In the Pandemic Present, a Literary Tour of Greenwich Villageâs Past
From the quirky brownstones to the birth of queer New York and the tangle of streets themselves, everything about this neighborhood has defied the grid from the beginning.
The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband, Eugen Jan Boissevain, in front of their home at 75½ Bedford Street, which has been cited as the ânarrowest house in New York,â c. 1923.Credit.Library of Congress
Published March 17, 2021Updated March 18, 2021
When my boyfriend and I moved from our pocket-size Greenwich Village apartment last October, our cat, Evita Carol, made a sound Iâll never forget. After all of the furniture and four years of ephemera had been slammed into a truck parked illegally on the corner of Bleecker and Thompson, I let her out â and she howled. It was a guttural cry, a mew-tinged eulogy for a place she once recognized and which now lay empty before her, gutted.