This most unusual home is also known as Cobble Court; before the house was moved to Charles Street in 1967, it was located at 1335 York Avenue on the Upper East Side. From 1942 until her death in 1952, Margaret Wise Brown – the best-selling children’s book author of The Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon, and other stories – used this “Cobble Court” house (since enlarged) as her writing studio. On March 5, 1967, facing demolition, the Cobble Court house was moved to its present-day lot at 121 Charles Street in Greenwich Village, and, in 2000, was expanded in size. At the time, it was located at 1335 York Avenue, near the Upper East Side residence that she shared with her partner, socialite Blanche Oelrichs, who went by her pen name, Michael Strange. Brown is credited with popularizing the picture book and helping to reimagine children’s literature by centering stories on a child’s reality rather than on fairy tales.

Edna St. Vincent Millay lived in “the narrowest house in the Village,” 75 1/2 Bedford Street. The GVHD designation report writes of Millay: “Gentle poet, her loving nature made itself felt to her generation, enriching their lives through its beauty.” Her house, a three-story building with an unusual stepped gable, is reminiscent of the Dutch tradition. Edna St. Vincent Millay lived here from 1923 to 1924. According to the Millay Society, “In the immediate post-World War I era, Millay emerged as a major figure in the cultural life of Greenwich Village, when the Village served as an incubator of every important American literary, artistic, and political movement of the period. As part of this milieu, Millay’s work and life came to represent the modern, liberated woman of the Jazz age, free of the restrictions of the past…”

From c. 1960 to 2010, absurdist playwright H.M. “Harry” Koutoukas lived in this apartment building. While here, he contributed to the burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway theater movement in the 1960s through his award-winning work at downtown venues, such as the Caffe Cino and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. According to the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, “As with other Off-Off-Broadway pioneers who rejected the theater establishment, Koutoukas fully embraced the creative and experimental opportunities that the relaxed attitudes, intimate spaces, and limited finances of unconventional downtown venues nurtured. He wrote at least 52 plays over his career, based on a compilation by Cino historian Magie Dominic, and took part in more than 150 productions.”

One of the early literary celebrities who lived in The Village was Thomas Paine (1737-1809), author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man. Common Sense (1776) was an early call for the independence of the American colonies from Britain. Widely distributed with more than 500,000 copies sold, the pamphlet has a big influence on the Declaration of Independence. Another sign of the pamphlet’s great influence was the hugely negative Loyalist reaction to Common Sense. The Rights of Man (1791), was a reply to Burke’s critique of the French Revolution. Although he was a best-selling author in the 1770s, by the time of his death in the early 19th century Paine was largely forgotten in America. He was often referred to as “The Infidel” and was not understood by many of the petty bourgeois who surrounded him. Paine first lived in Greenwich Village in a house at 309 Bleecker Street, which was demolished in 1930.

Thomas Paine later moved into a house at 59 Grove Street, where he died on June 8, 1809. That house also no longer stands, but a plaque on the existing house marks Paine’s residence there, as does the century-old bar located in the building, known as ‘Marie’s Crisis,’ partly in tribute to Paine.

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).

Trailblazing playwright, author, and activist Lorraine Hansberry’s first apartment in the Village was at 337 Bleecker Street (above what is now a hat shop), where she lived from 1953 to 1960.

With the success of her award-winning Broadway play, Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry bought and moved to 112 Waverly Place. GVSHP unveiled a historic plaque at 112 Waverly Place in celebration of Hansberry’s time there (you can learn more about our historic plaque program here). According to the LGBT Historic Sites Project, “Hansberry lived parallel lives: one as the celebrated playwright of A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by a black woman to appear on Broadway, and the other, as a woman who privately explored her homosexuality through her writing, relationships, and social circle.”

Ann Charlotte Lynch (Botta) was an American poet, writer, teacher, and socialite whose home was the central gathering place of the literary elite of her era. Arriving in the Village in 1845, Ann took up residence at No. 116 Waverly Place, and established one of those notable literary salons which brought together many writers including Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, R. H. Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor. Another notable salon which attracted many Village writers was that of the talented but retiring magazine editor, Evert Augustus Duyckinck, at No. 20 Clinton Place (just outside the historic district). Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century magazine was another host who gathered about him many of the foremost literary and artistic figures of the day. He lived at No. 13 East Eighth Street in the 1880s, in a house which is no longer standing.

Henry Jarvis Raymond, founder and first editor of the New York Times and first editor of Harper’s Magazine, lived at No. 12 from 1860 to 1867. A leading Whig and Republican, he served New York as Speaker of the State Assembly, then as Lieutenant Governor, and finally as Congressman (1865- 67), at which time he was National Chairman of the Republican Party. Raymond “had occasion more than once to display not only moral but physical courage in defense of his principles,” wrote Elmer Davis, in History of The New York Times. “As a reporter and editorial writer he was remarkably gifted; his writing was rapid, his style clear; a rare virtue in those times, his copy was legible.”

Mark Twain also lived in The Village in the so-called “Mark Twain House” at 21 Fifth Avenue. A prolific writer who often chose the American scene as his theme, he was equally renowned as a raconteur and public speaker and was constantly in demand as an outstanding leader in the literary world. Twain moved to the Village in 1900 and spent the rest of his life as a New Yorker. Twain – the pseudonym used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens — acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Mabel Dodge was known internationally as the “New Woman,” a liberated radical whose wealth enabled her to be a patron of artists, writers, philosophers, and reformers who defined the avant-garde. During her time in Europe, Mabel created a new Renaissance salon to entertain the leading cultural elite. Among her guests were Gertrude and Leo Stein, Alice B. Toklas, André Gide, James Joyce, painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, Pablo Picasso, Arthur Rubinstein, and American art historian Bernard Berenson. In 1912, Mabel moved to New York City and created a salon at 23 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village for “movers and shakers” who challenged bourgeois morals and inextricably altered life in America. Among the many cultural change agents who gathered there were writer/reporter Walter Lippmann, Harlem Renaissance writer/photographer Carl Van Vechten, and muck-racking journalist Lincoln Steffens.

In 1883 the Lazarus family moved to 18 West 10th Street, a beautiful Italianate-style home (pictured above) which is featured on GVSHP’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Map. It was in 1883 that Lazarus was asked to write a poem about the Statue of Liberty. “The New Colossus” made Lazarus famous around the world with her lines “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Lazarus, who’s been called a reclusive spinster, was a lifelong Villager, descended from some of the first Jewish Portuguese immigrants to the New World. She began writing poetry when she was 11 years old, and as an adult she was broadly published, writing volumes of poetry and translations, and joining the world of writers, corresponding regularly with poets and writers of the time including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James (whose home on Washington Place was just east of the Greenwich Village Historic District).

John “Jack” Silas Reed was an American journalist, poet and communist activist at the beginning of the 20th century whose writing about revolutionary events and radical causes made him a very polarizing figure in this country and abroad. He is probably best known as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, his account of the Bolshevik Revolution which he reportedly wrote from his home at 1 Patchin Place. Reed was born on October 22, 1887 to a wealthy family in Portland, Oregon. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910 where he was the editor of the University’s monthly magazine, he took on a number of journalism assignments and moved to bohemian Greenwich Village to be among other writers, intellectuals and artists. His first home here was at 42 Washington Square and from there he explored the surrounding eclectic community of artists, immigrants and political and social activists. Based on this experience, he wrote his poem ‘The Day in Bohemia” in 1912. Here is an excerpt: Twixt Broadway and Sixth Avenue, And West perhaps a block or two,– From Third Street up, and Ninth Street down, Between Fifth Avenue and the Town,– Policeman walk as free as air, With nothing on their minds but hair, And life is very, very fair In Washington Square. Bohemia! Where dwell the Sacred Nine, Who landed, steerage from the White Star Line,– (For, when the Sacred Springs dried up in Italy They packed their duds and emigrated prettily. And all the Ladies, donning virile jeans, Became the Editors of Magazines.) Among his circle were such notorious figures as Mabel Dodge, Max Eastman, Margaret Sanger, Frances Perkins, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. His involvement in activism started with his (as well as other Villagers’) role in advocating for striking silk workers in Patterson, New Jersey in 1913. In 1914 Reed was sent to cover the Mexican Revolution; for four months, he traveled alongside Pancho Villa and his guerilla peasants, sending reports back home which contradicted the prevailing American reports which portrayed the Mexican revolutionary as a villain. Max Eastman’s Marxist magazine The Masses sent Reed to Russia during that country’s Bolshevik Revolution. He arrived in Petrograd in October of 1917 with his wife Louise Bryant, also a journalist, as the Bolsheviks seized power. Reed was a supporter of the new socialist government that took over Russia and he wrote extensive notes chronicling the revolution which became the basis of his book Ten Days that Shook the World. Bryant also wrote a book based on her experience in Russia, Six Red Months in Russia. By 1919 Reed, along with activist Benjamin Gitlow, led a portion of the Socialist Party’s left wing to form the Communist Labor Party, one of the two early communist organizations in this nation which would lead to the founding of the Communist Party of the USA. He also served as a contributing editor of its initial journal, The Revolutionary Age and then became editor of The Communist (today, known as Political Affairs). On another trip to Russia where he was received as a hero, he developed typhus and died at the age of 33 in 1920. He is one of three Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

While she resided at 40 West 9th Street from 1901 until 1908, she wrote a collection of corrosive articles for McClure’s magazine that later became “The History of The Standard Oil Company.” The book was to become the catalyst that hastened the breakup of the corporate monopoly. Ida Tarbell grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. The daughter of a small oil producer, she was forever changed at the age of 14 when she witnessed the Cleveland Massacre, where dozens of small oil producers in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, including her father, were faced with a “Sophie’s Choice:” sell their businesses to the shrewd, 32 year-old John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his newly incorporated Standard Oil Company, or attempt to compete and face ruin. Rockefeller proceeded to purchase 85 percent of the city’s oil refineries. Tarbell’s father refused to sell which left the family business struggling to compete. Almost 30 years later, Tarbell would redefine investigative journalism with the 19-part series in McClure’s, noted as a masterpiece of investigative writing, that brought down one of history’s most infamous robber barons and effectively broke up Standard Oil’s monopoly. Tarbell unearthed damaging internal documents, supported by interviews with employees, lawyers and—with the help of Mark Twain—candid conversations with Standard Oil’s most powerful senior executive at the time, Henry H. Rogers, which brought the company to its knees. She became one of the most influential muckrakers of the Gilded Age, helping to usher in that age of political, economic, and industrial reform known as the Progressive Era. “They had never played fair,” Tarbell wrote of Standard Oil, “and that ruined their greatness for me.” Tarbell later moved to The Hotel Griffou at 19 West 9th Street where she lived from 1909 until 1919. She is also closely associated with the 1848 Greek Revival townhouse on East Tenth Street that was owned and occupied since 1923 by the Pen and Brush Club. Under the presidency of accomplished writer and suffragist Grace Seton, the Pen and Brush became – eight years before women were granted the right to vote – an established legal corporation: The Pen and Brush, Inc. Its founding mission was to offer opportunities for women in the arts at a time when women were excluded from membership in male-only arts club. The organization continued to flourish under the 30-year presidency of Ida Tarbell. Members have included Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Marianne Moore, Margaret Widdemer, and Pearl S. Buck, who also received the Nobel Prize in Literature; and renowned visual artists Isabel Whitney, Malvina Hoffman, Clara Sipprell, and Jessie Tarbox Beals. The Pen and Brush Club sold the building at 16 East 10th several years ago. The building was renovated and subsequently resold for a record sum. Tarbell herself bought a modest house in Easton, Connecticut, in 1906, from the proceeds of her Standard Oil exposé which was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

While she resided at 40 West 9th Street from 1901 until 1908, she wrote a collection of corrosive articles for McClure’s magazine that later became “The History of The Standard Oil Company.” The book was to become the catalyst that hastened the breakup of the corporate monopoly. Ida Tarbell grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. The daughter of a small oil producer, she was forever changed at the age of 14 when she witnessed the Cleveland Massacre, where dozens of small oil producers in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, including her father, were faced with a “Sophie’s Choice:” sell their businesses to the shrewd, 32 year-old John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his newly incorporated Standard Oil Company, or attempt to compete and face ruin. Rockefeller proceeded to purchase 85 percent of the city’s oil refineries. Tarbell’s father refused to sell which left the family business struggling to compete. Almost 30 years later, Tarbell would redefine investigative journalism with the 19-part series in McClure’s, noted as a masterpiece of investigative writing, that brought down one of history’s most infamous robber barons and effectively broke up Standard Oil’s monopoly. Tarbell unearthed damaging internal documents, supported by interviews with employees, lawyers and—with the help of Mark Twain—candid conversations with Standard Oil’s most powerful senior executive at the time, Henry H. Rogers, which brought the company to its knees. She became one of the most influential muckrakers of the Gilded Age, helping to usher in that age of political, economic, and industrial reform known as the Progressive Era. “They had never played fair,” Tarbell wrote of Standard Oil, “and that ruined their greatness for me.” Tarbell later moved to The Hotel Griffou at 19 West 9th Street where she lived from 1909 until 1919. She is also closely associated with the 1848 Greek Revival townhouse on East Tenth Street that was owned and occupied since 1923 by the Pen and Brush Club. Under the presidency of accomplished writer and suffragist Grace Seton, the Pen and Brush became – eight years before women were granted the right to vote – an established legal corporation: The Pen and Brush, Inc. Its founding mission was to offer opportunities for women in the arts at a time when women were excluded from membership in male-only arts club. The organization continued to flourish under the 30-year presidency of Ida Tarbell. Members have included Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Marianne Moore, Margaret Widdemer, and Pearl S. Buck, who also received the Nobel Prize in Literature; and renowned visual artists Isabel Whitney, Malvina Hoffman, Clara Sipprell, and Jessie Tarbox Beals. The Pen and Brush Club sold the building at 16 East 10th several years ago. The building was renovated and subsequently resold for a record sum. Tarbell herself bought a modest house in Easton, Connecticut, in 1906, from the proceeds of her Standard Oil exposé which was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

The French-born novelist, short-story writer, and diarist Anaïs Nin moved to the top floor skylight studio at 215 West 13th Street with her husband Hugh Guiler in September 1940. She described the room in her diary: “Five flights up. A very large, high-ceilinged room, half of the ceiling an inclined skylight, the whole length of it, twelve windows in all. A small kitchen, with barely enough room for stove and icebox. A small bathroom. A door opening on a back of a factory, but one can smell the Hudson when there is a breeze.” After struggling to publish her fiction, Nin purchased a printing press, Gemor Press, at 17 East 13th Street. Here she printed her own books, which incorporated Guiler’s artwork under the name Ian Hugo.

Djuna Barnes was born in 1892. She first came to Greenwich Village in 1915, becoming part of the growing ‘bohemian’ community. Barnes shared an apartment on Greenwich Avenue with Berenice Abbott, Kenneth Burke, and Malcom Cowley. She was involved with the Provincetown Players, was a member of the radical feminist Heterodoxy Club, and was openly bisexual, having many affairs with both men and women. She left the Village in 1921, for Paris. There, she lived with her lover, Thelma Wood, was part of Natalie Barney’s inner circle, developed her close relationship with Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and met James Joyce. In 1936, she published Nightwood, now her most famous work. Although it was well-reviewed, it did not sell, and Barnes made almost no financial profit from it. She began relying upon her friends for financial assistance, and continued to drink heavily. After a suicide attempt in 1939 and a brief stint in Arizona, she finally returned to New York, and the Village. She moved into 5 Patchin Place in 1941, where she wrote ‘The Antiphon,’ which was only performed for the first time in 1962, in Stockholm. She became a recluse, living out the last forty-two years of her life at Patchin Place. E. E. Cummings, who lived at 4 Patchin Place, was known to check up on her by shouting through his window: ‘Are you still alive, Djuna?’ She died in 1982, the last surviving English-language modernist.

Mine Okubo was Japanese-American artist born in Riverside, California, in 1912. She is best known for her 1946 book Citizen 13660, in which she recounts her experience in a Japanese-American internment camp, which was one of the first widely-circulated personal accounts of the repression and indignities faced by over 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, and is considered to this day one of the most affecting pieces about that chapter in American history. Okubo received her Master's of Fine Arts from UC Berkeley in 1938 and spent two years traveling in France and Italy developing her skills as an artist. The outbreak of war in Europe forced her return to the United States and she began working for the Works Progress Administration's art programs in San Francisco. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 called for the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living on the west coast. Mine and her brother, Toku, were relocated to the internment camp Tanforan, which had been created as a "temporary assembly center" on a horse racing track in San Bruno, California. They were later relocated to the Topaz Camp in Utah, where they lived in harsh conditions with about nine thousand other Japanese-Americans. Okubo documented her experience at the camp in her sketchbook, recording images of the humiliation and everyday struggle of internment. In time, Fortune magazine learned of her talent and offered her assignments. When the War Relocation Authority began allowing people to leave the camps and relocate in areas away from the Pacific Coast, Mine took the opportunity to move to New York City, where Fortune was located. Upon her arrival, she moved to 17 E 9th Street. It was here that she completed her work on Citizen 13660, named for the number assigned to her family unit, containing more than two hundred pen and ink sketches. Though she eventually moved into another apartment, she lived in New York for the rest of her life, until 2001 when she died at age 88. Citizen 13660 is considered a classic of American literature and a forerunner of the graphic novel and memoir.

Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985), famed author of the children’s novels Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, lived in Greenwich Village from the mid-1920s until 1935. Better known as E.B. White, the author was born in Mount Vernon, New York as the youngest of six children. He attended Cornell University, where he was nicknamed “Andy” after the college’s president, who shared the same last name. In the mid-1920s, White moved to a two-room apartment at the third floor of the four-story row house at 112 West 13th Street. Here he lived with three friends from Cornell, where he had just received his BA: Burke Dowling Adams, Gustave Stubbs Lobrano, and Mitchell R. Galbreath. Together they paid $110 per month, which came out to $27.50 per person. The apartment included a living room, hallway, kitchenette, bathroom, and a bedroom with two sets of bunk beds. In his biography, E.B. White: A Biography by Scott Elledge, White is quoted as describing the summer of 1925 until the winter of 1926-27 as “lean and tortured,” a lonely period during which he endured “comparative unemployment,” working part time for an advertising company. Nevertheless, he considered this the “only genuinely creative period” of his life, as he had plenty of time to write and explore the city. It was around this time that White began writing for the recently founded New Yorker, at the recommendation of fiction editor Katherine Angell, who later became his wife. In an interview with the Paris Review, White remembers going to a Child’s restaurant on 14th Street, where he opened his first two or three checks from The New Yorker and felt at last that “this was it” - he had made it in some small way. The magazine, in its infancy, examined every text sent its way and made an effort to publish unknown talent. White became a regular contributor in 1927.

Katherine Angell, who had joined The New Yorker in August of 1925 in anticipation of the end of her marriage, moved to an apartment at 16 East 8th Street in the winter of 1929. She divorced her husband the following summer, and then married E.B. White in November. The newlywed couple lived at this address until 1935. In addition to writing for The New Yorker, White wrote for Harper’s Magazine, publishing poetry and prose before he began writing for children. In addition to his most famous children’s books, White wrote Here is New York in 1949, co-authored Elements of Style in 1959 with his former professor William Strunk Jr., and published Trumpet of the Swan in 1970. White received the National Medal for Literature in 1971, and two years later was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was honored with the National Medal for Literature, a special Pulitzer award, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal. White died of Alzheimer’s in 1985.