NYC’s skinniest townhouse just listed for $4.19M

Buying this $4.19 million townhouse will be quite the squeeze.

At just 9.5 feet across, the charming residence at 75 1/2 Bedford Street is widely regarded as the skinniest house in New York City. Buyers of the bite-sized home will inherit an outsized slice of West Village history, however.

The narrow walls of the 152-year-old Millay House have hosted a number old Hollywood icons and a Pulitzer prize-winning poet.

The fresh listing, located between Commerce and Morton streets, was first reported by the New York Times. Broker Cortnee Glasser of Sotheby’s International Realty holds the listing.

“There’s nothing claustrophobic about it,” Glasser told the Post, describing the interior as bright, light and European.

“It does not feel like a Manhattan home.”

The Dutch-style gabled facade spans three stories, plus a finished lower level and a quaint rear garden.

Despite roughly 1,000 square feet of space, you’d be hard-pressed to fit a king bed. Past reports place the home’s interior width at roughly 8.5 feet.

The home offers three bedrooms and two bathrooms in total, plus the possibility for a fourth bedroom in the lower level. A quaint garden off of the kitchen adds another 150 square feet of elbow room.

The oddball dimensions recall the home’s past life as a carriage entryway for 77 Bedford, the oldest surviving house in the neighborhood.

Original details are lovingly maintained throughout, including four woodburning fireplaces, wood-beamed ceilings and oak flooring throughout. Walls of windows, floor-to-ceiling French doors and a 12-foot-tall third-floor skylight keep the townhome from things for feeling too confined. The home’s efficient built-ins and tidy pocket doors are a necessity.

It was one of the home’s most famous residents, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who installed the skylight. Millay rented the property in 1923 and 1924, according to a plaque above the door. The top floor served as a writing retreat where she wrote her Pulitzer-prize winning “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.”

Millay and her husband also added the gabled roof, Dutch-style doors and wood casement windows on each story, the Times reported.

The house was leased to a range of artists during that time, largely to artists working at the nearby Cherry Lane Theater. Cary Grant and John Barrymore were among its tenants, as well as Anthropologist Margaret Mead and cartoonist William Steig.

Andrew Berman, the director of Village Preservation, told the Times that the historic home is “an icon of the neighborhood.” Tour groups and photo takers regularly pause outside the home, according to Glasser.

The most recent occupants purchased 75 1/2 Bedford Street in 2023, according to city records. Dr. Tandra Hammer, an obstetrician and gynecologist, paid $3.41 million for the home. Her daughter, Donte Calarco, lives there most of the year, the Times reported. Both real estate investors, the pair told the outlet that they are ready for their next project.

The mother-daughter duo’s improvements to the home included closet upgrades, electrical work and “a lot of TLC into the garden,” Glasser said.

More extensive renovations by previous owners included the installation of Italian marble countertops in the eat-in kitchen and a claw-foot soaking tub in the second-floor primary suite.

“It’s a needle in a haystack kind of a listing,” Glasser said. “There’s nothing like it out there that’s currently on the market.”