Greenwich Village has been the home of many women, whose actions have changed the fabric of New York and America.

As every New Yorker who spots a celebrity at Duane Reade knows, thousands of art and pop culture luminaries have called the city home. From Whitman to Warhol, this is a quick guide to the places notable New Yorkers have lived and worked.

While Manhattan's streets were largely laid out with the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, this grid system was only implemented between Houston and 155th Streets. The plan left Greenwich Village with its long-established mews, alleys, and courts, many of which date to the city's early colonial period, intact. While not exclusively in the Village, most of the secret streets on this list are located there among the organically developed 18th-century street plan. While some changes have come to these streetscapes in the last century, in most cases their concealment and a healthy dose of historic preservation work have aided in their continued survival in the 21st century.

View of Patchin Place with Jefferson Market Courthouse in the background, November 24, 1937. The houses along Patchin Place were built in the late 1840s, in close proximity to Jefferson Market and, later, the Jefferson Market Courthouse and Prison. Berenice Abbott’s photograph depicts the brick buildings lining Patchin Place, a single dead-end block off of West 10th Street, in 1937. At the time, the secluded side street was known as a popular spot for literary New Yorkers. Long-term residents included e.e. cummings, and Djuna Barnes, while Marlon Brando also stayed on the block for a short time. Today, Patchin Place looks much like it did 80 years ago, with one notable exception. Rather than poets and writers, the street’s seclusion has attracted a different kind of privacy-seeking professionals: therapists.

Cultural Medallions are porcelainized enamel plaques affixed to the exterior of buildings, in order to commemorate an individual (or occurrence) that has made a significant contribution to New York City’s rich cultural heritage. These are the Cultural Medallions in Manhattan. See more from the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center here.

Patchin Place ca. 1936 The poet e. e. cummings lived at No. 4 Patchin Place for four decades, until his death in 1962. Patchin Place was a cul-de-sac of small workingmen’s houses off of West 10th Street between Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, across from the Jefferson Market Courthouse (now the Jefferson Market Library). It was during his years on Patchin Place that cummings was his most prolific. While clearly the Village was a source of inspiration for cummings, as it was for so many in those years of the early and mid-20th century, the Village actually only makes very few explicit appearances in his poetry. John Reed, the radical journalist and author of Ten Days That Shook the World, also lived at Patchin Place in the years just before he died in 1920 (and he was a friend and frequent attendee of Mabel Dodge’s salon, see more below!).

Throughout the years many artists have called Greenwich Village home. This collection highlights the writers of Greenwich Village.