Patchin Place

Greenwich Village

Art & Culture | History

A Gated Alley of Literary Greatness and Lovely Lights

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patchin place street sign greenwich village

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About Patchin Place

& why it made the Carpe City list

Look through the gate on the north side of 10th Street between 6th and Greenwich Avenues and see the small, hidden alley known as Patchin Place.
New Yorkers love Patchin Place. When E.E. Cummings wrote “Love is a Place,” we’re guessing he meant 4 Patchin Place, his home from 1924 until he died in 1962!
Cummings wasn’t the only artistic luminary to live in Patchin Place. Novelists Djuana Barnes and Theodore Dreiser also lived here, as did Marlon Brando’s sister, who put him up here when he was just getting his career off the ground.
Patchin Place’s popularity with artists was a sign that it was unpopular with most of society.
- The alley consists of ten three-story homes built in the 1840s as boarding houses for employees of an old hotel on Fifth Avenue.
- Only the working class would live in a home with an entrance that did not directly face the street. But by the late 1900s, as the city grew more crowded and louder, that stigma completely; The “off-street” residences became extremely sought-after properties.
- Patchin Place is a landmark!
At the end of the alley, you’ll see one of the last two remaining gas lamps in Manhattan lit by the city. Patchin Place boasts the only wall-lamp of its kind in the city. See if you can spot the hidden fixture (we call it an ensconced sconce!)

Carpe City Trivia

What's with the gaslights?

Gaslights like the one here on Patchin Place were once so ubiquitous that 19th Century New York City is sometimes just called “Gaslight New York.”

By: Lucie Levine

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