Back to Homepage New York - Albany Albany - Points of Interest New York - Auburn Auburn - Points of Interest New York - Binghamton Binghamton - Points of Interest New York - Buffalo Buffalo - Points of Interest (Downtown) New York - Buffalo - Points of Interest (Midtown) Buffalo - Points of Interest (Midtown) North Buffalo - Points of Interest (Midtown) East Buffalo - Points of Interest (Midtown) South New York - Elmira Elmira - Points of Interest New York - Ithaca Cornell University - Ithaca, New York Ithaca - Points of Interest New York - New Rochelle New Rochelle - Points of Interest New York - New York City New York City - Points of Interest The New York Public Library Brooklyn Bridge Manhattan West Street and North (Hudson) River Water Front Lower West Side South Street Wall Street District City Hall District Bellevue Hospital Metropolitan Opera House The Empire State Building Downtown to Uptown Brooklyn The Bronx Queens Staten Island New York - Niagara Falls New York - Poughkeepsie Poughkeepsie - Points of Interest New York - Rochester Rochester - Points of Interest New York - Saratoga Springs Saratoga Springs - Points of Interest New York - Schenectady Schenectady - Points of Interest New York - Syracuse Syracuse - Points of Interest New York - Troy Troy - Points of Interest New York - Utica Utica - Points of Interest New York - Yonkers Yonkers - Points of Interest New York - Geology New York - Topography New York - Plant and Animal Life New York - Conservation and Recreation New York - Archeology and Indians New York - History New York - History - After the Revolution New York - Transportation New York - Agriculture New York - Industry New York - Ethnic Groups New York - Folklore New York - Religion

New York - New York City - Washington Square - Greenwich Village The district roughly known as Greenwich Village has two focal points: Washington Square and Sheridan Square, each the center of a neighborhood fairly distinct in architecture, in the character of its activities and in the type of its people. Sheridan Square can best be described as the "Times Square" of Greenwich Village. WASHINGTON SQUARE, on the other hand, is striking for its dignity, still undestroyed by the commercial and tenement advances that swept around it, while many of the streets to the north, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, have scarcely changed thtough the decades. Although some of the private homes have been converted into rooming houses, large numbers of charming dwellings are still occupied by their owners. The site of the square served as the city's potter's field in 1789, and the use of its trees -- some still standing -- as the public gallows during that period was an attraction drawing large crowds of holiday makers on execution days. In 1823, however, the potter's field was closed. Four years later a park was laid out and the first of the impressive mansions which give the square its present character was erected. The square today is well shaded by trees: pin oaks, oriental planes, yellow locusts, ash, and American elm. Benches line its paths, and here meet Italian workers, mothers and their broods from the south, apartment dwellers from the north, university students from the east, and young Villagers from the west. Dominating the park is the white marble WASHINGTON ARCH, eightysix feet high, with a span thirty feet wide, designed by Stanford White. Rising at the foot of Fifth Avenue, it forms an imposing gateway to New York's most imposing thoroughfare. It was completed in 1895 at a Cost of $128,000, and commemorates the first inauguration of George Washington. Two statues of the first President, one in the uniform of commander-in-chief, by Hermon A. MacNeil, the other in civilian garb, by A. Sterling Calder, face the north on bases projecting from the east and west piers, respectively. On the east side of the square is a bronze STATUE OF GARIBALDI by Giovanni Turini, erected in 1888 and presented by the Italians of New York. Directly south of the arch is a WORLD WAR MEMORIAL FLAGPOLE, forty-five feet high, and near by is a bronze BUST OF ALEXANDER LYMAN HOLLEY, Bessemer steel pioneer. It is the work of J. Q. A. Ward and was erected in 1890. Annual events in Washington Square include the folk festival and the open-air art and pottery exhibits. The first, an outdoor pageant of folk dancing and singing, is held on Labor Day. Art exhibits, inaugurated in 1931, are held in May and September, with pictures lining the building walls on the blocks near the western half of the square -- Thompson, Sullivan, and MacDougal Streets, and Washington and Waverly Places. Painters living within the confines of the city may exhibit their wares free, and receipts from sales range from less than a dollar to several hundred dollars. In May, the Ravens tack their verses on a fence along Thompson Street -the Fifth Avenue extension south -- and sell them for quarters and half dollars. Washington Square North, part of the old Warren estate, retains almost intact its line of fine early nineteenth-century Greek Revival homes of red brick with white limestone trim. Each mansion was built on a generous plot with a ninety-foot garden in the rear. One of the earliest of these was the RHINELANDER MANSION, designed by Richard Upjohn, architect of Trinity Church, and built at the west corner of Fifth Avenue in 1839. Across Fifth Avenue is the WANAMAKER HOUSE, built in 1833-7 as two separate houses by James Boorman, a merchant, and purchased by Rodman Wanamaker, a merchant's son, in 1920. The twelve houses extending between Fifth Avenue and University Place are known as THE Row, one of New York's most elegant residential areas, and occupy land owned by Sailors Snug Harbor, an organization to aid indigent seamen. Once part of the Minto farm of twenty-one acres, which included most of the land between Washington Square North and Tenth Street, from Fifth Avenue to the Bowery, the area was acquired by Captain T. Randall, a privateer, in 1790. His son, appropriately and sentimentally, gave it to men of the sea, and stipulated in his will that none of the land was ever to be sold. The sailors benefiting from the income live in a home on Staten Island (see page 618). These houses, among the most lavish of the 1830's, with brick, ivy-covered walls, fine doorways, and quaint and carefully tended front yards, did not acquire their extraordinary harmony by accident. Though built by lessees, and with varying interior schemes, their exteriors were controlled by a master plan dictating the cornice and window heights. Some of the city's leading families and some of the country's best-known writers and artists have occupied the houses. Among the latter were Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Francis Hopkinson Smith. In No. 3, a studio building, lives Frederick W. Stokes, the artist, who went to the North Pole with Peary; some of his paintings of the Arctic regions are in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, but many are in his studio, which, like others in the building, is still heated in winter by pot-bellied stoves. Waverly Place, running east and west of Washington Square North, honors through its name Sir Walter Scott. At No. 108 Richard Harding Davis lived during his early newspaper days. The beauty of the square is marred on its east side by the tall drab buildings of NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. The Main Building, erected in 1894, replaced the original building of the university, which was founded in 1830. Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, was one of the leaders in the move to establish this nonsectarian institution for the dissemination of practical as well as classical education among the middle and poorer classes. The use of stone cut by Sing Sing convicts for the buildings precipitated one of New York's first labor demonstrations-the Stone Cutters' Riot. Masons, parading in protest, were dispersed by the Seventh Regiment. At the school Morse conducted successful experiments with telegraphy, Draper made the first daguerreotype of the human face, and Colt perfected the revolver. The first two men were faculty members. Morse, a portrait and landscape painter, was professor of art; George Inness was one of his pupils. Colt was one of the lodgers in the Gothic tower of the university. Others who had rooms there were Brander Matthews, Winslow Homer, and Walt Whitman. New York University has another campus in the Bronx. On the ground floor, right, of 100 Washington Square East is the MUSEUM OF LIVING ART. (Open Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.) Founded in 1927, the gallery contains works of Man Ray, Lachaise, Cézanne, Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, and Juan Gris, owned by Albert E. Gallatin, a descendant of the New York University's first council chairman. Three of the paintings are critically acclaimed as being among the most important of this century: The Three Musicians, by Picasso, The City, by Leger, and Composition in White and Red, by Mondrian. The exhibits also include the work of American artists such as Marin, Demuth, Sheeler, Hartley, and Knaths. Near the university, at 22 Washington Place, was the Triangle Waist Company, where in 1911 occurred a disastrous fire which took a toll of 150 lives. As a result of the investigation that followed, State laws were enacted to improve working conditions in the factories. Washington Square South, with its remodeled and newer studio buildings, is far less elegant than the north side. Beginning shortly before the war, many Villagers who later became noted lived on this street. Adelina Patti, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Gelett Burgess, John Dos Passos, James Oppenheim, Pierre Matisse, Guy Pene duBois, and Alan Seeger were tenants at No. 61, Madame Branchard's Rooming House. At the west corner of Thompson Street stands the $450,000 JUDSON MEMORIAL BAPTIST CHURCH, of amber-colored brick, with slender Lombardian campanile surmounted by a lighted cross. The church was designed by Stanford White; its twelve stained-glass windows were executed by John La Farge. Tall, modern apartments pre-empt Washington Square West, a threat to the old open atmosphere that attracted them. In the court of the Holley Chambers spouts a fountain fed by the subterranean Minetta Brook. Its winding, erratic course beneath Greenwich Village has been a repeated cause of distress to apartment builders and subway constructors. MacDougal Street, bordering the west side of Washington Square, swarms with tearooms, night clubs, and Villager memories. The Liberal Club and the Provincetown Players occupied No. 133 -- a half block south of the park -- a building now used as a WPA training theater. Around Washington Square South and extending west to Sheridan Square are numerous Village night clubs, patronized mostly by outsiders. Many of them, such as the Black Cat, established in 1888, between the square and Third Street, were early meeting places of Village intellectuals. One-half block north of Washington Square, the blind MACDOUGAL ALLEY, a lane of century-old mews converted into studios, runs cast from MacDougal Street. Privately owned, the Alley is lit by New York's only remaining gas street lamps.