Washington Square Park

You are standing on top of twenty thousand bodies. Before this was a park, before it was a military parade ground, before NYU surrounded it with lecture halls — this was a potter's field. From seventeen ninety-seven, New York City buried its indigent and unclaimed dead here. An estimated twenty thousand people were interred beneath what is now nine and three quarter acres of paths, chess tables, and street performers.

In the northwest corner stands the Hangman's Elm, one of the oldest trees in Manhattan. Legend says it was used for public executions, though only one hanging here is documented: Rose Butler, a young Black woman convicted of arson, was executed at a gallows nearby in eighteen nineteen and buried yards from where she died.

The marble arch at the north end was designed by Stanford White in eighteen ninety-one to celebrate the centennial of George Washington's inauguration. It was formally dedicated in eighteen ninety-five and marks the southern terminus of Fifth Avenue. Bob Dylan played his first New York gigs in the folk clubs surrounding this park in the early nineteen sixties. Before that, Henry James set his novel Washington Square here. The fountain at the centre has been a gathering point for musicians, protesters, students, and chess hustlers for over a century.