Reaction to NYC Historical Society Visit

Due to a class I had to attend at 2pm, I was only able to stay at the NY Historical Society for about 20 minutes. However, the artifacts that I did get to see definitely caught my interest. One of the things I found the most interesting was the directory of people who lived in the city categorized by address. I lived at Hayden last year, which is located on Washington Square West, so I was deeply exposed to what it meant to live on the park. The directory could help show me the kind of people who lived in that area hundreds of years ago. It also could probably illustrate when exactly the shift took place from Washington Square in the Henry James sense, as a playground for the elite New Yorkers, to the more bohemian, artist-driven society it seems to capture now. This shift represents an important change in Greenwich Village life, as illustrated in Republic of Dreams; women such as Edna St. Vincent Millay helped to reconstruct what it meant to live in the village. Art and writing began to trump financial gain and society position. This shift greatly affected the way Greenwich Village is viewed today, both by outsiders and New Yorkers alike.
The map that was shown at the beginning of the presentation was also interesting; it’s fascinating to note that New York was not always on a grid system, and that it was developed later and laid over the more confusing Dutch settlement once the English took over the colony. The grid system is now one of the primary markers of life in New York, and wholly dictates how we get to and from places all over the city.

-Jessica Roy