Around Washington Square
Every spring the sidewalks, stoops, fence posts and fire escapes surrounding Washington Square blossom with eye-catching canvases, wild watercolors, still lifes and sculptures. What’s happening? It’s the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, a perennial favorite with Greenwich Village pedestrians. This colorful exhibit attracts multitudes of art lovers in search of a masterpiece hiding in a doorway or hanging on a garden gate. If you should be one of the crowd ambling among the artists and easels, you might stumble upon a Belgian-block-paved alleyway snuggled between University Place and Fifth Avenue and south of East Eight Street. Here, you’ll find thirty small stucco carriage houses that could be pictured on a postcard mailed from Majorca or Malaga. This can only be Washington Mews, a hop, skip and puddle jump from Stamford White’s Washington Arch, where Fifth Avenue comes to an elaborate end.
Awaiting the artist is an ideal motif for brush, pen, charcoal or colored pencil: two rows of tiny dwellings, inset with colored tiles, slumbering under blankets of ivy and wisteria vines. The five houses on the north side of the mews, once called Shinbone Alley, were originally built as stables in 1833 for the residents of Washington Square North, whose yards extended to the far side of what is now a private street. The remodeling of the stables into homes and studios was done in 1916 for Sailors Snug Harbor, owners of the land. It was then that the other houses with whitewashed facades were added. The dwellings on the south side with a similar architectural motif were constructed in 1939. With doors painted in welcoming shades of bottle green, burgundy red and azure blue and brightened by brass door knockers, these houses had such distinguished occupants as political pundit Walter Lippman and Grover Whalen, the city’s official greeter during the 1939 World’s Fair. The converted stable with the shell-pink door at No. 60 was once the studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the renowned sculpture who founded the art museum that bears her name.
How the exhibit got started is a story in itself. One spring day during the Depression, a penniless artist picked up his palette and began to paint a picture in one of the streets off the square. As his canvas took shape, a passerby stopped, admired the work, and offered to buy it on the spot. Afterward, the painter, his pockets lined with silver, gathered a group of artists friends together, and they decided to exhibit their work in Washington Square. Later, with the assistance of Gertrude Whitney, the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit opened in 1931, the first of its kind in the country. It is now held twice a year, in late May and early September.
Ever since Evert Duyckinck arrived from Holland in 1638 and began painting the Dutch burgomasters wearing high white collars, Manhattan has been a magnet for artists. Gilbert Charles Stuart painted his first portrait of George Washington here before moving his studio to Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1796. William Glackens of the Ashcan school and Edward Hopper captured the everyday lives of New Yorkers with bold brushstrokes in the early 1900s. This tradition is sure to continue as long as there are motifs like Washington Mews to capture the artist’s eye and imagination.
