When walking by Bedford St in the West Village, you cannot miss the narrowest house in the city located at 75 ½ Bedford St. between Commerce and Morton. It measures 9 ½ ft wide and 42 ft long.

The townhouse was listed for sale last August at $2.7 million and sold for $2.1. The previeous owners bought the house for $1.6 million in 2000.

The broker’s Web site described it as a vertical suite, with a kitchen, dining room and parlor on the first floor, a double living room on the second floor and a top-floor master bedroom suite. A trapdoor in the kitchen floor leads to a finished basement. The residential interiors are a tight squeeze even by New York standards, measuring just 8 1/2 feet wide and 42 feet long on each of its three floors. Full article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/14/skinniest-house-in-new-yo_n_423040.html

But this townhouse is more than just a curiosity for tourists to take photographs; its notorious history and charm is what makes it so interesting.

In its early years, 75 1/2 Bedford was used as a cobbler’s shop and then a candy factory (in 1880, Martha Banta, a candy maker, lived there). Thomas Newett, a shipper, lived there in the 1890s. By 1920, the neighborhood had become largely working-class Italian, and Victor Ponchione, a recent immigrant and a cooper in a vineyard, his wife and two children resided in the building. Then in 1923, when Greenwich Village was just beginning to reinvent itself as an artists’ enclave, Spalding Hall and fellow artists and actors leased 73-77 Bedford St. from Hendricks-Gomez’s descendants. The group established the Cherry Lane Theater around the corner at 38 Commerce St. and converted the three contiguous buildings into West Village apartments in order to rent them out. Full article at http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GV/GV043NarrowestHouse.htm

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