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. Then I saw
New York as a little city which had sprung up almost with the speed of
a modern mushroom town. First, in Peter Minuit's day, its centre was
the old block house below Bowling Green; then it spread out a bit
until it became a real, thriving city,--with its utmost limits at
Canal Street! Greenwich and the Bowery Lane were isolated little
country hamlets, the only ones on the island, and far, far out of
town. They appeared as inaccessible to the urban dwellers of that day
as do residents on the Hudson to the confirmed city people
nowadays;--nay, still more so, since trains and motors, subways and
surface cars, have more or less annihilated distance for us.
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