OUR SQUARE AND THE PEOPLE IN IT By Samuel Hopkins Adams Illustrated by Scott Williams Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company 1917 _WALLED in by slums stands Our Square, a valiant green space, far on the flank of the Great City. Ours is an inglorious little world Sociologists have-not yet remarked and classified us. The Washington Square romancers who bold sentimental revel at the foot of Fifth Avenue reck nothing of their sister park, many blocks to the east. But we are patient of our obscurity. Close-knit, keeping our own counsel, jealous of our own concerns, and not without our own pride of place, we live our quiet lives, a community sufficient unto itself. So far as may be for mortals under the sway of death and love and fate, we maintain ourselves with little change amid the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the surrounding metropolis. Few come into Our Square except of necessity. Few go out but under the same stem impulsion. Some of us are held by tradition, some by poverty, some by affection, and some through loyalty to what once was and is no more. Here we live, and here hope to die, “the kind hearts, the true hearts that loved the place of old.” And of all, there is no truer heart or kinder than that of the gentle, shrewd, and neighborly old dominie through whose lips I tell these tales, the real historian of the folk whom I, too, have known and loved in Our Square._ OUR SQUARE I OUR Square lies broad and green and busy, in the forgotten depths of the great city. By day it is bright with the laughter of children and shrill with the bickering of neighbors. By night the voice of the spellbinder is strident on its corners, but from the remoter benches float murmurs where the young couples sit, and sighs where the old folk relax their weariness. New York knows little of Our Square, submerged as we are in a circle of slums. Yet for us, as for more Elysian fields, the crocus springs in the happy grass, the flash and song of the birds stir our trees, and Romance fans us with the wind of its imperishable wing.