1-4 Milligan Place: Review and Ratings

Review of 1-4 Milligan Place by Carter Horsley

Every sophisticated Greenwich Villager knows and loves quaint Patchin Place but most likely quite a few do not realize that just around the corner is another small "hole-in-the-wall" residential enclave of almost equal charm known as Milligan Place.

Patchin Place is on West 10th Street between the Avenue of the Americas and Greenwich Avenue and it is across the street from the landmark Jefferson Market Courthouse Library Clocktower.

Milligan Place is on the Avenue of the Americas between West 10th and West 11th streets. It consists of four small three-story houses each with fire escapes on its triangular alley.

Ephermeralnewyork.com notes that an New York Times article in 1915 said that "Down in Milligan Place, the little hole in the wall o lower Sixth Avenue, where babies yowl and black cats prowl and pigeons coo in unison with the music of the elevated, and the soul is untrammeled and free, there is a toy shop."

In 1799, Samuel Milligan what is now Patchin Place and later gave it to his son-in-law, Aaron Patchin. The low-rise buildings on this quite short street were probably built in 1848 or 1849. In 1917, indoor plumbing, electricity and steam heat were added and three years later Grace I. Patchin Stuart, the last remaining member of the Patchin family, sold the property to the Land Map Realty Corporation, which converted the houses into small apartments.

The street's gate was not erected until 1929 by which time the street had become one of the most famous literary communities in the world. Its most famous resident was E.E.Cummings, the poet, but other notable residents included John Reed and Louise Bryant, Ralph Albert Blakelock, the painter, Djuna Barnes, Theodore Dreiser, John Masefield and Marlon Brando, the actor.

The modernist writer Djuna Barnes, a friend of Abbott's, moved into a room-and-a-half apartment at #5 Patchin Place in 1941. She had lived in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and had been in the audience when residents organized a performance of William Butler Yeats's play "The King's Threshold" in the courtyard of Patchin Place as a war benefit, but had spent most of the 1920s and 30s in Europe. After her return to New York she became so reclusive that Cummings would occasionally check on her by shouting out his window "Are you still alive, Djuna?"

In 1963, when a developer proposed to tear down the houses on Patchin and nearby Milligan Place in order to put up a high-rise apartment building, she left her apartment to tell a protest meeting that she would die if she had to move, and that the destruction of the neighborhood would leave local youths with nowhere to practice their mugging.

Community activists, led by future mayor Ed Koch, succeeded in saving Patchin Place, and in 1969 it became a landmark. Though Barnes complained about "writing amid the roaring of plumbing, howling of downstairs dog, thumping of small child on elephant's feet", Barnes remained in residence until her death in 1982.

Patchin Place remains physically almost unchanged. It even retains its 19th century gas street lamp - one of only two in New York City, and the only one that still gives light, though the light is now electric. Usage has changed, however: the same privacy that had once attracted writers and artists also appealed to psychotherapists, who began to locate there in the 1990s, transforming the street into what one psychologist called "therapy row". As of 2003, according to its entry at Wikipedia.com, Patchin Place was home to about 35 residents and 15 therapists' offices.

In 1929 the gate at the entrance was added and nearby Jefferson Market prison was torn down. Later the Art Deco-style, yellow brick Women's House of Detention was erected on the Greenwich Avenue end of the block and it was famous for having its inmates shout down to their male friends on the street much to the consternation of their neighbors. Eventually, the Women's House of Detention was demolished and eventually a community garden replaced with a very ugly and tall fence until finally a handsome cast-iron fence surrounded the lush garden.

Almost the end of a nice story except to add that Sutter's, a pastry cafe with the world's best prune danishes eventually closed on the Greenwich Avenue corner and many years later the Jefferson Market food store across the avenue from Milligan Place finally closed as the Village's best gourmet food store. It had operated in the space formerly occupied by Charles's French Restaurant, the most expensive and elegant restaurant for many years in the Village.