A short distance south from St. Luke's, on the opposite side of Hudson Street, is an open space that is a public playground and a public garden. It was a graveyard, but a few years ago the city decreed that it should vanish, with the exception of a monument put up to commemorate the devotion of firemen who gave their lives for duty in a fire of the long ago. It was not the graveyard of St. Luke's, although near, but of farther away St. John's; and it is pleasant to remember that it was in walking to and fro among the now vanished graves and tombs that Edgar Allan Poe[66] composed his “Raven.”
Cheerful in its atmosphere—but perhaps this is largely from its name—is short little Gay Street, leading from Waverley Place, just around the corner from Sixth Avenue. Immediately beyond this point—for much of the unexpected still remains in good old Greenwich Village—Waverley becomes, by branching, a street with four sidewalks; for both branches hold the name of Waverley. It is hard for people of to-day to understand the power of literature in the early half of the last century, when Washington Irving[67] was among the most prominent citizens, and James Fenimore Cooper[68] was publicly honored, and admirers of the Waverley Novels made successful demand on the aldermen to change the name of Sixth Street, where it left Broadway, to Waverley Place, and to continue it beyond Sixth Avenue, discarding another name on the way, and at this forking-point to do away with both Catharine and Elizabeth streets in order to give Waverley its four sidewalks. Could this be done in these later days with the names, say of Howells[69] or of Hopkinson Smith![70] Does any one ever propose to have an “O” put before Henry Street![71]
At the forking-point is a triangular building, archaic in aspect, and very quiet. It is a dispensary, and an ancient jest of the neighborhood is, when some stranger asks if it has patients, to reply, “It doesn't need 'em; it's got money.”
Gay Street is miniature; its length isn't long and its width isn't wide. It is a street full of the very spirit of old Greenwich, or, rather, of the old Ninth Ward; for thus the old inhabitants love to designate the neighborhood, some through not knowing that it was originally Greenwich Village, and a greater number because they are not interested in the modern development, poetic, artistic, theatric, empiric, romantic, sociologic, but are proud of the honored record of the district as the most American ward of New York City.
In an apartment overlooking a Gay Street corner there died last year a man who had rented there for thirty-four years. There loomed practical difficulties for the final exit, the solution involving window and fire-escape. But the landlord, himself born there, said, “No; he has always gone in and out like a gentleman, and he shall still go out, for the last time, as a gentleman,” thereupon he called in carpenter and mason to cut the wall.
Then some old resident will tell you, pointing out house by house and name by name, where business men, small manufacturers, politicians, and office-holders dwelt. And, further reminiscent, he will tell of how, when a boy, at dawn on each Fourth of July, he used to get out his toy cannon and fire it from a cellar entrance (pointing to the entrance), and how one Fourth the street was suddenly one shattering crash, two young students from the old university across Washington Square having experimentally tossed to the pavement from their garret window a stick of what was then “a new explosive, dynamite.” No sane and safe Fourths then!
(page 185)
“It has been called the oldest building in New York.”
It is still remembered that some little houses at the farther end of Gay Street, on Christopher, were occupied by a little colony of hand-loom weavers from Scotland, who there looked out from these “windows in Thrums.”[72]