Greenwich

“ One morning, our friend, Miss S., was kind enough to accompany us to Greenwich, where, you know, is the Hospital for disabled sailors of the British navy. The day was warm and lovely, like what we call the Indian summer in America. We took an omnibus to London Bridge; from thence we proceeded by railway, and in a few minutes were in Greenwich. We entered the magnificent old Park, and wandered about for a long time, to our hearts' content, among the venerable old trees, admiring the graceful deer that were enjoying themselves all around us. ”

“ But Greenwich, too, is beautiful,—a spot where the art of man has conspired with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel together how to make a pleasant scene, and the longest liver of the two had faithfully carried out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an additional charm of its own, because, to all appearance, it is the people's property and play-ground in a much more genuine way than the aristocratic resorts in closer vicinity to the metropolis. ”

“ Greenwich was at all times a resort for those who could afford it, an exclusive and beautiful country region where anyone with a full purse could go to court health and rest among the trees and fields and river breezes. It was destined to become the most popular, flourishing and prosperous little village that ever grew up over night. Those marvellously healthy qualities as to location and air, that fine, sandy soil, made it a haven, indeed, to people who were afraid of sickness. ”

“ Stepney, Hampstead, Westend, and Peckham fairs have been crushed by the police, that ‘stern, rugged nurse’ of national morality; and although Greenwich fair continues, it is any thing but what it used to be. Greenwich, however, will always have a charm: the fine park remains—trees, glades, turf, and the view from the observatory, one of the noblest in the world—before you the towers of these palaces built for a monarch’s residence, now ennobled into a refuge from life’s storms for the gallant defenders of their country, after their long and toilsome pilgrimage—then the noble river ”

“ It was in a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I fancied them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed by the town ”

“ Shall we take a turn about Greenwich Park presently? The days are still short, and you are not so far from your house at Greenwich as you would be at Kensington.’
I consented, and then we stood at the window, looking at the scene of the river from the docks, talking about Will and the sea-life and such matters until dinner was ready. I longed to hear him say that he loved me. The language of his eye was not satisfying enough. I wanted him to take my hand and ask me to be his wife. I had thought my appetite good until I sat down, and then I could not eat. My heart beat fast. ”

“ The other day there was a merry breeze under a cloudless sky, and the air was filled with the music of the Greenwich symphony, which is played by an orchestra entirely composed of foghorns and hooters.
But Greenwich is amphibious. The river may not be for all tastes; there is the park too, with its avenues climbing to the heights of Blackheath. The deer have gone; but the Observatory remains, for the accurate adjustment of watches, and there is the distant prospect of London of which the great landscape painters [Pg 284] used to be so fond, from the corner of the terrace. ”

“ Greenwich, you see, maintains its old and honourable repute—that of being a resort and shelter and refuge for those upon whom the world outside would have pressed too heavily.
There is no one who has caught the inconsequent, yet perfectly sincere spirit of the Village better than John Reed. In reckless, scholarly rhyme he has imprisoned something of the reckless idealism of the Artists' Quarter—that haven for unconventional souls. ”

“ Greenwich Hospital—The Park, etc. LITTLE ROBERT AND HIS NOBLE FRIEND.
Greenwich, though a large market town, containing a goodly number of elegant and noble buildings, and many thousand inhabitants, appears in this age of steam to form a part of London—for when you set out from the metropolis to visit it, you seem to have hardly got comfortably seated in the railway carriage, before you are there.
Greenwich is delightfully situated on the south bank of the Thames, and is certainly one of the most beautiful and interesting places in the vicinity of London. ”

“ Greenwich fair, of itself, is nothing; the congregated throngs are every thing, and fill every place. The hill of the Observatory, and two or three other eminences in the park, are the chief resort of the less experienced and the vicious. ”

“ Greenwich will not straighten its streets nor conventionalise its views. Its intellectual conclusions will always be just as unexpected as the squares and street angles that one stumbles on head first. Its habit of life will be just as weirdly individual as its tangled blocks. It asks nothing better than to be let alone. ”

“ Then there is that curious quality about Greenwich so endearing to those who know it, the [Pg 176] quality of a haven, a refuge, a place of protected freedom.
"It's a good thing," said a certain brilliant young writer-man to me, "that there's one place where you can be yourself, live as you will and work out your scheme of life without a lot of criticism and convention to keep tripping you up. The point of view of the average mortal—out in the city—is that if you don't do exactly as everyone else does there's something the matter with you, morally or mentally. ”

“ We dare to think as uptown wouldn't dare,
Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious;
What care we for a dull old world censorious,
When each is sure he'll fashion something glorious?"
So we find that the romance of Colonial days still blooms freshly below Fourteenth Street and that people still rush to the Village to escape the world and its ways as eagerly as they fled a hundred years ago. But the third and last point of unity is perhaps the most striking. Always, we know, Greenwich has refused rebelliously to conform to any rule of thumb. ”

“ The upper portion of Greenwich (where my last article left me loitering) is a cheerful, comely, old-fashioned town, the peculiarities of which, if there be any, have passed out of my remembrance. As you descend towards the Thames, the streets get meaner, and the shabby and sunken houses, elbowing one another for frontage, bear the sign-boards of beer-shops and eating-rooms, with especial promises of whitebait and other delicacies in the fishing line. ”

“ Did they never feel a something approaching very near gratitude on passing, in the metropolis, a Greenwich pensioner, who, with his honest, carved out, unabashed front, looks as bluntly and as wonderingly at the bustle and splendour around him as does an unsophisticated wether suddenly removed from South Downs to Cheapside, whilst shaking his woollen coat beneath the whip of the coachman to the Lord Mayor. What a mixture of gravity and wonderment is in the poor brute’s countenance! ”

“ What, in the name of whitebait, have we to do with Greenwich more than with Timbuctoo, or Moscow, or Boston, or Astracan, or the capital of the Cannibal Islands? The great orb of day no doubt surveys all those places in turn, but he does not do so at the same moment, or minute, or hour. It has been ordained by Providence that one half of this globe should be wrapped in darkness whilst the other is illuminated by light—that one fraction of the town-councils of the earth may sleep and be silent, whilst another is awake and gabbling. ”

“ Stroll around the block that is squared by the present Charles, Perry, Bleecker and Tenth streets some day, look at the brick and stone, the shops and boarding-houses,—and try to dream yourself back into the eighteenth century, when, in that very square of land, stood the Captain's lovely country seat. In those days it was something enormous, palatial, and indeed was always known as the Mansion or Manse. This is, of course, the basis for the silly theory that Greenwich got its name from the estate. ”

“ There are indeed a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in the most adventurous fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all its own. It is filled with magnificent foreign-looking trees, of which I know nothing but that they have a vain appearance of being chestnuts, planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are plenty of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children ”

“ Undoubtedly the Warren place was the largest and most important one out there, and for a time to "go out to visit at Greenwich," meant to go out to visit the Manse. For years the Captain and the Captain's lady lived in this beautiful and restful place with three little daughters to share their money, their affections and their amiable lives. Thomas Janvier's description of the house as he visualises it with his rich imagination is too charming not to quote in part:
OLD ST. JOHN'S. "Still faces on Varick Street, sombre and unaltered, a stately link between the present and the past." ”

“ Greenwich was our first Connecticut town, a charming introduction to a new state: highroad and streets thickly tree-lined, and once, when we lost ourselves at a turning, we passed exquisite houses in lovely gardens. There was a divine smell of ozone-haunted seaweed in the air, for Greenwich is on Long Island Sound, with gold-green [Pg 231] sedgy shores, and everybody is rich or richish. Surely, though, the people are not "exclusive" in that selfish way I hate, for in this part of the world they can prowl all over each other's lawns; they have hardly any fences. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course the best known of the Greenwich magazines is The Masses, owned by Max Eastman and edited by Floyd Dell. It has, in a sense, grown beyond the Village, inasmuch as it now circulates all over the country, wherever socialistic or anarchistic tendencies are to be found. But its inception was in Greenwich Village, and in its infant days it strongly reflected the radical, young, insurgent spirit which was just beginning to ferment in the world below Fourteenth Street. ”

“ Gouverneur Morris, Simeon de Witt and John Rutherford were appointed by the city to take charge of this task, and, as one writer points out, they did not do it as badly as they might have done, nor as we are inclined to think they did when we try to find our way around lower New York today. The truth is that Greenwich had grown up, and always has grown up ever since, in an entirely independent and obstinate fashion all its own. ”

“ Perhaps you will keep it as a rainbow memory, a visualisation of the make-believe country where anything is possible. But in any case you will not forget.
Many a place gets into your mind and creates nostalgia when you are far from it. But Greenwich Village gets into your heart, and you will never be quite able to lose the magic of it all the days of your life. ”

“ Captain Sir Peter Warren, on whom be peace and benedictions, is usually given the credit of having given Greenwich its name, the historians insisting that it was the name of his own estate, and simply got stretched to take in the surrounding countryside. This seems rather a stupid theory. The Warrens were undoubtedly among the earliest representative residents in the little country resort, [Pg 36] but by no stretch of imagination could any private estate, however ample or important, be called a village. ”

“ If you take up your atlas, and look at the map of the British Isles or the map of Europe, you will see that the meridian of longi [99] tude (or the line running north and south) marked 0° passes through the spot where Greenwich is shown. This means that all places in Europe to the right or the left—east or west, that is—are located and marked by their distance from Greenwich; and, if for no other reason, this town is because of this fact a very important place in the world. ”

“ We have grown older since then, and quiet, and steady: liking nothing better than to spend our Easter, and all our other holidays, in some quiet nook, with people of whom we shall never tire; but we think we still remember something of Greenwich Fair, and of those who resort to it. At all events we will try. ”

“ It does not welcome tourists, though it is hospitality itself to wayfarers seeking an open door. It is the Village, and it will never, never, no never be anything else—the Village of the streets that wouldn't be straight!
Janvier, who has already been quoted extensively, but who has written of Greenwich so well that his quotations can't be avoided, says: "In addition to being hopelessly at odds with the surrounding city, Greenwich is handsomely at variance with itself."
New York, and especially Greenwich, grew by curious and indirect means, as we have seen. ”

“ Those who cannot go far on account of business, remove to Greenwich, [Pg 48] situate on the border of the Hudson about two or three miles from town. The banks and other public offices also remove their business to this place and markets are regularly established for the supply of the inhabitants. ”