St. Luke's Place

Greenwich Village

& why it made the Carpe City list

St. Luke’s Place is one of the loveliest blocks in New York and is located where Leroy Street turns outside the Hudson Park branch of the New York Public Library.
Some very illustrious figures have called St. Luke’s Place home.
- Poet Marianne Moore, journalist Linda Ellerbee, and actor Robert de Niro have all lived on St. Luke’s.
- There are so many sensational stories on this block, some of them get devoted posts on Carpe City!
  - Click here for #6 St. Luke’s, here for #10 St. Luke’s, and here for #11 St. Luke’s
The fifteen gorgeous townhouses lining the street were built in the early 1850s on land once owned by Trinity Church.
Though Trinity sold the plots to different owners, the homes were all built at the same time, and all in the Italianate style with arched doors, wide stoops, and cast-iron handrails and fences.
After the last of the original owners vacated the street by 1980, the makeup and character of the street began to change. By the 1920s, St. Luke’s place was as much an artists’ paradise as the rest of the Village.
- Painter Paul Cadmus lived at #5, revolutionary journalist Max Eastman lived at #11, novelist Sherwood Anderson lived at #12, poet Marianne Moore lived at #14, Theodore Dreiser wrote An American Tragedy at #16, and Mayor Jimmy Walker lived at #6!

A rumor circulated for years that Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick on St. Luke’s place, however, this rumor is false.
Moby Dick was published in 1851, and the houses here on St. Luke’s weren’t built until 1852.