Washington Square stands at the southern end of lower Fifth Avenue, a public square that the novel reaches at the climax of a long, meticulously observed walking survey of Manhattan. The walk begins at Union Square Park, where the narrator notes the rat-poison skull-and-crossbones warnings planted in the grass, and then descends to the truer park on its west side—the farmers' market with its banks of potted flowers, office trees, and truck farm produce from New Jersey. From there the route moves west along Fourteenth Street, past cheap clothes hanging from pipe racks on the sidewalk, big hand-crayoned sale signs in the windows, and tables with hats and gloves for the coming winter, with store ceilings strung with luggage. The traffic crawls by in big fumy buses, and the smells of pizza and sidewalk incense fill the air. Down Seventh Avenue the walk passes the double-parked paramedics of St. Vincent's, with distant sirens tolling the truth of eternal emergency, then slants eastward along Greenwich Avenue past Mexican and Indian restaurants and coffee ritual places. The street scene is dense with human variety: a long-gray-haired man with a little dog on a leash, three black kids whose voluminous jeans fall off their hips, a thin blond young woman kneeling to tend to a baby in a stroller, and a stopped-in-traffic truck driver looking down at her with his arm dangling over his cab door. Across the street rises one of the paranoidally fenced community gardens, behind which soars the towered Romanesque strawberry-red Jefferson Market Courthouse, recalling the last century when, given the great identity problem of the new world, every conceivable architecture rose from the sidewalks of New York—Romanesque, Gothic, Moorish, Belle Epoque, and Tenement. The walk then crosses arterial Sixth Avenue along miserable, wretched Eighth Street, once the glory of bohemian intellect with the best bookstore in New York, now the venue of shoes and phony antique clothing, with boomboxed hatchbacks from New Jersey zooming up to the curb. Finally, the route moves south on sedate lower Fifth to Washington Square, where the Random House Group offices are located, making the square the terminus of this urban pilgrimage and the site where the novel's architectural and social observations converge.