Washington Square

In 1946 automobile traffic passed through Washington Square Park connecting Fifth Avenue to West Broadway. Fifth Avenue was two-way street then and The Fifth Avenue buses used the Park as their turnaround. There was a bus stop in the park and you could ride the doubledeckers uptown.

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There was a big economic divide between the north and south side of the Square. North of the park, Fifth Avenue and the adjoining blocks were mostly high-rise apartments erected by developers twenty years earlier. The most notable of these buildings was One Fifth, built in 1927, and home to a popular restaurant in 1946. The blocks to the south were a tenement district inhabited by Italians and the Bohemian set. The blocks to the east were largely commercial loft spaces and the blocks to the west leading to the West Village were a mix of old and newer buildings. In the 1920s gentrification and rising rents sent some of the artists and writers of the Village elsewhere. The Village became a popular tourist destination, known as much for its speakeasies as it for its artists. In the postwar years, the expanding downtown campus of NYU acquired much of the property lining the park.

The cheap boarding houses in the area had drawn the struggling creative class to the neighborhood for decades. The dilapidated boarding houses on Washington Square South between West Broadway and Houston had been a temporary home so many aspiring writers and artists through the years that it was known as "Genius Row." NYU bought up the block after the war and began demolition in 1947. Also on the south side was Judson Memorial Church, a Baptist church that long has been a Village institution. From 1937-46 the church focused on an outreach to the Italian community of the neighborhood but later in 1946, under a new pastor, it began to minister to the veterans, artists and NYU students in the area.

Also victim to NYU's postwar expansion were the lodging houses on the south side that had been leased by "Papa" Albert Strunsky since 1923 from Columbia University, which owned the block. He had modernized the interiors and refaced the facades and rented out rooms to those creative people he favored. It was said that he carried some struggling writers and artists for years. Strunsky lived on Washington Square himself, at number 47. His daughter Lenore married Ira Gershwin in 1926. Strunsky was profiled in The New Yorker in 1929 and was a well-known Village figure in 1946. NYU bought the block from Columbia in 1948 and demolished it in 1949 for the law school.

The Greek Revival townhouses on the north side of the park had been built in the 1830s as homes for the affluent but were converted into apartments in the 1930s. Number 3 held artist studios. The painter Edward Hopper was a tenant from 1913 to 1966. He and his wife shared a bathroom with other tenants until 1941. The building was not heated until 1958. Tenants had to haul coal themselves up the stairs in this walkup to burn in their fireplaces. The houses on the north side, west of Fifth, were not as unified in appearance and even grander. The Rhinelanders had lived there as had Henry James's grandmother. Her former home was demolished in 1947. This was the site of his famed novel Washington Square. A seven-story apartment building, Richmond Hill, had been built on the block in 1898. Most of the other houses were converted to apartments in the 1940s.

The park itself was neglected during the Depression years. The grass was allowed to brown. The trees were withering. The fountain did not work because of a leaky basin. The pavement was cracked. Vandalism was rampant and panhandlers filled the park. Parks Commissioner Robert Moses planned a complete redesign of the park but the neighborhood thwarted him. At the end of the decade, he did add two fenced-in playgrounds to provide recreational space for the 4500 children who attended nearby elementary schools and replaced the crumbling benches on the east side of the park. During the Depression years the park continued to serve as a locus for cultural activities such as the annual outdoor art show, captured in a 1946 painting by Thomas Hart Benton who had lived in the city from 1912-35, including several years in the area. The annual May Day parade, led by perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, still assembled in Washington Square for its annual march uptown in 1946. It was a popular place for a Sunday stroll or to sit on a bench and leisurely read The Sunday Times or listen to impromptu poetry readings or political exhortations.

Emily Kies Folpe gives a detailed history of Washington Square in the amply illustrated It Happened on Washington Square .