In the graveyard lie buried Governor Stuyvesant and Commodore Mat-
thew C. Perry. A statue of the Dutch governor, presented by Queen Wil-
helmina of Holland in 1915, stands near his grave. In 1878 the graveyard
was the scene of a sensational body snatching when the remains of A. T.
Stewart, well-known merchant and owner of a store which is now part
of Wanamaker's, were stolen and held for $20,000 ransom. They were
not returned till two years later.

On Second Avenue at Twelfth Street is the Cafe Royal, forum and
meeting place of the Jewish intelligentsia. Behind the box hedges that
make it a sidewalk cafe in summer, or in the big inside room on Friday
nights, vehement arguments are carried on for and against a new play,
book, or art movement. Managers on the road telephone the cafe by long
distance to fill some sudden need, and unemployed actors eat there in the
hope of attracting the eye of some impresario.

Greenwich Village

Area: Spring St. on the south to 14th St. on the north; from West St. east to
Broadway.

A nation, coming into its own artistically after an era of ruthless indus-
trial expansion, of materialism and strait-laced conventionality, seized upon
Greenwich Village as a symbol of revolt in the ferment of postwar years.
The "Village" was the center of the American Renaissance or of artiness,
of political progress or of long-haired radical men and short-haired radical
women, of sex freedom or of sex license—dependent upon the point of
view.

Greenwich Village, actually, is a cross section of American urban life.
Here are old families in their gracious mansions; bankers and clerks in tall
apartment buildings; and a foreign-born population of some twenty-five
thousand, largely Irish and Italian, in tenements. If in 1939 there were
more serious artists and writers, more "bohemians" in renovated old
houses, more colorful tea rooms and wild night clubs than in other Ameri-
can centers, the number each year was lessening.

In the years just preceding and following the World War the political,
artistic, and literary rebels who flocked to the Village gave it a character
unique in this country. The literary history of Greenwich Village, however,
begins much earlier. Here Tom Paine spent the last years of his life. Poe
lived, drank, and worked at several Village addresses. Walt Whitman lived
in the vicinity, Henry James was born near Washington Square (he named