Greenwich Village

								

Sarah Comstock says:



     "The Indian trail has been, throughout our country, the

     beginning of the road. In his turn, the Indian often

     followed the trail of the beast. Such beginnings are

     indiscernible for the most part, in the dusk of history, but

     we still trace many an old path that once knew the tread of

     moccasined feet."
Here, between the short lane that ran from the Bouwerij toward the
first young sprout of Greenwich, and the primitive Sand Hill (or Sandy
Hill) Trail lay a certain waste tract of land. It was flanked by the
sand mounds,--part of the Zantberg, or long range of sand
hills,--haunted by wild fowl, and utterly aloof from even that
primitive civilisation. The brook flowed from the upper part of the
Zantberg Hills to the Hudson River, and emptied itself into that great
channel at a point somewhere near Charlton Street. The name Minetta
came from the Dutch root,--min,--minute, diminutive. With the
popular suffix tje (the Dutch could no more resist that than the
French can resist ette!) it became Mintje,--the little one,--to
distinguish it from the Groote Kill or large creek a mile away. It
was also sometimes called Bestavaar's Killetje, or Grandfather's
Little Creek, but Mintje persisted, and soon became Minetta.
Minetta was a fine fishing brook, and the adjacent region was full of
wild duck; so, take it all in all, it was a game preserve such as
sportsmen love. It seems that the old Dutch settlers were fond of
hunting and fishing, for they came here to shoot and angle, as we
would go into--let us say--the Adirondacks or the Maine woods!
"A high range of sand hills traversed a part of the island, from
Varick and Charlton to Eighth and Green streets," says Mary L. Booth,
in her history. "To the north of these lay a valley through which ran
a brook, which formed the outlet of the springy marshes of Washington
Square...."
And here, on the self-same ground of those "springy marshes," is
Washington Square today.
The lonely Zantberg,--the wind-blown range of sand hills; the cries of
the wild birds breaking the stillness; the quietly rippling stream
winding downward from the higher ground in the north, and now and
then, in the spring of the year, overflowing its bed in a wilderness
of brambles and rushes;--do these things make you realise more plainly
the sylvan remoteness of that part of New York which we now know as
Downtown?
A glance at Bernard Ratzer's map--made in the beginning of the last
half of the eighteenth century for the English governor, Sir. Henry
Moore--shows the only important holdings in the neighbourhood at that
time: the Warren place, the Herrin (Haring or Harring) farm, the Eliot
estate, etc. The site of the Square, in fact, was originally composed