NYU Washington Square College - Album Yearbook (New York, NY)

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When Richard Harding Davis, in The Exiles, has Meakin become lonesome for New York, Meakin asks only to be able to come back once more to the friendly wel- comeness of lower Fourteenth Street. When Arthur Train wrote The Man Hunt he remembered and described the Pie Houses of Greenwich Village. just where Barrow and Commerce Street join there is a little cluster of houses of very unusual con- strustion. He wrote: . Strangely enough, when the street turned, the house turned, too, so that half its front faced East and half North. The natural inference was that the inside of the house was shaped like a piece of pie, with its partially bitten end abutting on the corner. . May it be whispered here that a poet laureate of an Empire which rules the waves and is determined that its subjests never, never, shall be slaves was once a bartender in Luke Connor's saloon over on the West Side? We feel that John Masefield may well be proud of having lived in our Village. 9 RECENT perusal of the Faculty Diredtoryi of New York University's Wash- ington Square College has brought to light the astonishing fact that even such a learned group of human beings as Professors of many of the branches of Higher Education are not immune to the fascination which the Village has 'to offer to those creatures seeking self-expression. Counting only those who are either full-fledged or Assistant Professors, there are twenty-eight men who live in Greenwich Village! What, then, may be said of the hundreds of younger men and women Instrucitors of whom a count was not even atternpted?- Of these twenty-eight, nine teach subjedts re- lated to English and Literature, twelve teach History and Political Science, two are Philosophers and Psychologists and five are Scientists. To name only a few, there are such people as Harry Woodburn Chase, Chancellorg Alexander Baltzly, Assistant Dean and Professor of History, Willard Earl Atkins, Professor of Economics, Andre Alden Beaumont, to whom this volume has been dedicatedg W. H. Harnley, well- known Geneticistg Caspar J. Kraemer, head of the Classics Department, B. Niederl, of the Chemistry Department, and Philip Evans Wheelwright, Professor of Philosophy. It must be true that the Village does offer some kind of security and peace of mind to the dwellers of Manhattan, for, just at the dayl of this writing we have learned that Dorothy McSparran Arnold, Dean of Women and Professor of English, is com- ing to make her permanent home on the West Side of Washington Square! 10 REENWICH VILLAGE cannot be considered geographically as just a place. Greenwich Village is an attitudeg it is a form of human expression. It is inevi- table that man's mind, still carrying its heritage of prehistoric environments, should K lun 261 V Age. 11.99 'Z -C CM' .4 -r ll .-. . : 'Sift ZIM farmers: Nocccxffx

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writers a four-course dinner and an excellent bottle of wine for thirty-five cents. Today a spic' and span self-service cafeteria stands facing Sheridan Squareg but the thirty-five cent dinner and the bottle of wine have vanished. n Does not Howells tell us that on his first visit to New York he supped at the table under the pavement in that famous old beer tavern, Pfajvs, and it was here that he met Walt Whitman? A This tavern saw such visitors as Bayard Taylor and Edmund Clarence Stedman . . . the younger generation of scribes whose greatest joy was to have a story accepted by Harper's or Scribnefs also came to the tavern seeking Bohe- vnia. To mention a few, there were Artemus Ward, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Thomas Bailey Aldrich and William Winter. Many of the little twisting streets and alleys found their way into the works of famous men. Henry James wrote a novel called Wash- ington Square. Innumerable writers have peopled the pages of their books with both animate and inanimate life of the Village. Brander Matthews in The Last Meeting calls one of his characters The Duchess of Washington Square. Julian Ralph in his People We Pass has Miss Grandish live in one of the brick houses with white trimmings on Waverly Place. Edward Townsend described the social contrast between the north and the south side of the Square in just Across the Square. F. Hopkinson Smith has the hero of his novel Caleb West entertain his guests in the house which faced the Square where they saw night life of the park, miniature figures strolling about under the trees, flash- ing in brilliant light or swallowed up in dense shadow as they passed in the glare of the many larnps scattered through the budding foliage. Near the southeast corner of the Square was the Benedic, a red brick bachelor apartment building, now the Student Building, which Robert W. Chambers glorified as the Monastery in Outsiders. If one really wants to feel the spirit of our Village of a generation ago, he may find it in Bunner's book The Midge. If, after reading Theodore Winthrop,s Cecil Dreenie, one is tempted to come to the Square seeking Chrysalis College, he will be disappointed for the locale of that story was the old University of New York build- ing which those Sing Sing convidts had erecited and which was pulled down a few years before the beginning of this century. From a little known book of Stephen French Whitman, called Predestined, we quote a description of our Village: It had been drizzling: the pavernents, beaded with rain, showed, under nzistily irradiating street larnps, hu- . rnid footprints. Frovn the juncture of Macdougal Street and Waverly Place, spread out a vnass of grey black shad- ows underlaid with the horizontal, pearly lustre of wet asphalt paths. v -if-'QM 9 E251 qfffc 'Q 'f fl

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seek an escape from the spick and spanness of the most modern city in the world . . . ancient instincts still associate physical comfort with cave-like dwellings and primitive existences. A handful of centuries do not make for complete civilization. And so the few, twenty-ive thousand of them, still obey these instincts which trans- cend childhood training. They flee to Greenwich Village, the haven for those who seek self-expression. A wistful sigh escapes us as we drop the curtain on our history of the Village. As We contemplate New York City with its suspension bridges, its hordes of people, as we think of those tall skyscrapers with their elevators shooting up and down inside of them like nerve impulses, as we hear the lonely hooting of the brave little tug boats on that friendly East River, we also, like those many, many others, flee to Green- wich Village. 3 C35 L27 viii. il 5 ac -14 - 's fe-jim