Measuring only nine and a half feet wide, this circa-1873 stepped-gable home at 751/2 Bedford Street was at various times a carriage house, a cobbler’s shop, and part of a candy factory.
According to a 1993 New York Times article, the house sold for “less than $300,000” that year.
In 1923, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there; she’s pictured below with her husband and a friend outside the house. The windows look the same (with a protective black fence added), but the wood-frame home on the left has been replaced. Bedford Street in the 1920s sure looks a little like a hick country road.
Tags: 751/2 Bedford Street, Carriage Houses in the Village, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Narrowest House in Greenwich Village
Ephemeral New York 
January 13, 2009 at 4:21 pm |
[…] in at nine and a half feet wide, a house once lived in by Edna St. Vincent Millay is the narrowest house in Greenwich Village. [Ephemeral New […]
January 13, 2009 at 4:45 pm |
If you pick up “Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Women Writers Running Wild in the Twenties” by Marion Meade, there is a whole section devoted to this address. This is the house where Millay seduced Edmund Wilson.
January 13, 2009 at 4:56 pm |
Thanks for the info about the book. Edmund Wilson is another 1920s writer with a fascinating history in the Village. “The Princess With the Golden Hair” from Memoirs of Hecate County contains lots of detail about the Village/Union Square back in the day.
January 13, 2009 at 5:32 pm |
Thanks. Have you skimmed through Wilson’s diaries “The Twenties?” It is chock-full of Village references and people. Scott and Zelda on one page, Dorothy Parker on another.
January 13, 2009 at 5:36 pm |
No, but I’ll look for it. The 1920s is such an interesting time in Village history. Dawn Powell’s diaries are also a must-read.
January 15, 2009 at 9:06 pm |
I think the period photo showing the poet and hubby was shot in the back yard.
Note the door (and hall) being on the right, and the fact that the adjoining house on the right is of a different depth, unlike in the front shot.
I’m sure that Bedford St. in the 20s was just as well paved as now.
January 16, 2009 at 3:09 pm |
The fellow in the middle of the photo may have been my uncle,Frank Shay,her publisher.DB
August 27, 2009 at 6:02 am |
I lived in this house with my mom from around 1966-1970. My mom and her husband rented the house into the late 1970s. Although it was 9 1/2 feet wide I think it was much longer. There was a trapdoor in the kitchen with stairs leading down to the basement. I turned the basement into a my own personal psychedelic hangout in 1967 complete with flickering lights, blankets hanging on the wall, and incense.
The kitchen and dining room were on the first floor, two bedrooms and a bath on the second, and the third floor was all living room.
I think the rent was around $300 a month.
August 27, 2009 at 2:18 pm |
$300 a month is astounding. I’m picturing your basement psychedelic hangout looking something like Greg Brady’s psychedelic attic.
July 17, 2014 at 8:12 am |
[…] Bohemian, free-love advocate, and a writer of passionate, sometimes cynical lyrical poetry, Millay lived in various places in the Village beginning in 1917, most famously at 75 1/2 Bedford Street. […]
October 2, 2017 at 6:10 am |
[…] changed in 1836, when a builder put up 73 and 75 Bedford Streets. (75 and 1/2 Bedford, the former home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, has the distinction of being the city’s skinniest […]
April 11, 2022 at 5:42 am |
[…] not the skinniest house in all of Manhattan; that honor goes to this circa-1873 gabled beauty on Bedford Street, which clocks in at an itty-bitty nine and a half feet wide. (Famously, it was […]