75½ Bedford Street is a beautiful thing to behold. Its stepped-gable roofline tops three stories of nubby brick, while inside there are warm wood-beam ceilings, multiple working fireplaces, and a Dutch door that opens to a rear garden shared with neighbors, including the Cherry Lane Theatre. Its pedigree is romantic: the former home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Cary Grant, and John Barrymore. Even the address — that half — is whimsical. But like so many beautiful, expensive things, it is often bought and left unused. Almost none of the recent owners of 75½ have actually lived there. Or at least not for very long.
The house is, technically, the skinniest townhome in Manhattan — a unicorn that somehow seems to make it more alluring to buyers, even as it’s less alluring to their tenants, who have to contend with rooms that are just over eight feet wide and an oddly placed staircase. “The bumping of the head between the second and the third floor — I’ll always remember that,” says Juan Carlos Arcila-Duque, a designer who lived at 75½ in the mid-1990s. He was a self-professed “downtown boy” and thought of the $800 rental as an ideal artist’s garret — never mind the cramped layouts or the difficult stairs. He had romances there, became a citizen, and designed his second line of furniture from a desk overlooking Bedford Street. “So it is very special in my heart,” he says. “But for someone to live there, they have to not care about how uncomfortable it is.”
