75½ Bedford Street

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

75½ Bedford Street is a three‑story house in Manhattan’s West Village famous for being incredibly narrow. The outside width is about 9.5 feet (2.9 meters), and inside it can be as narrow as about 2 feet (0.6 meters). The building sits on a long, 80‑foot‑deep lot, with internal dimensions that vary by floor, and city records list it at about 999 square feet in all. The interior features a central spiral staircase that divides each floor into two living areas, a tiny utility closet beneath the stairs, and fireplaces on every floor. There are two bathrooms, and the galley kitchen includes a microwave built into the base of the staircase. An arched doorway opens to a shared rear garden.

The house was built in 1873, possibly earlier in Italianate style, on what used to be the carriage entrance for the neighboring property, including 77 Bedford Street, the oldest house in Greenwich Village. It was constructed for Horatio Gomez, a trustee of that estate, and it has a Dutch‑style stepped gable on the exterior.

Over the years, 75½ Bedford Street has housed several notable residents. It served as a home for actors staying at the nearby Cherry Lane Theatre, with Cary Grant and John Barrymore among its guests. The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband Eugen Boissevain lived there from 1923 to 1924; they hired Ferdinand Savignano to add a skylight, make the top floor a studio for Millay, and give the front façade a Dutch-inspired touch. Cartoonist William Steig and anthropologist Margaret Mead also lived there. The house inspired Ann McGovern’s children’s book Mr Skinner’s Skinny House.

In 2013, George Gund IV purchased the property for about $3.25 million. The house is part of the Greenwich Village Historic District but is not itself listed as an individual New York City Landmark.

Although popularly called the narrowest house in New York, some city tax records show other very small buildings in different parts of the city.