But that was when Greenwich was almost the whole of fashionable New York.

Later New York plunged onward and left the green cradle of its splendid beginnings.

But the cradle remained, still to cherish new lives and fresh ideals and a society profoundly different, yet scarcely less exclusive in its way, than that of the Colonies.

It has been described by so many writers in so many ways that one is at a loss for a choice of quotations.

Perhaps the most whimsically descriptive is in O.Henry's "Last Leaf." "In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called 'places.' These 'places' make strange angles and curves.