75½ Bedford Street: The Narrowest House in New York

Why is it significant?

Notice this impossibly slender red-brick slice of a house squeezed tightly between two handsome brownstones on Bedford Street.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Notice this impossibly slender red-brick slice of a house squeezed tightly between two handsome brownstones on Bedford Street. At just nine and a half feet wide on the outside and barely eight feet four inches across on the inside, this architectural marvel is officially the narrowest townhome in New York City.

Built in eighteen seventy-three during a citywide real estate boom, the house occupies what was previously an open carriage alleyway between numbers seventy-five and seventy-seven Bedford. Former city records reveal that horsecars and delivery wagons once clattered through this narrow opening to reach cobblestone stables in the rear courtyard. Rather than waste precious street frontage, a thrifty builder threw up brick walls across the alley and created a three-story residence with a charming Dutch stepped gable.

Despite its dollhouse dimensions, this pint-sized dwelling boasts a storied bohemian history that rivaled any mansion on Fifth Avenue. In the nineteen twenties, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay moved in with her Dutch husband, living on the top floor while she ran the Cherry Lane Theatre just around the corner. She loved the home's sheer eccentricity, describing it as an enchanted ship where every piece of furniture had to be built to scale and where she could touch both walls at once with outstretched arms.

Later, in the nineteen forties, celebrated children's author Margaret Wise Brown rented the house and wrote beloved bedtime classics, including Goodnight Moon, gazing out through the tiny rear windows into the secluded courtyard garden. Other famous tenants who squeezed through its tiny doorways include screen legend Cary Grant and beat poet William S. Burroughs.

In two thousand thirteen, this sliver of Village history went on the market and sold for a staggering three-point-two-five million dollars! That works out to over three thousand dollars per square foot, proving that in Greenwich Village, character is worth more than square footage.