At this moment of writing it is still standing, on the south of Washington Square,--I think number 58,--with other shabby structures of wood, which, for some inscrutable reason, have never been either demolished or improved.

Now they are doomed at last, and are to make way for new and grand apartment houses; and so these, among the oldest buildings in Greenwich, drift into the mist of the past.
And in that same part of the Square--in number 59 or 60, it is said--lived one who cannot be omitted from any story of the Potter's Field: Daniel Megie, the city's gravedigger.

In 1819 he bought a plot of ground from one John Ireland, and erected a small frame house, where he lived and where he stored the tools of his rather grim trade.
For three years he dwelt there, smoothing the resting places in the Field of Sleep; then, in 1823, a new Potter's Field was opened at the point now known as Bryant Park, and the bodies from the lower cemetery were carried there.

Megie, apparently, lost his job, sold out to Joseph Dean and disappeared into obscurity.

It is interesting to note that he bought his plot in the first place for $500; now it is incorporated in the apartment house site which is estimated at about $250,000! There is a legend to the effect that Governor Lucius Robinson later occupied this same house, but the writer does not vouch for the fact.
The Governor certainly lived somewhere in the vicinity, and his favourite walk was on Amity Street,--why can't we call it that now, instead of the cold and colourless Third Street?
I find that I have said nothing of Monument Lane,--sometimes called Obelisk Lane,--yet it was quite a landmark in its day, as one may gather from the fact that Ratzer thought it important enough to put in his official map.