Washington Square Park's eastern two-thirds was a public burial ground from 1797 to 1825, and an estimated 20,000 bodies still lie beneath its lawns and pavement.
The park functions as Greenwich Village's living room, with the fountain plaza drawing street performers and dense crowds while the chess tables along the southwest corner keep a rougher, streetwise edge.
The square is a cemetery that was never emptied. The eastern two-thirds served as a potter's field between 1797 and 1825; nineteenth-century accounts put the burials between ten and twenty-two thousand, and the working modern estimate is that more than twenty thousand people remain under the lawns and paving. The claim is not folklore: water main work in 2015 opened two nineteenth-century burial vaults beneath the park, one of them intact, with coffins still bearing name plates — remains from a church graveyard rather than the public field, which gives some sense of how crowded the ground is.
One famous story does not survive checking. The English elm in the northwest corner is called Hangman's Elm, but the tree stood on the bank of the buried Minetta Creek in what was then a private garden, not on the burial ground, and only a single public hanging at the field is documented, with witnesses disagreeing about where the gallows stood.
The square became a military parade ground in 1826, was laid out as a park in 1849 and 1850, and passed to the city's parks department in 1871. The arch came out of a temporary gesture: in 1889 the local philanthropist William Rhinelander Stewart put up a wood and plaster arch across Fifth Avenue for the centennial of Washington's inauguration, and it proved popular enough to be rebuilt in Tuckahoe marble to Stanford White's design, cornerstone laid in 1890 and dedicated in 1895. The two figures on the north piers came later: Hermon A. MacNeil's Washington as commander-in-chief and Alexander Stirling Calder's Washington as president.
What makes the park legible on foot is a fight it won. Shirley Hayes began campaigning in 1952 against Robert Moses's plan to run Fifth Avenue through the square; Jane Jacobs and much of the neighborhood joined; a trial closure followed a 1958 hearing, and by August 1959 the park was permanently shut to cars. The arch still stands at the head of an avenue that stops. The 2007 to 2009 reconstruction shifted the fountain onto the arch's axis, which is why the basin now works as an amphitheater with the arch as its backdrop.
New York, NY 10012 · Official site ↗
Washington Square Park is a 9.75-acre (3.95 ha) public park in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City. It is an icon as well as a meeting place and center for cultural activity. The park is operated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
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