ase of the numbered
streets they openly travesty the requirements of communal
propriety and of common-sense: as may be inferred from the
fact that within this disjointed region Fourth Street
crosses Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth streets very nearly at
right angles--to the permanent bewilderment of nations and
to the perennial confusion of mankind.--THOMAS
JANVIER.

It seems a far cry from the Greenwich of the last century to the
Greenwich of this; from such quaint, garden-enclosed houses as the
Warren homestead and Richmond Hill, from the alternately adventurous
and tranquil lives of the great men who used to walk its crooked
streets long and long ago, to the Studio quarter of today. What tie
between the Grapevine, Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Brannan's, and all the
ancient hostelries and mead houses and the modern French and Italian
restaurants and little tea shops which are part and parcel of the
present Village? So big did the gap appear to your servant, the
author, so incongruous the notion of uniting the old and the new
Greenwich harmoniously that she was close to giving the problem up in
despair and writing her story of Greenwich Village in two books
instead of one. But--whether accidentally or by inspiration, who
knows?--three sovereign bonds became accidentally plain to her. May
they be as plain to you who read--bonds between the Green Village of
an older day and the Bohemian Village of this our own day, points that
the old and the new settlements have in common--more--points that show
the soul and spirit of the Village to be one and the same, unchanged
in the past, unchanged in the present, probably to be unchanged for
all time. The first of these points I have already touched upon in an
earlier chapter--the deathless element of romance that has always had
its headquarters here. Every city, like every brain, should have a
corner given over to dreams. Greenwich is the dream-corner of New
York. Everyone feels it. I found an old article in the _Tribune_
written by Vincent Pepe which shows how the romance of the
neighbourhood has crept into bricks and stone and even the
uncompromising prose of real estate.

"Each one of these houses in the Village is from
seventy-five to one hundred years old," writes Mr. Pepe (he
might have said a hundred and fifty with equal accuracy in a
few cases), "and each one of them has a history of its own,
individually, as being one o