feet long, and three stories high. Its stepped gable recalls the old Dutch architectural detail. Among the tenants of the building have been John Barrymore and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The HUDSON PARK PLAYGROUND, south of St. Luke's Place, was converted from a graveyard in the 1890's. Here, it is claimed, was buried the oft-found lost Dauphin of France , above whose body was placed a stone bearing the simple description -- Leroy (The King). On Varick Street (continuation of Seventh Avenue) at the corner of Charlton Street, stood Mortier House, one of 's headquarters during the Revolution. While Washington was living here Thomas Hickey, one of his bodyguards, was hanged for his participation in a Tory plot that involved firing the city, inciting the troops to mutiny, and feeding the general a dish of poisoned peas. Aaron Burr later lived in the house and in 1831 it was opened as the Richmond Hill Theatre. It was razed in 1849 to make room for business, which today dominates this neighborhood with tall loft and office buildings. Only south of Charlton Street does an occasional dingy red-brick house now serving as a tenement remain as a vestige of the old village.