Located on 75 ½ Bedford Street, Greenwich Village is home to a very narrow townhouse. The size maybe tiny, but the history is deep, rich and vast.

With the widest parts being 8 feet 7 inches wide to the narrowest spots being only 2 feet and a total depth of 30 feet, the narrowest townhouse has housed many different types of people, both regular New Yorkers and famous New Yorkers. With three stories and a beautiful red brick facade, the townhouse fits into the historic district like a very tiny puzzle piece of a larger but quaint picture.

It’s been noted that the house was constructed in 1873, but a story in the New York Times in 1996, claims that the house was built before then. Originally built for Horatio Gomez of the Hettie Hendricks-Gomez Estate during the smallpox epidemic, the house would later be home to a cobbler, a candy factor, Italian immigrants, cartoonist William Steig and his family, John Barrymore and Carey Grant, and a Village resident who would go on to preserve the house in 1952.

However, the house’s most famous resident was the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. An openly bisexual Millay lived with her husband, renovated the house and created a studio for herself. There is a plaque on the outside dedicated the house to her and stating that she penned her Pulitzer Prize winning “The Ballad of Harp-Weaver.” This fact has been refuted however.

Millay lived in the house between 1923-1924.