The Queerest Places

New York, N.Y.

Edna St. Vincent Millay home
75-1/2 Bedford Street

Following her 1923 marriage to businessman Eugen Boissevain, bisexual poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived at this address in Greenwich Village in what she nicknamed “the dollhouse.” The diminutive brick house on Bedford Street is only 9-1/2 feet wide, and when Millay lived there, had one room and a fireplace on each of the three floors. Behind the house was a beautiful but tiny courtyard. In 1995, New York’s Historic Landmarks Preservation Center installed an oval medallion at the residence with the inscription, “The irreverent poet, who wrote ‘My candle burns at both ends,’ lived here in 1923-1924 at the time she wrote the Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Conveniently, Millay’s house was only a few blocks from Chumley’s, a speakeasy (still in operation as a bar and eatery) that was one of her favorite hangouts. From Bedford Street, Millay and Boissevain moved to a farmhouse in Austerlitz, N.Y., which they renovated and lived in until their deaths.

Millay’s “dollhouse” is now on sale for $2.7 – read more about it here.