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As she had in Bellows Falls, in Hoboken Hetty became a part of the local lore. Perhaps the most enduring story about Hetty in Hoboken involves the time in 1903 when she left the town in a huff after being served a summons by the town recorder for failure to pay a $2 license fee for her dog. Hetty at first claimed that Dewey was licensed in New York and she therefore assumed she did not have to pay a fee in Hoboken. Next she claimed that the dog belonged to Sylvia, who stayed with her only infrequently. The recorder was unmoved. Faced with a maximum $25 fine, Hetty grudgingly sent an acquaintance named Charles Gahagan to the local Health Department to pay the $2. Irked by the incident, Hetty packed for a trip to Chicago, vowing to find another town when she returned. “Mrs. Hetty Green has left Hoboken, and, it is rumored, for good,” the Times reported on April 4. “The experiences Mrs. Green had during the last month or so did not strike her as pleasant, and an intimate friend of hers said yesterday that she was not likely to return to Hoboken to reside.” But distance mollified Hetty’s anger, and return she did.

Three years later, as she boarded a Hoboken streetcar, she found herself short of the proper change. “I’ll pay my fare later at the office,” she told the conductor, according to the Times of January 21, 1906. “That letter carrier sitting opposite will vouch for me.” When the postman nodded, the conductor paid Hetty’s fare himself. The next day, Hetty arrived at the trolley company office with a nickel. She asked for a receipt. The conductor, George Krell, saved the nickel as a souvenir.

In their advancing years, Hetty and Edward found themselves drawn back together. Edward, well into his seventies when Hetty moved to Hoboken in the mid-1890s, was increasingly infirm. With Ned in Texas and Sylvia spending more of her time with Annie Leary in New York and Newport, Hetty turned her attentions to nursing him. Unorthodox as their marriage was, Hetty and Edward had been married for more than 30 years, and Hetty never fully severed the ties of family. Edward still spent much of his time at the Union Club in New York City, but he also from time to time occupied an apartment just above Hetty’s in Hoboken, where she would visit and read to him in the evenings after she returned from New York.

Edward Green’s final years were quiet and uneventful. William Wallace Crapo, the New Bedford lawyer, politician, and businessman who spent much of his life tangled up one way or another with Hetty, saw the two of them together in New York one evening. Crapo had come from New Bedford for a meeting of the directors of a railroad. Hetty, staying temporarily at a boardinghouse in lower Manhattan, sent word to Crapo that she needed to see him on crucial business. Crapo promised to come by at the end of his business day. When he arrived, he found Edward seated quietly with Hetty in the boardinghouse’s sitting room. As Crapo took his seat, Hetty launched into a by-now familiar diatribe against the late Edward D. Mandell, the late Dr. Gordon (Aunt Sylvia’s physician and trustee), and various other New Bedford figures (all of them friends of Crapo’s) whom she considered guilty of financial wrongs. Hetty held a bible and read underlined passages that she felt forecast divine retributions on her enemies. When Crapo realized that the “important business” he’d come for amounted to another chance for Hetty to vent, he settled in and listened patiently until she cooled down.

After a while, Crapo rose to go. Edward, sensing his chance to escape back to his club, rose also. In a few moments the two old men were heading down the steps and into the night. They walked east on Eleventh Street toward Broadway to catch their respective streetcars. As Green boarded his car, he turned to Crapo and said, “Women are queer.” It struck Crapo that they were the first words Green had spoken all night.

William called after him, with a smile, “Some women.”

Hetty and Edward spent the summer of 1900 together in Vermont,