The Squire's Alley, Greenwich Village

A pocket of pre-Revolutionary New York surviving, by whatever means, inside a city that paved over the rest of its own past generations ago. The narrator who found it once is adamant that he was leaving no false modesty in his failure to find it again.

Whereabouts: Somewhere among the older, crookeder streets of Greenwich Village, New York — a byway old enough to predate the city's surrounding grid.

Access: Only ever found once, led there after dark by the resident the narrator later fled; his own account admits he has never been able to retrace the route since, by day or by memory.