Don't blink as you walk by or you'll miss it. The house at 75 1/2 Bedford Street is just nine and a half feet wide. Packed inside are three bedrooms, two full baths, and four wood-burning fireplaces. It can be yours for $5 million. According to the real estate listing, the West Village home is so "unique" that it has "its own Wikipedia page" from which we will quote here:
According to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the archives of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the house was constructed in 1873 during a smallpox epidemic, for Horatio Gomez, trustee of the Hettie Hendricks-Gomez Estate, on what was the former carriage entranceway for the adjacent property, which includes the adjacent 1799 house at 77 Bedford Street, built by Joshua Isaacs, the oldest house in Greenwich Village. However, the house may have been constructed earlier, as the style that appears in a 1922 photograph at the New-York Historical Society is typical of the 1850s Italianate architecture common in the area at the time.
In 1923, the house was leased by a consortium of artists who used it for actors working at the nearby Cherry Lane Theater. Cary Grant and John Barrymore stayed at the house while performing at the Cherry Lane during this time. Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and her new husband, coffee importer Eugen Jan Boissevain, lived in the house from 1923 to 1924. They hired Ferdinand Savignano to renovate the house. He added a skylight, transformed the top floor into a studio for Millay and added a Dutch-inspired front gabled façade for her husband.
Later occupants included cartoonist William Steig and his sister-in-law, anthropologist Margaret Mead. The house was the inspiration the children's book Mr Skinner's Skinny House, written by former resident Ann McGovern and illustrated by Mort Gerberg.
