Washington Square Park, the heart of Greenwich Village, hides a darker history than it looks. Washington Square was a potter's field, a public burial ground for the poor, from 1797 to 1825, and an estimated twenty thousand people are buried under your feet. Before that it was a public execution ground, and the elm tree in the northwest corner of the park is called the Hanging Elm, said to be where criminals were executed before the Revolution.
The city paved it over in 1827 and called it a park. The white marble arch at the north end was designed by Stanford White and completed in 1892 to commemorate the centennial of Washington's inauguration. In the twentieth century, the park became the living room of the Greenwich Village bohemian world: Henry James set his novel Washington Square here, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez played folk music at the fountain, and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac argued poetry on the benches.
Stand at the fountain in the middle, look north through the arch at Fifth Avenue, and you are looking up the spine of the wealthiest street in the world.