Below the Grid: Downtown Villages Walk

Tompkins Square Park

The East Village's living room and its loudest soapbox. This ten-acre park has hosted labor riots, love-ins, punk shows, and the first public chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra outside India.

You're standing in a park that has been a stage for nearly every kind of New York dissent. In 1857, immigrants marched here demanding bread and work. In 1874, police clubbed thousands of workers in what became known as the Tompkins Square Riot. A century later, the Grateful Dead played the bandshell while Allen Ginsberg recited poetry on the grass.

The Hare Krishna movement traces its Western birth to an elm tree in the southern plaza, where A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada sat and chanted in 1966. Look for the Temperance Fountain near the center, a cast-iron relic from 1888 when reformers campaigned against drink.

Now watch the dog run, the skateboarders, the chess tables. The park still does what it always did: gives the neighborhood a place to breathe and argue and be.

Alamo

A one-ton steel cube mounted on a hidden pivot. Give it a push and it spins. Tony Rosenthal's 1967 sculpture marks the seam where the East Village, NoHo, and Greenwich Village meet, and it has been a meeting spot ever since.

Go ahead, give it a shove. It takes surprisingly little effort to set a ton of steel in motion. The artist Tony Rosenthal called this piece Alamo, and it was installed here in 1967 as part of a city program called Sculpture in Environment. It was only meant to stay for six months, but the neighborhood refused to let it go.

Behind you is the Cooper Union, the tuition-free college where Abraham Lincoln gave the speech that helped make him president in 1860. And beneath your feet, Astor Place was once the center of a working-class entertainment district, full of beer gardens and dime museums. The subway entrance across the square is a replica of a kiosk from the Budapest Metro, a gift from the city's Hungarian sister. Spin the cube once more, then head south on Lafayette Street toward the arch you can already see in the distance.

Washington Square Park

The marble arch, the fountain, the chess hustlers, the grand piano on wheels. Once a potter's field and a parade ground, now the undisputed heart of Greenwich Village and the front lawn of NYU.

You're looking at the Washington Square Arch, a marble version of the Arc de Triomphe built in 1892 to celebrate the centennial of George Washington's inauguration. The arch you see is actually the permanent replacement. The first one was made of wood and plaster and was so popular that the city raised money to rebuild it in stone. Under your feet, the park holds some twenty thousand bodies.

It was the city's potter's field from 1797 until 1825, a burial ground for the unknown and the poor. In the twentieth century the fountain plaza became a stage: Bob Dylan played here, Joan Baez, the Beat poets. The chess tables in the southwest corner have hosted games between hustlers and grandmasters for decades; Bobby Fischer learned to play somewhere near this spot. Walk through the arch and look north up Fifth Avenue.

That view, the start of Manhattan's most famous street, framed by the arch, is one of the best in the city.