Along the river shore above Lispenard's swam]), or meadow, and reaching inland nearly to the old Boston and Albany Road (that is, the Bowery) was that delightful suburl) known as Greenwich Village. Along the shore northward from old Vauxhall and Harrison's Brewery the old maps show the " Road to Greenwich." Its first name was Sa]3okanican, which the Dutch changed to the Bossen Bouwerie. Where White Star and Cunard steamers now come to their wharves, the pleasant grassy slopes reached down to the water's edge, and nothing more ])retentious than one of the "yachts" of some up-river |)otentate ever sent a ripple to that strand. Through the Bouwerie ran the Manetta brook, that famous water that, in spite of burying and cul verting and filling in, has been the dread of architects and builders down to the present day. Washington Square was within the village boundaries when Washington Square was nothing but a marsh where the crack of a duck-gun might occasionally have been heard.

"Admiral" Peter Warren (who was only Captain Warren at that time) built a house somewhere about 1744 in Greenwich. That house afterwards became, and was for many years, the residence of Abraham Van Ness, Esq. Around it clustered other fine houses: there came the Bayards and the de Lanceys and James

62 The Hudson River

Jauncev, and there the fashionables of their time were accustomed to turn for a drive into the country. Thomas A. Janvier, who made a dehghtful study of old Greenwich Village, says of its inhabitants: