Caroline Cook

borders, which quickly turned into fervent desire with visiting these “exotic” locales. Enchantment with antiquity was not entirely new to the nineteenth-century, though the ways in which achievements of past civilizations were glorified in previous centuries differed with changing societal characteristics. During the Italian Renaissance, people studied antiquity to both imitate and expand upon its prized techniques in art, architecture, and literature.6 Eighteenth-century interest in the past expressed a nostalgia for ‘authenticity’ in the face of industrial modernization.7 Motivated by fears of their own empires falling, nineteenth-century Europeans poured over artifacts from the ancient world to discover origins that legitimized their modern nation states and to mirror the paradoxically eternalized power of crumbling civilizations whose ruins made them appear indestructible by time.8 Nineteenth-century North Africa, home to ancient Egyptian ruins of monumental pyramids, temples, sphinxes, and other structures strewn over expansive sites, was a particularly popular site for this obsession, with the term “Egyptomania” as a fitting descriptor. These European tourists, particularly French archaeologists, scholars, and photographers, claimed to be transfixed by the structural remnants of ancient Egypt, with several recording their explorations which were then widely published at home. For example, in 1809-29, Napoleon Bonaparte directed the documentation of sites along the Nile River in a multi-volume, elaborately-illustrated publication titled Déscription de l’Égypte; in 1822, Jean-François Champollion published a highly regarded translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs by analyzing the newly-discovered Rosetta Stone; and in 1856, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo—the first museum dedicated to displaying Egyptian antiquities—was established by a French scholar named Auguste Mariette.9 These Western Europeans and others published their findings as objective records of ancient Egyptian culture, portraying them as trustworthy historical documents that accurately captured the civilization that fascinated them. Egyptomania, however, merely highlighted myths and mystery that stressed ancient elements of Egyptian civilization, obscuring the reality of a society that was not only still alive and just as politically and socially active as the cities of Western Europe, but also notably different from this presentation of its ancient history.10 The Egypt of Greene’s photographs was neither the ancient civilization that transfixed

6 Otto J. Brendel, “Borrowings from Ancient Art in Titian.” The Art Bulletin 37, no. 2 (1955): 114. https://doi. org/10.2307/3050703. 7 Andrea Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins.” Grey Room, no. 23 (2006): 9. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20442718. 8 Brian Dillon, “Ruin lust: our love affair with decaying buildings.” The Guardian, February 17th, 2012, https://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/feb/17/ruins-love-affair-decayed-buildings. 9 Ronald H. Fritze, Egyptomania: A History of Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy (London: Reaktion Books, Limited, 2016): 181. 10 Maurus Reinkowski, “Uncommunicative Communication: Competing Egyptian, Ottoman and British Imperial Ventures in 19th-Century Egypt,” Die Welt Des Islams 54, no. 3/4

nineteenth-century European tourists nor the independent nation-state of North Africa that we know today. Rather, it was part of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire and a central object of French—and towards the latter half of the century, British—imperialism (fig. 3). While the tourism that Egyptomania inspired had benefited certain circles of Egyptians economically from the nineteenth-century onward, the vast majority of individuals living in the region were Muslims who viewed the famous ruins as pagan relics from the distant past, not associated with their present culture.11 The Western European craze for Egyptian history motivated travels known as “le voyage au Levant,” such as Greene’s along the Nile River.12 This type of journey emphasized romantic visions of Eastern cultures rather than historical accuracies, perpetuating the colonialist concept of the “Orient” as a faraway land completely distinct from “the Occident.”13 Western European tourists ‘othered’ Egypt, along with the rest of Arabic-speaking and Ottoman North Africa, by capitalizing on colonialist binaries that separated ‘the East’ from ‘the West,’ as primitive versus civilized, foreign versus familiar. This ‘othering’ of Egypt additionally manifested Europeans’ fantasies for exotic locales that were more otherworldly and romantic than European society. The collective image of these cultures thereby became rooted in stereotypes rather than in accounts of actual people whose lives were as unique and complex as Europeans understood their own to be. Just as European scholars presented their empire-influenced observations of their voyages, European photographers like Greene captured images of Egyptian landscapes that fed into the idea that Egypt was simultaneously important enough to establish an empire but too weak to sustain it on its own. This idea became culturally accepted in both European and Egyptian society, resulting in beliefs that supported and perpetuated colonialist biases in both regions. This biased gaze was made possible by recent innovations that made cameras tmore portable and efficient, thus more popular in the travel industry.14 The resulting documentation of these travels embodied the values of myth and mystery in Egyptomania, producing photographs that presented ancient pyramids and Sphinxes with a distinctly European nostalgia for ancient scenes devoid of contemporary Ottoman people and daily life.15 The

(2014): 401. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24268895. 11 Fritze, Egyptomania: A History of Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy, 17. 12 Translation: journey to the Levant (Asia Minor) 13 Malcolm Daniel, “Photographers in Egypt,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/treg/hd_treg.htm. 14 Helmut Erich Robert Gernsheim et al. “Development of Stereoscopic Photography.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 3 Dec. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/technology/photography/Development-of-stereoscopic-photography. 15 “The Egypt of Gustave Flaubert: December 2, 2009 to April 4, 2010,” Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, informational webpage for the exhibition of the same name, https://www.rmo. nl/tentoonstellingen/tentoonstellingen-archief/het-egypte-van-gustaveflaubert/.

destruction of a contemporary subject’s ability to share the same time or space as that of the viewer, typified the colonialist agenda to view contemporary Arab and Ottoman North Africa as an archaic land beholden to Western Europe’s modernizing exploits. Though often praised for their aesthetic beauty and technique, Greene’s photographs succinctly present this colonialist attitude by framing his subjects according to his empire’s vision of them. Greene’s techniques for photographing symbols of Egyptian antiquity, particularly his omission of contemporary Egyptians from their own landscapes and denial of contemporaneity between subject and viewer, were not the only ways in which his photographs expressed colonialist attitudes. The very nation that he depicted was in fact much more complex and entrenched in colonialist systems than his images reveal. Egyptian society was defined by complex dichotomies rather than simple binaries: to be a member of Egyptian society was to hold multiple identities at once. From the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, the Egyptian region experienced a dramatic population change. The overall number of inhabitants increased from around 4.5 million people at the beginning of the century to about 10 million by the end, and Cairo and Alexandria developed into two highly concentrated, cosmopolitan cities even while the growing rural communities accounted for the majority of the population.16 As political and social structures became increasingly influenced by both Egyptian and Ottoman frameworks, the percentage of foreign residents living and owning land and manufacturing companies grew tremendously, primarily due to French, British, and American imperial interests.17 Concurrent with European empires’ occupation and exploitation of Egypt was the Ottoman Empire’s continued governance of this heterogenous and multiethnic region on national and local levels. The complex array of cultural influences and colonial systems that shaped Egyptian society from within and outside its borders illustrates that colonialism was an ever-present and complicated issue in Egypt at the time that Greene and his contemporaries photographed its landscapes.18 In addition to Europeans wrestling for increased control in the region, members of the Ottoman Empire themselves participated in colonialist systems that pitted ethnic groups against one another. During the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of the Egyptian population in present-day Egypt – Arabic-speaking Egyptians – was denigrated as lower-class citizens and only permitted to hold the lowest ranks in the

16 Ehud Toledano, “Social and Economic Change in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century.’” The Cambridge History of Egypt, ed. M. W. Daly, vol. 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): p. 254. 17 Toledano, “Social and Economic Change,” p. 255. 18 Maurus Reinkowski, “Uncommunicative Communication: Competing Egyptian, Ottoman and British Imperial Ventures in 19th-Century Egypt,” Die Welt Des Islams 54, no. 3/4 (2014): 401-05.

Egyptian army.19 The elite members of society who claimed origins in the central Ottoman empire adopted the identity of Egyptian national elites, and positioned themselves as a kind of Egyptian that was superior to the Arabic-speaking “Egyptian natives.”20

Gabriel Lékégian, an Armenian-Egyptian photographer contemporary with Greene, typifies the complexity of Egyptian identity and colonialist influences on photography in and of the region. Born in the predominantly Turkish part of the Ottoman Empire around the 1850s, Lékégian moved to Cairo where he became a prominent photographer of Egyptian landscapes and people throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.21 One of his photographs entitled Marché des Dattes, dating to 1880-89, illustrates his representation of nineteenth-century Egypt that is more indicative of the lives of Egyptian people but still uses a problematic colonialist lens as in Greene’s photographs (fig. 4). The image features the date palms recognized as symbols of Egyptian history by European photographers, but alongside them is a multitude of Egyptian citizens selling their wares. In contrast to Greene’s photograph Études de dattiers, Lékégian recognizes the date market—the element of human activity in the scene—in both his title and in the image itself. Besides including contemporary, everyday Egyptian life, Lékégian also captures the date palms in movement and as active components of the scene. The photograph is devoid of the stillness and vastness of Greene’s work; instead it is filled with the bustling activity of a culturally rich, cosmopolitan city. Lékégian better captures the complexity of nineteenth-century Egyptian life because his photograph joins symbols of its cultural heritage with the actual people who embodied it. Egypt is represented as a society that shares the time and space of the nineteenth-century viewer gazing upon it, enabling a necessary sense of contemporaneity. Another photograph by Lékégian that is emblematic of his livelier portrayal of Egyptian society is titled Marchands de Khan Khalil, Cairo, which dates to the 1880-90s and similarly associates a culture within Egyptian society with human activity (fig. 5). The image depicts two men selling goods in a souk or bazaaron on the glittering streets of Cairo, and they are presented as contemporary merchants inhabiting the same time and space as the viewer. Lékégian angles his scene at a diagonal viewpoint, as did Greene in his image Giza. Sphinx, but this instead allows the viewer to make eye contact with the merchant on the left, retaining the merchant’s dignity and humanity. Rather than emphasizing stillness, choosing an ancient monument to represent Egyptian history, or denying the contemporaneity of the subject and the viewer, Lékégian features textures and movement alongside a figure who is able

19 Reinkowski, “Uncommunicative Communication,” 406. 20 Reinkowski, “Uncommunicative Communication,”407. 21 “Lekegian, Gabriel,” Lusadaran: Armenian Photography Foundation, accessed December 21, 2021, http://lusadaran. org/?artists=gabriel-lekegian.

to communicate directly with his audience. This image is another illustration of how Lékégian better represented the cosmopolitan nature of everyday Egyptian society; his lens was not the same as that of Greene and his European contemporaries. As mentioned previously, however, Egyptians themselves participated in colonialist systems embedded within the various empires. Lékégian himself trained in watercolor painting with an expatriate Italian artist, named Salvatore Valeri in Constantinople in the 1880s before establishing a photography studio in Cairo towards the end of the nineteenth century that catered to European tourists and elite Ottoman residents of Cairo.22 Though Marché des Dattes and Merchants de Khan Khalil, Cairo illustrate the culturally-rich everyday Egyptian life that is absent in Greene’s photographs, Lékégian’s early artistic training as well as the studio he ran in Cairo were still designed for and sold to perpetrators of an imperialist system that desired an exoticized view of Egyptian society. Additionally, as an ArmenianEgyptian, he did not identify as Muslim or Arab, which made him a member of the Egyptian minority population. His identity, along with his European-influenced artistic training and Euro-American clients, contributed to the internalized Orientalism that underscored many of his works even when they appeared to be holistic portrayals of everyday Egyptian life. His background and techniques are rooted in a similar context of influences that define Greene’s colonialist lens. Many portraits of Lékégian’s express his internalized Orientalism and colonialist outlook. His photograph entitled Turkish woman at her house from 1880-85 (fig. 6) depicts a woman according to stereotypes associated with Asia Minor that European Egyptomania spread to European and Egyptian photographers. The Turkish woman is presented in an exotic, harem-like studio setting, denoted by the surrounding furniture and elaborate clothing.23 Her lounging position and gaze that extends to a point beyond the grasp of the viewer imbue her with the relaxed nature of a regal figure. This image is characteristic of both the manner in which elite members of Ottoman society wished to see themselves depicted and the identifying elements of Egyptian culture that attracted Euro-American tourists and scholars. That this preference for an exoticized, romanticized version of Egypt was common to elite members of the Ottoman Empire, voyaging non-Ottoman tourists, and a minority-Egyptian photographer typifies the complexity of colonialist influences in Egypt. Colonialist narratives tend to describe societies as divided into binaries: those who were colonizers and those who were colonized.24 The relationship between empire and subjects, however,

22 “Lekegian, Gabriel,” Lusadaran: Armenian Photography Foundation. 23 “Lekegian, Gabriel,” http://lusadaran.org/?artists=gabriel-lekegian. 24 Fatma Müge Göçek, “Postcoloniality, The Ottoman Past, And The Middle East Present,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 3 (2012): 552. doi:10.1017/S0020743812000529.

is rarely this simple. As can be seen in the case of nineteenth-century Egypt, non-Western European members of Ottoman society were not the passive victims crushed by imperial power as colonialist narratives prefer to describe them; they, too, participated in and perpetuated their own nuanced colonialist systems that involved active relationships between “colonized” Ottomans and leaders of the Ottoman and Western European empires there.25 Like the traditionally-heralded French photographers, Egyptian artists experimented with the camera and created intriguing landscape photographs of their nation. Though their photographs tend to represent contemporary Ottoman life without the colonialist denials of contemporaneity and erasures of cosmopolitan culture, nineteenth-century Egyptian artists still catered to the European tourists and to the Ottomanized elite who exercised authority over them.26 While Lékégian should be lauded for his inclusion of contemporary Egyptian life in his photographs, which communicated this cosmopolitan society to his contemporary nineteenth-century, especially since he was an Armenian Egyptian capturing the Ottoman culture he lived and worked in, his participation in colonialist systems must also be recognized. Thus, in order to better illustrate the complete picture of colonialism in nineteenth-century Egyptian landscape photography, the images and contexts of Egyptian photographers must be highlighted alongside those of their European counterparts that are traditionally discussed. It is imperative that the photographs of Greene and his European contemporaries be understood as expressions of a colonialist approach. Although the scholars are working to publicize this understanding, many powerful institutions continue to exhibit this and similar work without significant mention of their problematic nature. Greene’s photographs, despite their colonial implications, are often exhibited and written about as remarkable documents objectively recording the ‘true beauty’ of Egyptian history. In addition Publishing collectible volumes of his photographs, major institutions have held exhibitions and published essays celebrating his works. From August 31, 2019 to January 5, 2020, SFMoMA held an exhibition that traveled to subsequent American museums titled Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene. The website’s brief description of the exhibition states that Greene “made a number of visual choices that seem strikingly modern to us today: in both the spareness of his landscapes and the tightly cropped details and high-contrast textures of his documentation of archaeological sites in Egypt.”27

Rather than define his photographs as expressing a colonialist lens, SFMoMA advertises the exhibit by characterizing the photographs as modern, implying that they should only be considered for their beauty

25 Göçek, “Postcoloniality, The Ottoman Past, And The Middle East Present,” 554. 26 Prita Meier, African Photography, Class lecture at New York University, NY, December 15, 2021. 27 “Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene,” SFMoMA, accessed December 21, 2021, https://www. sfmoma.org/exhibition/signs-and-wonders-the-photographs-of- john-beasley-greene/.

rather than analyzed critically for their historical and political context. Viewers are invited to look but not to think or question how the photographs came to be understood as heralded modernist images. While the website does mention that his photographs “invite us to consider the complex relationship between photography, colonialism, and modernism,” this acknowledgement of his photographs’ association with colonialism is kept intentionally vague, indicating that readers should want to visit the exhibit because of Greene’s advanced technical skills and originality rather than focus on the problematic context and overtones of his work. A 2019 New York Times article similarly describes Greene’s images as evoking “a time when travel was still an adventure, ancient civilizations were largely mysterious and the grammar of photography was just being invented.”28 That this article, which was published the same year as the SFMOMA exhibition, nostalgically describes le voyage au Levant as adventurous travel and nineteenthcentury Egypt as an ancient, mysterious civilization illustrates the author’s colonialist treatment of Ottoman society, valued for its myth and mystery. Greene’s overtly problematic techniques in representing this diverse, complex civilization were celebrated as recently as 2019, which indicates that Greene is still held in high regard for seeing the world – in a manner that favors Western European biases and the erasure of non-Western cultures and life. If the recent SFMoMA exhibition and New York Times article were not enough, an essay published in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, an online resource meant to be used by all individuals as an easy-to-understand, objective history of global art and culture, additionally denies Greene’s association with colonialism in an equally disturbing way. First, the essay describes nineteenth-century Western Europeans such as Greene as “photographers [who] were principally interested in facts.” This statement ignores their cultural biases and justifies the photographers’ erasure of everyday life through the argument that the ancient monuments featured in their images, rather than the everyday life that was excluded from them, were more ‘objective’ representations of North African society. Moreover, the essay describes le voyage au Levant as “the pilgrimage of the soul” and the resulting photographs as defining “a magical moment when the ancient civilization, still half-buried like the Sphinx, began to release its age-old secrets.”29 This institution, which gains even more foot traffic than SFMoMA or the New York Times article, identifies Greene and his contemporaries as magicians uncovering a civilization that is important only for its antiquity, which again not only masks Greene’s colonialist undertones with aesthetic praise, but romanticizes and commends them for doing just that.

28 Arthur Lubow, “Much About John Beasley Greene Is in Doubt. Not His Talent,” The New York Times, December 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/arts/photography-john-beasley-greene.html. 29 Daniel, “Photographers in Egypt”

John Beasley Greene’s photographs clearly express a colonialist lens by framing the Egyptian landscape to support his Empire’s anachronistic vision of it, but powerful institutions continue to exhibit the work of Greene and his like-minded contemporaries without this necessary contextualization. While it is apparent that museums, gallery spaces, and textbooks must display the work of nineteenth-century photographers with more context regarding their association with colonialist systems, continuing to exhibit the works of these artists alone, even with added context, is conceptually limitedTherefore, photographs of contradictory gazes and understandings of the same subjects, such as those by photographers living and working in Egypt, such as Gabriel Lékégian, should be highlighted alongside these problematic photographs. As evidenced byLékégian’s work, these photographs are still fraught with their own issues and engagement with European imperial influences, but they offer a more complete picture than either body of work on its own. What is more, to assume that there are nineteenth-century photographers untouched by colonialism who captured an ‘authentic’ Egypt just furthers the colonialist binary that there are pre-colonial and post-colonial visions of Egyptian society. Instead of denouncing Lékégian as a photographer whose work expressed a colonialist lens just like Greene’s, it should be remembered that despite their conceptual inadequacies, Lékégian’s photographs still represent Egyptian society in a fuller manner than Greene’s. Lekegian’s many realistic photographs of everyday Egyptian peasant life along with his more colonialist ones demonstrate the complications of colonial Egypt that existed beyond the oversimplified colonizer/colonized binary. By exhibiting these photographs with proper contextualization, curators will let viewers understand a more complete picture of colonialist influences in North Africa. Moreover, rather than continuing to only exhibit the work of the non-Egyptian photographers who have been lauded as the fathers of modern travel photography for centuries, viewers will instead be able to engage with the work of Egyptian photographers who traveled amongst and depicted their own communities and heritage. To avoid a tendency by European and North American scholars to engage in White Saviorism in order to ‘correct’ past misdeeds, these groups need to prioritize North African voices, analysis, and contributions in future scholarship.30 Nineteenth-century Egyptians also consumed the very photographs scholars condemn as incorrectly and damagingly representing their society and culture, and contemporary Egyptians today view these photographs as expressions of their ancient history, adopting Eurocentric visions of art history. To put this issue into binaries of moralization is to distract from expanding discourse and instead continue to use the sight of colonial empires.

30 Matthew Hughey, The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014): 1-2.

In discovering new ways to exhibit Egyptian landscape photography, collaboration must exist between Egyptians and non-Egyptians. Significant attention must be paid to uplifting the names and works of Egyptian landscape photographers alongside already-familiar European names. The history of nineteenth-century Egypt must be told through landscape photography that neither erases the everyday life of Egyptians nor hides the realities of complex colonialist engagement that affect them from both outside and within their own region. Scholars and institutions must cease to publish and display texts portraying Empire-influenced photographs without mentioning their colonial overtones, and nineteenthcentury voyages to Egypt must no longer be viewed with nostalgia or as discoveries of an ancient, untouched culture and civilization. While it is perhaps impossible to reverse the harm done by European colonialist photographers of the Egyptian landscape since both Egyptians and non-Egyptians perpetuated these colonialist sentiments, these works must be recontextualized with a more nuanced understanding of Egyptian art history.

Figure 1: John Beasley Greene, Giza. Sphinx, c.1853-54, salted paper print, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 2: John Beasley Greene, Études de dattiers (Studies of Date Palms), c. 1854, salted paper print, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 3

Figure 4: Gabriel Lekegian, Marché des Dattes, c. 1880-89, albumen photograph, Lusadaran: Armenian Photography Foundation.

Figure 5: Gabriel Lekegian, Marchands de Khan Khalil, Cairo, c. 1880-90s, albumen photograph, Lusadaran: Armenian Photography Foundation.

Figure 6: Gabriel Lekegian, Turkish woman at her house, c. 1880-85, albumen photograph, Lusadaran: Armenian Photography Foundation.

Anuska Maqbool

Today, Washington Square Park feels like a space that is accessible to all who wish to use it, whether they are rich or poor, New Yorkers or not. The diversity of Washington Square’s inhabitants has been an integral part of its character and charm for decades, but a closer look at the park’s history reveals a theme of continuous struggle over the right to the park between those with power and the unempowered or poor. This struggle is evident in the community’s passionate activism and involvement in the park’s fate throughout the twentieth century. The park’s history of activism includes events such as the strong resistance against Robert Moses’ multiple proposed park redesigns in the mid-to late- 1900s, the fight to remove the traffic lanes cutting through the park in the 1950s, the community’s pushback against NYU’s expansion throughout the mid to late 1900s, the Beatnik Riot of 1961, and the community-led redesign of the 1960s. To contextualize the park’s redesign during the 1960s and the struggle over the right to the park, it is important to understand the history of the land that is now Washington Square Park and its changes in ownership and function since the early 17th century.

History of Washington Square Park Washington Square Park was once a marshy meadow, with a stream called Minetta Brook flowing diagonally through it. The land surrounding the brook was inhabited by the Lenape people, but would become a land riddled with ownership conflict once the Dutch West India Company moved its settlement to the southern tip of Manhattan island.1 In 1626, the Dutch believed that they had bought Manhattan Island from the Lenape for $24 (about $1.7 million in 2022 dollars), and intended to establish New Amsterdam as the capital of the Dutch colony. The Lenape, who had a vastly different concept of landownership from the Dutch, believed that the agreement was to share the land.2 The colony director at the time, Wouter van Twiller, established upon the land a massive farm

1 The dutch had previously established themselves on Nut Island, what is now Governer’s Island 2 Paul Otto, “The Dutch, Munsees, and the Purchase of Manhattan Island,” New York State Bar Association Journal 87, no. 1 (January 2015): pp. 10-17, https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/hist_fac/40/.

which completely covered the site of Washington Square. The farm, manned by slaves forcibly brought to the Americas, was under constant threat from the Lenape people, who took every opportunity to try to reclaim their right to the land. Due to his inability to address these threats, and being embroiled in corruption, Twiller was removed and sent back to the Netherlands. A Dutch merchant, Willem Kieft, replaced him as Director of New Netherland in 1638. As the new administrator, Kieft made the decision to free a small group of slaves and assign them plots on the outskirts of the Duth settlement, where their farms acted as a buffer against the Lenape further North; this included the land of Washington Square.3 The year 1664 saw the Dutch surrendering New Amsterdam to the English. With this surrender, slavery was once again institutionalized as the city became a port for African slave trade. It became illegal for Black people – even newly freed slaves – to own land, and by 1716, all the property granted to freed slaves, including that of Washington Square, had been passed to Dutch or English landowners.4 The fortunes and rights of black people in New York fundamentally changed here, and the struggle to own land and occupy space in the city continued well into the future, even once slavery was abolished in New York.

In 1741, Sir Peter Warren, an admiral in the British Navy, bought a large part of what is now Greenwich Village and built a summer home a few blocks northwest of present-day Washington Square. By the late 1700s, however, his daughters had sold most of his estate. Wealthy New Yorkers, attracted to the clean “rural atmosphere” of the area, started to buy up Warren’s former land and build their own summer homes.5 Despite the proliferation of vacation homes, New York City in the 18th century was not exactly a tourist destination. Unhygienic living conditions and a lack of sanitation infrastructure meant that yellow fever raged in New York in the late 1790s. So dire was this epidemic, that locating a new potter’s field, a burial ground for paupers and unknown or unclaimed people, became urgent. This led the city government to create a potter’s field in Greenwich Village at the site of Washington Square. Parallel to contemporary conflicts in the Square, such as the sustained pushback from ‘old-timers’ of the Square against folk-singers in the mid-20th century, the wealthy homeowners of the area were outraged. They protested the decision, arguing that the potter’s field “[lay] in the neighborhood of a number of Citizens who [had] at great expense erected dwellings on the adjacent lots for the health and accommodation of their families during the summer season,” and that the potter’s field would endanger their health.6 Though they resisted, the potter’s field remained. On one hand, there were those who had no money to bury their

3 Emily Kies Folpe, It Happened on Washington Square, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 4 Folpe, It Happened on Washington Square, 54. 5 Folpe, It Happened on Washington Square, 56. 6 Folpe, It Happened on Washington Square, 58.