Alley public, although other commentators feel that the lack of alleys is a benefit to the quality of life of the city. Two notable alleys in the Greenwich Village neighborhood in Manhattan are MacDougal Alley and Washington Mews. The latter is a blind alley or "cul-de-sac". Greenwich Village also has a number of private alleys that lead to back houses, which can only be accessed by residents, including Grove Court, Patchin Place and Milligan Place, blind alleys. Patchin Place is notable for the writers who lived there. Shubert Alley is a long pedestrian alley at the heart of the Broadway theater
The blind leading the blind appears in Horace: "" ("the blind leader of the blind"). Horace was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (27 BCE – 14 CE) The saying appears several times in the Bible with similar stories appearing in the gospels of Matthew, Luke and Thomas, possibly via the Q source. Sextus Empiricus (160 – 210CE) compares ignorant teachers and blind guides in Outlines of Scepticism: The phrase appears in Adagia, an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. The first edition, titled "Collectanea Adagiorum", was published in Paris