But it happens that he has a sanctuary, a haven after his own heart, where he can still draw a breath of relief, among buildings small but full of age and dignity and with the look of homes about them; on restful, crooked little streets where there remain trees and grass-plots; in the old-time purlieus of Washington Square and Greenwich Village! The history of old New York reads like a romance.

There is scarcely a plot of ground below Fourteenth Street without its story and its associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in the dry prose of registries and records.

Let us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know as Washington Square, as it was when the city of New York bought it for a Potter's Field.
Perhaps you have tried to visualise old New York as hard as I have tried.

But I will wager that, like myself, you have been unable to conjure up more than a nebulous and tenuous vision,--a modern New York's shadow, the ghostly skeleton of our city as it appears today.
For instance, when you have thought of old Washington Square, you have probably thought of it pretty much as it is now, only of course with an old-time atmosphere.

The whole Village, with all your best imaginative efforts, persists--does it not ?--in being a part of New York proper.
It was not until I had come to browse among the oldest of Manhattan's oldest records,--( and at that they're not very old!)--those which show the reaching out of the fingers of early progress, the first shoots of metropolitan growth, that the picture really came to me.