Washington Square Park

Where it sits. The park covers about 9.75 acres at the foot of Fifth Avenue, which terminates at its northern edge, and it functions as the front garden of New York University, whose buildings ring it on three sides. Greenwich Village lies to the west, SoHo begins a few blocks south, and the whole square is closed to traffic, so the sound inside it is people rather than engines. The Washington Square Arch stands at the north gate; the fountain plaza occupies the centre; a chess and games area sits in the south-west corner; two dog runs, playgrounds and lawns fill the rest.

The story behind it. This ground was a marsh crossed by Minetta Creek before the city bought it in 1797 for use as a potter's field. Between the late 1790s and 1825 something in the region of twenty thousand people were buried here, many of them yellow fever victims interred at a safe distance from the town; the remains are still there, and excavations have turned up headstones dated as early as 1799. In 1826 the burial ground was levelled and reopened as a military parade ground, and the square around it filled with the Greek Revival houses that still line Washington Square North. A wooden and plaster arch was raised over Fifth Avenue in 1889 for the centenary of George Washington's inauguration, proved so popular that a permanent version followed, and Stanford White's Tuckahoe marble arch, 77 feet high and clearly modelled on the Arc de Triomphe, was erected in 1892; the two statues of Washington on its northern face were installed in 1918. The elm at the north-west corner, known as the Hangman's Elm and thought to be roughly three and a half centuries old, is the oldest known tree in Manhattan, though the research does not support the gallows story attached to it.

Why it matters to New York. In the 1950s Robert Moses proposed extending Fifth Avenue straight through the park as part of a wider redevelopment of the blocks to the south. Shirley Hayes, a local mother of four, ran a seven-year campaign to keep cars out entirely rather than accept any of the compromise roadways offered; Jane Jacobs joined the fight and credited Hayes with the strategy in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The park was closed to traffic for a trial in 1958 and permanently in 1959, and the episode is generally treated as the moment American urbanism began to push back against highway planning. A separate confrontation in April 1961, when the parks commissioner refused permits to the Sunday folk singers at the fountain and police cleared the square with batons, made national news and became known as the beatnik riot.

On screen. The arch is one of the standard shorthand images for New York and appears in hundreds of establishing shots, but the park has also carried real scenes. When Harry Met Sally... (1989) opens with an eighteen-hour drive from Chicago that ends with the two characters parting badly at this arch. Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) is set substantially at the stone chess tables in the south-west corner, where speed-chess players still hustle for money exactly as the film shows. Larry Clark's Kids (1995) uses the fountain plaza; Boaz Yakin's Fresh (1994) returns to the chess tables; and I Am Legend (2007) empties the whole square, with Will Smith's character living at 11 Washington Square North and stalking deer through the grass. Barefoot in the Park (1967), August Rush (2007), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Gilmore Girls have all used it. Note that the fountain in older films sits centred on nothing in particular: it was shifted several metres during the 2007 to 2009 reconstruction so that it now lines up with the arch and the axis of Fifth Avenue.

Getting there and timing. West 4th Street–Washington Square is served by the A, B, C, D, E, F and M; the N, Q, R and W stop at 8th Street. The park is open until midnight and paved throughout, so it is easy to get around on wheels. Weekend afternoons in warm weather bring pianists who wheel a grand piano in, jazz trios, skateboarders and a permanent crowd around the fountain. Early morning is when the arch photographs cleanly down Fifth Avenue.

What to combine it with. Greenwich Village begins immediately west, the Grey Art Museum and NYU's Bobst Library sit on the square itself, and Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street's coffee houses and the Stonewall National Monument are all within a ten-minute walk.