town--its limitations,
its inconveniences, its _naivetes_. But perhaps, in these years of
storm, and stress, and heartache, we envy more than a little. It is not
merely the architectural story that the old maps, prints, diaries tell;
in them we can find an age that is gone, catch fleeting glimpses of
people long since dust to dust, look at past manners, fashions,
pleasures and contrast them with our own.

But to begin with the old map. The lettering beneath conveys the
information that it was prepared for the City in 1819-1820 by John
Randel, Jr., and that it shows the farms superimposed upon the
Commissioner's map of 1811. Through the centre of the map there is a
line indicating Fifth Avenue north to Thirteenth Street. Here and there
is a spot apparently intended to represent a farmhouse, but that is all;
for in 1820, though Greenwich Village and Chelsea were, the city proper
was far to the south. Some of the names on the old map are familiar and
some are not.

Just above the bending lane that ran along the north side of Washington
Square, then the Potter's Field, may be read "Trustees of Sailor's Snug
Harbor." The land thus marked extends from what is now Waverly Place to
what is now Ninth Street. In 1790 Captain Robert Richard Randall paid
five thousand pounds sterling for twenty-one acres of good farming land.
In 1801 he died, and his will directed that a "Snug Harbor" for old
salts be built upon his farm, the produce of which, he believed, would
forever furnish his pensioners with vegetables and cereal rations. Later
Randall's trustees leased the farm in building lots and placed "Snug
Harbor" in Staten Island. Above the estate, in diagonal form, and at one
point crossing Fifth Avenue to the west, was the large farm of Henry
Brevoort. More limited holdings, in the names of Gideon Tucker, William
Hamilton, and John Morse, separate, in the map, the Brevoort property
from the estates of John Mann, Jr., and Mary Mann. The latter must have
been a landowner of some importance in her day, for the fragment of a
chart runs into the margin above the line of Thirteenth Street without
indicating the beginning of any other ownership.

On the land to the west of the Avenue line may be read "Heirs of John
Rogers," "William W. Gilbert," "Nicholson" (the Christian name lies
somewhere beyond the map horizon), and "Heirs of Henry Spingler."
Irrigation is indicated by a line, running in a general northwesterly
direction, bearing th