General Vagaries.

fuckyeahhistorycrushes:

Edna St. Vincent Millay Epic name, I know. Who is she you might ask? The answer is a immensely talented poet and badass redhead. She was gorgeous and her many suitors and lovers (ladies, too!) definitely knew it. Plus, she was a total cougar before she tragically died in her 50s.

75 1/2 Bedford, Manhattan….FOR SALE.

I would like to have this, please.

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 apartments in order to rent them out. Shortly thereafter the openly bisexual Millay, “Vincent,” as she was known by her friends, and her new husband, Eugen Jan Boissevain, a coffee importer, took up residence at 75 1/2 Bedford. They hired Ferdinand Savignano to renovate the house. He put in a skylight and transformed the top floor into a studio for Millay, installed casement windows at each level and topped the front with a tiny Dutch stepped gable, most likely to reflect Boissevain’s Dutch heritage. Before that, reports Gray, the house had a typical Italianate look common to the 1850s, as depicted in a 1922 photograph at the New-York Historical Society.

According to the plaque on the front of the building, Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there from 1923-1924 and wrote “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Not so, says Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor of the Millay Society. Via e-mail, Barnett stated that Millay did not write this poem there. “Millay worked on that poem while living in Europe and finished it before returning to the U.S.A. Millay and her husband lived at Steepletop, Austerlitz, NY, beginning in 1925. She lived there until her death in 1950, her husband until his death in 1949.” However, writer Ann McGovern (who lived at the building sometime in the late 1980s) asserted in a newspaper interview that Millay wrote part of “The King’s Henchmen” there.