A marble arch, a fountain full of children and buskers, chess hustlers on the south-west corner, and about 20,000 bodies buried underneath it.
What is underneath
Before it was a park it was a potter’s field — the city’s burial ground for the poor and for yellow fever victims between 1797 and 1825. Estimates put the number of bodies still under the square at around 20,000. Utility work in 2015 broke into two intact burial vaults with skeletons still stacked in them, which was widely reported and which nobody who lives around the square found particularly surprising.
There was also a hanging elm in the north-west corner, or so the story goes; the tree is real and is one of the oldest in Manhattan at about 350 years, but the executions are probably legend.
The arch
Stanford White’s marble arch went up in 1892 to mark the centenary of Washington’s inauguration, replacing a temporary plaster one that had proved unexpectedly popular. There are two statues of Washington on the north face — as a soldier and as a statesman.
In 1917 a group of artists including Marcel Duchamp climbed the internal staircase, let off balloons, and declared Greenwich Village a free and independent republic. The staircase is still there and is not open to the public.
Line up under the arch looking north and you are looking straight up Fifth Avenue, which begins here.
What actually happens there
The fountain is the centre and it is a permanent, slightly chaotic performance space — a jazz band on one side, a pianist who wheels a grand piano in, breakdancers, an evangelist, a man with a saxophone and a dog. On a warm evening it is one of the liveliest public spaces in the city and it costs nothing.
The park is effectively New York University’s quad. The buildings on three sides are almost all NYU, and the population skews young in term time.
The south-west corner has the chess tables, and the players there are good. Bobby Fischer played here as a teenager.
The dog runs — two of them, large and small — are among the best in Manhattan and are a spectator sport in their own right.
Around it
The streets west of the square are the heart of Greenwich Village — Bleecker, MacDougal, Cornelia — and Minetta Lane and Minetta Street follow the course of a buried stream, which is why they bend.
Bleecker Street south of the park was the folk circuit in the early 1960s; the Café Wha? on MacDougal is where Dylan played his first New York set.
More Parks & Green Space
Central Park
Not a surviving piece of wilderness but a landscape built from nothing over sixteen years, including the streams, the hills and the woods. Free, and larger than you think.
The High Line
A freight viaduct that was going to be demolished, replanted as a mile-and-a-half elevated park thirty feet above the West Side. Free, and busier than you expect.
Bryant Park
Nine acres of lawn behind the Public Library that were a no-go area in the 1980s and are now the most heavily used park per square foot in the city. Free chairs, free events, free wifi.