p thereabouts. 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. It has been described by so many writers in
so many ways that one is at a loss for a choice of quotations. Perhaps
the most whimsically descriptive is in O. Henry's "Last Leaf."

"In a little district west of Washington Square the streets
have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips
called 'places.' These 'places' make strange angles and
curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist
once discovered a valuable possibility in this street.
Suppose a collector with a bill for paint, paper and canvas
should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself
coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!"

And Kate Jordan offers this concerning Waverly Place:

"Here Eleventh and Fourth streets, refusing to be separated
by arithmetical arrangements, meet at an unexpected point as
if to shake hands, and Waverly Place sticks its head in
where some other street ought to be, for all the world like
a village busybody who has to see what is happening around
the corner."

But what of the spirit of Greenwich? The truth is that first and
foremost Greenwich is the home of romance. It is a sort of Make
Believe Land which has never grown up, and which will never learn