Greenwich Village

								

ungovernable proportions through other acts of the same sort.
As late as 1819, a young negro girl named Rose Butler was hanged in
our Square before an immense crowd, including many women and young
children. Kindly read what the New York Evening Post said about it
in its issue of July 9th:



     "Rose, a black girl who had been sentenced to be hung for

     setting fire to a dwelling house, and who was respited for a

     few days, in the hope that she would disclose some

     accomplice in her wickedness, was executed yesterday at two

     o'clock near the Potter's Field."
And in Charles H. Haswell's delightful "Reminiscences," there is one
passage which has, for modern ears, rather too Spartan a ring:



     "A leading daily paper referred to her (he speaks of Rose)

     execution in a paragraph of five lines, without noticing any

     of the unnecessary and absurd details that are given in the

     present day in like cases; neither was her dying speech

     recorded...."
Thomas Janvier declares that she was accused of murder, but all other
authorities say that poor Rose's "wickedness" had consisted of
lighting a fire under the staircase of her master's house, with, or
so it was asserted, "a malicious intent." One sees that it was quite
easy to get hanged in those days,--especially if you happened to be a
negro! The great elm tree, on a branch of which Rose was hanged, stood
intact in the Square until 1890. I am glad it is gone at last!
Old Manhattan was as strictly run as disciplinary measures and rules
could contrive and guarantee. The old blue laws were stringently
enforced, and the penalty for infringement was usually a sharp one. In
the unpublished record of the city clerk we find, next to the item
that records Elbert Harring's application for a land-grant, a note to
the effect that a "Publick Whipper" had been appointed on the same
day, at five pounds quarterly.
Public notices of that time, printed in the current press, remind the
reader of some of these aforementioned rules and regulations. We read
that "Tapsters are forbid to sell to the Indians," and that
"unseasonable night tippling" is also tabooed; likewise drinking after
nine in the evening when curfew rings, or "on a Sunday before three
o'clock, when divine service shall be over."
I wonder whether little old "Washington Hall" was built too late to
come under these regulations? It was a roadhouse of some repute in
1820, and a famous meeting place for celebrities in the sporting
world. It was, too, a tavern and coffee house for travellers (its
punch was famous!) and the stagecoaches stopped there to change
horses. At this moment of writing it is still standing, on the south
of Washington Square,--I think number 58,--with other shabby
structures of wood, which, for some inscrutable reason, have never
been either demolished or improved. Now they are doomed at last, and