But it is
still the Village, and utterly different from the rest of the city.
Not all the commissioners in the world could change the charming,
erratic plan of it; not the most powerful pressure of modern business
could destroy its insistent, yet elusive personality. The Village has
always persistently eluded incorporation in the rest of the city.
Never forget this: Greenwich was developed as independently as Boston
or Chicago. It is not New York proper: it is an entirely separate
place. At points, New York overflows into it, or it straggles out into
New York, but it is first and foremost itself. It is not changeless at
all, but its changes are eternal and superbly independent of, and
inconsistent with, metropolitan evolution.
There was a formative period when, socially speaking, the growth of
Greenwich was the growth of New York. 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.
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