Washington Square Park ca. 1935

Washington Square, at the base of Fifth Avenue, emerged in the Victorian era as one of New York City's most fashionable neighborhoods. Projecting dignified calm and cosmopolitan charm, the square drew favorable comparisons to similar patrician precincts in nineteenth-century London and Paris. To Henry James, born on nearby Washington Place, Washington Square (where his grandmother lived) had "a riper, richer, more honorable look than any of the ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare- the look of having something of a social history."

Originally a marshland drained for use as a potter's field and public gallows in the later eighteenth century, Washington Square underwent its upscale metamorphosis in the mid-1820s, when the area was converted into a military parade ground and subsequently reconfigured as an eight-acre public park, complete with fountain and intersecting pedestrian paths. In 1837 New York University established its headquarters on the square's east border.

Affluent downtowners soon gravitated to this newly developed section of Greenwich Village, moving into the stately Federal-style townhouses constructed at the park's perimeter. By the century's end, a monumental arch designed by Stanford White and built from Tuckahoe marble dominated the Northern edge of Washington Square. Largely financed by the well-heeled homeowners who lived on the square, this imposing structure replaced a temporary portal erected in 1889 to commemorate the centennial of George Washington's inauguration as the nations first president.

By the 1890s, various economic and demographic changes had conspired to trigger the flight of upper-class families from Greenwich Village; much of the district's housing stock had grown dilapidated, real estate values and per capita income began to plummet, local church congregations started to migrate north, and slum tenements and drab factories were encroaching the side streets running east and south of Washington Square.