57 ½ Bedford Street
Architect: Unknown
Year built: mid-1800’s

NEW YORK—Think thin and carry a big checkbook. New York’s skinniest house is on the market again; and the 9.5-foot-wide townhouse in the West Village is listed with Town Residential realtors at an asking price of $4.3 million.

The 990-square-foot, three-story house has a history as unique as it’s slim stature. Variously listed by different sources as being built in 1836, 1850, and 1873, the safest bet may be to say that it was built in the mid-1800s. A New York Times article from 1996 written by Christopher Gray states that the address 57 ½ Bedford St. was referred to in a tax document dated 1873, but Gray asserts that since no changes were mentioned the building probably existed before that date.

The townhouse has been home to several artists and writers. Actors John Barrymore and Cary Grant are said to have stayed there. Anthropologist Margaret Mead lived there with her sister and brother-in-law, the cartoonist and author William Steig. Writer Ann McGovern, inspired by the building’s unusual shape, penned “Mr. Skinner’s Skinny House,” after a brief stay. Perhaps the building’s most famous inhabitant, and the only one recognized by a plaque on the front of the building, was poet Edna St. Millay, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems.” St. Millay lived there in the mid-1920s.

The home has three bedrooms and two baths and the interior spaces are shown on a ground plan as being 8-foot-4-inches wide on the second and third floors, and the ground floor and basement are only 7-foot-6-inches wide. It is about 35 feet deep and has a garden in the rear that measures 9 feet wide by 42 feet deep that is part of a shared space with neighboring buildings. All three floors have fireplaces and the home has recently been entirely renovated. It last sold in January 2010 for $2.1 million.

If you are thinking of making an offer be prepared to live like a movie star, at least in terms of being swarmed by paparazzi and curious onlookers. In the few minutes the Epoch Times was on Bedford Street scores of tourists came by with guide books in hand, pointing, staring, and taking many photos.

New York City Structures: The Narrowest House

New York City Structures: Belvedere Castle

New York City Structures, Hamilton Grange

New York City Structures, Ottendorfer Library

New York City Structures, Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum