There were already people hanging out on Weehawken Street when Henry Hudson arrived in the neighborhood in 1609, but who knows how much they had in common with the gay bears who gather there on Pride Day, or the rowdies to whom the message on a wall plaque—"Help Keep the Beauty of It . . . Do not urinate or litter"—is presumably directed. This very ancient street, just off Christopher a short block from the river, is considered the smallest street in Manhattan and boasts a wood-shingled house at No. 6 that is an early 18th-century survivor. Its existence gives a hint of the Village's rural past, 100 or so years before bohemians—followed by the more recent onslaught of persnickety yuppies—came to characterize the neighborhood.