This Sunday marks the 164th birthday of arguably the greatest novelist from New York City, or America for that matter. Henry James was born in 1843 in a house no longer standing on the northeast corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. Everyone associates James with Washington Square, but he lived all of about six months in the neighborhood before his restless father moved the family to Europe. When the Jameses returned to the city in 1848, they lived on 14th Street, near Union Square.

James’s novel “Washington Square” came out in 1881. His maternal grandmother had lived on Washington Square North, where James places the home of the novel’s protagonists, Dr. and Catherine Sloper. The grandmother’s house was among those razed for the 2 Fifth Ave. apartment building in the 1950s.

James set “Washington Square” largely in the year of his birth, 1843. The houses along the north side of the square, two rows on either side of Fifth Avenue, were relatively new at the time. James describes them in the novel:

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbors, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honorable dwellings.

Stanford White’s triumphal arch wasn’t there when the novel takes place. James first saw it in 1904 after he was long expatriated, a Londoner returning to New York to write his book “The American Scene.” The arch — which bears some very fine reliefs by Frederick MacMonnies — failed to impress James, who called it “the lamentable little Arch of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington Square — lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unaffiliated state … this melancholy monument.”

During that visit, James slept in the home of one of his favorite people, Mary Cadwalader Rawle, the Philadelphia girl who married Freddy Jones, Edith Wharton’s older brother. James knew Minnie Jones, as Mary was known, before he knew Wharton. Minnie lived at 21 E. 11th St., just east of Fifth Avenue, in a fine Greek Revival row house that still stands. The plaque on its façade announces the house as the birthplace of the great landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand, née Jones, Minnie and Freddy’s only child. By James’s visit, Freddy and Minnie were divorced. (Wharton remained closer to Minnie than to her brother.) James stayed in the house again, in 1911, on his final visit to America. And, in 1923, Edith Wharton stayed there, on her final visit to America.

That’s material for several plaques.

fmorrone@nysun.com