Greenwich Village: the arch and the crooked streets
The chess players, the streets where the grid gives up, and the bar that started it all. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Washington Square Arch
Stand under it and look north up Fifth Avenue — the arch was built to frame exactly that. Then turn round; the fountain and the park are the whole point.

2. The fountain
The Village's living room. Chess hustlers on the southwest benches, a busker or three by the basin, NYU students cutting through. Sit on the rim for ten minutes; the show comes to you.

3. Bedford and Grove
Where the grid breaks. The streets bend, change name, cross each other at impossible angles. 90 Bedford is the Friends building if you must; the genuinely odd corner is Grove and Bedford, with Twin Peaks' fake-Tudor gable.

4. Commerce Street
Two blocks long, ends in a dogleg, holds the Cherry Lane Theatre — the city's oldest continuously running off-Broadway house. You can walk the whole street in three minutes and it's worth slowing all of them.

5. Christopher Park & the Stonewall Inn
The small triangle park faces the Stonewall Inn across the street — where the 1969 uprising began, now a National Monument. Read the markers, stand a while. George Segal's white sculpted figures sit on the benches with you.

6. Village Vanguard
The red awning on a Seventh Avenue South corner, basement door, the jazz room since 1935 — Coltrane and Evans recorded live down those stairs. Worth a set if you're back after dark; worth knowing it's there now.

Greenwich Village: the arch and the crooked streets