McCarthy Square

The 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, the far-reaching gridiron pattern which laid out the streets and avenues of Manhattan, had little immediate impact on the western part of Greenwich Village. The grid was intended to provide a system for the orderly development of land between 14th Street and Washington Heights. However the geography of the West Village had evolved in an unregulated fashion since colonial days, emerging from marshland to farmland and then from a rural suburb to a densely-settled residential, commercial, and industrial neighborhood full of crooked streets.

Not until the 1910s and 1920s were Seventh and Eighth Avenues extended south of 14th Street. As a result, a number of small irregular parcels were created, including the traffic island at Charles Street, Waverly Place, and Seventh Avenue South. This parcel was acquired as a street and developed by the Borough President of Manhattan. In 1943, by Local Law 16, the City Council named the site in memory of Private First Class Bernard Joseph McCarthy, who was born and raised in Greenwich Village. A Marine, McCarthy was killed at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in August 1942 at the age of twenty-two.  His was the first reported death of a Greenwich Village resident in the war.

McCarthy Square’s original central flagpole once stood on the grounds of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, but has since been replaced. After the original was moved to this site it was embellished with an inscribed base of Deer Isle granite on behalf of neighborhood residents and the Dr. George A. Hayunga Maritime Post #1069 of the American Legion. Both the park and the memorial flagstaff were dedicated in June of 1943 and pay tribute to a brave son of Greenwich Village.