On a quiet West Village corner where Bedford Street meets Commerce, a three-story brick sliver of a building has spent more than 150 years proving that scarcity, in New York real estate, is its own form of currency. The house at 75½ Bedford Street measures nine feet six inches across at its widest exterior point, narrowing to roughly two feet at its tightest interior pinch. It is routinely described as the narrowest house in the city, and the title has done more for its value than any renovation could.
The structure reads less like a residence than an accident of 19th-century land economics. Its footprint is the leftover space of a carriage path, and everything notable about it since has flowed from that constraint rather than in spite of it.
A House Built in the Width of a Carriage Path
According to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, the house went up in 1873 during a smallpox epidemic, built for Horatio Gomez, a trustee of the Hettie Hendricks-Gomez Estate. The lot it occupies was never meant to hold a home. It was the carriage entranceway running between 75 and 77 Bedford Street, the latter being the 1799 Isaacs-Hendricks House, the oldest surviving house in Greenwich Village.
Squeezing a dwelling into that gap produced the dimensions that now draw tourists. Inside, the widest measurement is eight feet seven inches, and the floor plan tapers to about two feet at its narrowest. The building runs roughly 30 feet deep and totals close to 1,000 square feet across its three floors. A stepped Dutch gable roof and industrial casement windows, both added during a 1920s renovation, give the facade the storybook silhouette that walking-tour guides point to today.
The house sits within the Greenwich Village Historic District, which the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated in 1969. That protection has helped freeze the block in a state that lets the narrow house keep its theatrical effect, hemmed in by neighbors that have changed little around it.
From Cobbler’s Bench to Literary Address
Before it became a landmark, 75½ Bedford did ordinary work. It opened as a cobbler’s shop and later operated as a candy factory, with candy maker Martha Banta listed as a resident in 1880. A shipper lived there in the 1890s, and by the early 1920s the surrounding blocks had filled with working-class Italian families, including an immigrant vineyard cooper and his household.
The building’s cultural turn arrived with the Village’s reinvention as an artists’ enclave. Around 1923, a group of performers tied to the nearby Cherry Lane Theatre leased the cluster of buildings at 73 through 77 Bedford and carved them into apartments. The narrow house picked up its lasting association in that period, when poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there with her husband, lending the address its enduring nickname, the Millay House.
The Millay House Nickname
Millay’s residency is the detail every listing leads with, though the connection is more atmospheric than literal. Her familiar lines about a candle burning at both ends were written before she moved to Bedford Street, not within its slim walls. The association stuck anyway, and later tenants deepened the building’s literary reputation, among them anthropologist Margaret Mead, cartoonist William Steig, and children’s author Ann McGovern. Popular accounts also place screen actors at the address during its theater-district years, claims the building’s lore repeats more readily than the record confirms.
What Scarcity Sells for in the West Village
The narrow house functions as a clean case study in how the West Village converts limitation into market premium. A home that would be unbuildable under most modern logic, too thin for conventional layouts, has changed hands repeatedly at prices its square footage alone could never justify.
The trajectory is steep. The house sold for about $2.175 million in 2010, then listed for $4.3 million in 2011 after a renovation. It returned to the market in 2021 asking $4,990,000 and found a buyer the following year. Most recently, it was relisted in late 2025 through Sotheby’s International Realty for $4,195,000. Across those cycles, buyers paid for provenance and novelty far more than for space.
Inside, the renovation leaned into the constraint. The plan unfolds as a continuous stair sequence linking small rooms, with built-in storage, exposed beams, four wood-burning fireplaces, and French doors opening to a garden shared with the neighbors. A side entrance lets residents slip in from the garden, avoiding the cluster of photographers that gathers at the front facade.
That last detail captures the building’s odd status. It is at once a private home and a fixed point on the neighborhood’s tourist circuit, a piece of architecture whose value rests on being looked at. In a market that prizes square footage above almost everything, 75½ Bedford Street remains a reminder that in the West Village, a good story can be worth more per inch than the floor beneath it.
