It’s Always a Short Stay at the Edna St. Vincent Millay

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.”

Specs: 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

Price: $4.195 million ($1,765 in monthly taxes)

Extras: Finished basement with rec room and laundry, private garden and shared outdoor space, two balconies

10-minute walking radius: Cherry Lane Theatre, the Eighty Six, Stonewall Inn

Listed by: Cortnee B. Glasser, Sotheby’s International Realty

The slim little building on Bedford just listed for $4.195 million — not a price point at which buyers tolerate words like uncomfortable. Per square foot, it is about 2.5 times more expensive than the average Manhattan townhouse to close last quarter, according to appraiser Jonathan Miller. Even in this neighborhood, it seems to command a premium, like a misprinted coin that’s useless to someone feeding the dryer but interesting to a certain kind of enthusiast. “The irony is that premium is what priced it out of the hands of people who would actually use it,” says Miller.

The building wasn’t always a luxury item. It was “dilapidated and disgusting” when the architect Christopher Dubs first saw the place in the early 1990s. The seller said it had been vacant for a decade, but Dubs guessed it had been longer — hints of its age included its ruddy color scheme, abundance of stucco, and bad tile that he dated to the 1960s. He bought it anyway, for $270,000, made structural repairs, and put in a working kitchen. But instead of moving in, he moved to Florida and leased the building to his personal assistant, Barbara Vigilante, asked her to watch his cat, and installed a Murphy bed on the second floor for a roommate. 75½ Bedford was “fun,” Vigilante says of her time there. But it was also “barely usable.” Drafty, with winds that would knock down the curtains, electric lines that sparked, and an issue with the sewage. (And she had reason to believe it was haunted, but that’s a different story.)

In the late 1990s, Dubs embarked on the kind of renovation that he had dreamed of doing when he studied historical preservation. He invested about $200,000 to peel back the ugly stucco and bad tile to the original wood and hand-point the façade with bricks from the appropriate era. Once that renovation was complete, Dubs was pleased. “A feather in my cap,” he says. So was a new plaque out front, which marked St. Vincent Millay’s time in the home. But even she had spent barely any time there, renting it for just over a year between 1923 and 1925, during which she went on a 20-city American book tour and a round-the-world honeymoon by way of Honolulu and Japan.

When Dubs listed the townhouse in 2000, there was a bidding war. He recalls a man flying in on his private plane to view the place after seeing a story in the New York Times about the building. The buyer who won out in the end, Stephen Balsamo, ultimately paid $1.6 million, or $3 million today — the first to apparently pay a premium. He didn’t respond to calls and emails, but there’s reason to suspect he didn’t live there much, either. His daughter, Lindsay E. Balsamo, described him as a “generic businessman” who used it as a pied-à-terre when he worked in the city, then handed her the keys. She moved in with her boyfriend, and told a reporter they planned to stay “until my parents kick us out.” The fateful day came in 2010, when Balsamo sold it for $2.175 million to a buyer who reportedly “never moved in.” Like Dubs, Balsamo had made a nice profit. The next owner did, too, selling for $3.25 million in 2013. The buyer was a professional real-estate investor, George Gund IV, a scion of the billionaire Gund family who runs its property arm. He wrote in an email suggesting that he might not be a good person to ask about the house, since over a decade of ownership he “only spent a few months there.” Instead, he suggested I call one of the relatives he rented to, his cousin through marriage, Jupira Lee, who owns Casa, the Brazilian restaurant that was across the street and who lived in the building for a spell during the COVID lockdown.

“It’s the cutest house to live in,” she tells me. ”You feel like a little princess.” Still, she admits, ”I don’t really like living vertically.” Take the problem of her reading glasses. “No matter how many glasses I would buy, they’d end up on the wrong floor — up there or down there,” she says. Plus having a bathroom on a separate floor from her bedroom wasn’t ideal. “For me, who wakes up at least three times a night to go to the bathroom, it was a little bit of a nightmare.” But the price was right: just the $1,500 or so per month that Gund was paying in property taxes.

In 2023, Gund sold it for $3.41 million, or $3.7 million today, to Tandra Hammer, a doctor who moonlights as a real-estate investor. Her daughter, Donte Calarco, sells with Sotheby’s International. They were living in a condo across from the St. Vincent Millay house; when Gund put the house on the market in 2023, they “went in and fell in love,” Calarco says. But their plan to use it as a pied-à-terre went sideways: They needed more space for all the relatives who wanted to visit, and fewer stairs, Calarco says. Plus, like Gund and Dubs, they’re house collectors whose interests are now elsewhere — in a 16th-century Tuscan villa. So this month, they put the house up for sale, for $4.195 million.

When I asked Dubs why he, like so many other owners, bought and sold the house without ever really living there, he had a theory. “It’s like one of those things you see at Sotheby’s,” he says. “The saber sword from Star Wars or the banana or something.”