Bedford Street. Three buildings on this one block — and each one is more improbable than the last.
Start at seventy-five and a half Bedford. Look at it. Nine feet, six inches wide. That's the narrowest house in New York City. Built in eighteen seventy-three to fill a carriage-way gap between two larger buildings. The front door is about three feet wide. The staircase inside is the kind of staircase you have to negotiate sideways if you're carrying groceries.
Edna St. Vincent Millay lived here in nineteen twenty-three with her husband — she'd just won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and this is where she chose to live. When she first saw it, she reportedly told her husband: we'll take it. I've been trying to live narrowly all my life and never managed. Now I have no choice.
After Millay, the house passed through a series of tenants who sound like a dinner party you'd want to attend but could never host in a nine-foot-wide building. Cary Grant lived here. John Barrymore lived here. The
anthropologist Margaret Mead lived here. And — my personal favorite — the cartoonist William Steig lived here. He's the guy who created Shrek. The ogre who lived in a swamp came from a man who lived in a sliver.
Now walk down to eighty-six Bedford. There's no sign on the door. There has never been a sign on the door. That's Chumley's — or what used to be Chumley's — and the lack of signage isn't
