A Queer, Sultry Summer: Where Sylvia Plath Lived, Worked, and Cracked Open in New York City

The novel opens with one of the most arresting sentences in American literature: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” That line belongs to Esther Greenwood, the fictional alter ego of Sylvia Plath — but every reader who knows Plath’s biography understands it also belongs, in the most literal sense, to Sylvia herself. She wrote from experience. She always wrote from experience.

New York City was the crucible. The summer of 1953 — one sweltering month in Manhattan — provided the raw material for The Bell Jar, the only novel Plath would complete before her death at thirty. It also precipitated the breakdown that nearly killed her at twenty. The city was both playground and pressure cooker, a place of dizzying opportunity and suffocating expectation. For the literary pilgrim who wants to understand Sylvia Plath, a walk through her New York is not merely atmospheric. It is essential.

Who She Was Before New York

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts — a fact she recorded obsessively, the way a woman measures herself against a starting line. Her father, Otto Plath, was a biology professor and beekeeper; he died when Sylvia was eight years old, a wound she would spend the rest of her life cauterizing in verse. Her mother, Aurelia, raised her in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with fierce ambition and careful economy. Sylvia won scholarships, published stories, collected honors. She arrived at Smith College in 1950 as someone who had already decided, with the ferocity of a person compensating for precariousness, that she would be extraordinary.

By her junior year, she was. She had published poems, won prizes, earned a place on the editorial board of the Mademoiselle College Board — a pipeline, in the early 1950s, for ambitious young women who wanted to enter the world of New York publishing. In 1953, Plath was selected as one of twenty college women to spend a month in New York as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine. It was, in the parlance of the era, the opportunity of a lifetime.

The Offices: 575 Madison Avenue

The Mademoiselle offices occupied space at 575 Madison Avenue, in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Every morning in June 1953, Plath and nineteen other young women from colleges across the country reported there — dressed carefully, always dressed carefully — to work on the August college issue. Plath’s assignment as Guest Managing Editor required her to interview poets, write copy, attend shoots, and appear, perpetually, as a version of the Mademoiselle ideal: polished, productive, decorative, brilliant.

It was an impossible performance. The offices demanded that these women be simultaneously the creators of the magazine and its subject matter — the model and the mind, at once producer and product. Plath had spent months preparing her wardrobe: “blouses of sheer nylon, straight gray skirts, tight black jerseys, and black heeled pumps,” as one account of the period details. She wore her best outfit — pearls, gloves, a hat — to interview the poet Elizabeth Bowen, one of her first assignments.

The building at 575 Madison Avenue still stands, now home to other tenants. There is no plaque. The literary pilgrim walks past it as they might walk past any midtown office tower — except that somewhere in the press of granite and glass, a twenty-year-old from Wellesley sat at a typewriter and felt the city beginning to close in.

The Barbizon Hotel: 140 East 63rd Street

After their days at the Mademoiselle offices, the guest editors returned each evening to the Barbizon Hotel for Women, at the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street. The Barbizon was already famous — or rather, it was the kind of institution so thoroughly woven into a certain kind of New York ambition that famous is almost too simple a word for it. Opened in 1927, designed in a mixture of Italian Renaissance, Late Gothic, and Romanesque styles by the firm of Everett F. Murgatroyd and Palmer H. Ogden, it rose twenty-three stories above the Upper East Side as a residential hotel explicitly for women pursuing careers in the arts.

To live there, a woman needed three letters of recommendation and impeccable manners. Men were not permitted above the lobby. The corridors were lined with aspiring actresses and models, musicians and writers and editors, all pressing together in the peculiar atmosphere of a women’s dormitory run on the logic of a finishing school. Grace Kelly had stayed there. Joan Didion would stay there. And in the summer of 1953, Sylvia Plath lay in the bathtub on the seventeenth floor and stared at the ceiling.

She wrote about it, later, in The Bell Jar, where the Barbizon became “The Amazon,” and Esther Greenwood’s experience of the hotel became a masterpiece of dissociated claustrophobia: “I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near on to an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again.”

The month crescendoed on the night of Friday, June 26, 1953, when the guest editors celebrated their final evening together on the Barbizon rooftop. Plath hauled her suitcase up there and threw every nylon, slip, skirt, and blouse off the edge — her entire wardrobe, the wardrobe she had spent months assembling, fluttering down into the dark air above Lexington Avenue. “Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind,” Esther Greenwood narrates in the novel, “and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

The Barbizon Hotel for Women closed as a residential hotel in 1981 and was converted to condominiums in 2005, known today as Barbizon 63. It was designated a New York City landmark in 2012 by the Landmarks Preservation Commission — recognition, however belated, that the building’s history as a refuge and crucible for ambitious women constituted a significant chapter in the city’s cultural life. The pilgrim stands before it now at the corner of Lexington and 63rd and imagines the view from the seventeenth floor: all that jazz and push, all those nylons disappearing into the dark.

After the Month: The Breakdown and What Followed

Plath took the train home from New York the day after the rooftop ceremony, borrowing a skirt and a peasant top because she had thrown everything else off the roof. There was no job waiting. The rejection letter from a Harvard writing program arrived shortly after. A boyfriend departed for officer training. Depression descended, then electroshock therapy, then twenty-one days without sleep. On August 24, 1953 — just as the Mademoiselle issue she had worked on was leaving newsstands — Plath crawled into the basement of her mother’s house in Wellesley with a bottle of sleeping pills. She survived.

She recovered at McLean Hospital. She returned to Smith. She graduated summa cum laude in June 1955. She won a Fulbright to Cambridge, where she met Ted Hughes in 1956. She published The Colossus and Other Poems in the UK in 1960, her first collection. She began writing The Bell Jar in March 1961, working, according to one account, “like mad for the next seventy days.” The novel was published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in Britain only — Plath explicitly did not want it published under her own name in America while her mother was alive.

She died on February 11, 1963, in London, at the age of thirty. The Bell Jar was published in the United States under her own name in 1971, eight years after her death. Ariel — the collection of poems she wrote in a ferocious burst in late 1962, including “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” and “Morning Song” — was published by Faber & Faber in 1965, two years after her death. The Collected Poems appeared in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Reading the City She Left in the Novel

For the literary pilgrim, The Bell Jar is a kind of shadow map of midtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side. Esther Greenwood’s New York is recognizable in its geography — the hotel rising high above the avenue, the magazine offices, the parties in midtown apartments — but it is rendered in the specific distortion of a mind under pressure, a city experienced as both exhilarating and inescapable.

The famous passage about New York as a city of bumping and lurching is not merely autobiography; it is one of the great literary descriptions of urban alienation: “A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus.”

The trolleybus image is precise: propelled by external infrastructure, incapable of choosing its own route. For Plath in the summer of 1953, New York was the trolleybus wire — the system that moved her while she sat inside, staring out at a city she could not quite reach through the glass.

The Pilgrim’s Route: Walking Plath’s New York

A Plath pilgrimage through Manhattan moves along a fairly contained geography, and it can be done in a single afternoon.

Start at the Barbizon (Barbizon 63), 140 East 63rd Street at Lexington Avenue. Take the 4/5/6 train to 59th Street/Lexington, walk four blocks north. The building’s terracotta and limestone facade is largely unchanged from 1953; the upper floors still look down over the avenue with the same altitude that Plath described. The lobby is now residential. Stand on the corner, look up seventeen stories, and try to imagine the view and the bath and the slow accumulation of pressure that preceded the rooftop ceremony.

Walk south on Lexington to 575 Madison Avenue. This requires a short crosstown walk — head west on 63rd to Madison, then south to the mid-50s. The current occupants of 575 Madison have nothing to do with Mademoiselle, which ceased publication in 2001, but the address anchors the biography. You are standing where the desk was, where the assignments were handed out, where a twenty-year-old from Wellesley sat in the summer heat and worked harder than almost anyone around her and still felt, somehow, like she was bumping.

For the bookstore component of this pilgrimage, head downtown to the Strand. The Strand Bookstore, at 828 Broadway at 12th Street, is open Monday through Sunday, 10am to 9pm. The Rare Book Room — open Monday through Friday, 10am to 5pm, and Saturday through Sunday, 10am to 6pm — occasionally carries early editions of Plath’s work. The paperback edition of The Bell Jar (Harper Perennial, ISBN 9780060837020) is reliably in stock. Buy it in the city where it was written, or rather, in the city that wrote it.

If you want to stay in the neighborhood of the novel’s geography on your way back uptown, consider a detour to Books Are Magic in Brooklyn (and the Cobble Hill branch of McNally Jackson, for good measure), or the Rizzoli Bookstore on West 26th Street, where the aesthetic atmosphere is the closest Manhattan currently offers to the kind of mid-century cultural pressure that Plath both loved and could not survive.

What She Gave the City Back

New York took something from Sylvia Plath in the summer of 1953. It is important to say that plainly: the city — or rather, the system the city represented, the grinding machinery of ambition and appearance and expectation — contributed to a breakdown that very nearly ended her at twenty. The Mademoiselle month is not a triumphant story. It is the story of an enormously talented woman who was asked to be too many things at once and was given no permission to be none of them, not even briefly.

But New York also gave Plath the material for her one novel, the book that has been continuously in print since 1971, the book that has been a kind of lifeline for generations of readers who have found in Esther Greenwood’s story a mirror that neither beautifies nor distorts. The Bell Jar has never stopped selling. It has never stopped being relevant. It turns fifty-five years of American publication this year, and it reads as freshly as it did in 1971, because the pressure it describes — to be brilliant and beautiful and productive and graceful and self-effacing and ambitious, all at the same time, all in the same body — has not abated.

Plath’s New York is not a triumphant literary pilgrimage in the conventional sense. There is no house where she wrote her masterwork, no cafe where she held court, no neighborhood that carries her name. She was here for thirty days. But those thirty days became one of the essential novels of the twentieth century — a book that begins and ends in New York’s gravitational pull, even when it moves away from the city into the cold New England winter of breakdown and recovery.

Stand at the corner of Lexington and 63rd. Look up at the Barbizon. Think of the nylons falling through the dark. That is where the novel begins.

Practical Information for the Plath Pilgrim

Barbizon 63 (formerly the Barbizon Hotel for Women)
140 East 63rd Street, New York, NY 10065
Corner of Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street
Now a private residential condominium; exterior freely viewable
NYC Landmark since 2012; listed on the National Register of Historic Places
Subway: 4/5/6 to 59th St–Lexington Ave (4 blocks north)

575 Madison Avenue (former Mademoiselle offices)
Between 56th and 57th Streets, Midtown Manhattan
Subway: 4/5/6 to 59th St; N/R/W to 5th Ave/59th St

The Strand Bookstore (where to buy The Bell Jar)
828 Broadway at East 12th Street, New York, NY 10003
Hours: Monday–Sunday, 10am–9pm
Rare Book Room: Mon–Fri 10am–5pm; Sat–Sun 10am–6pm
Website: strandbooks.com
Subway: L/N/Q/R/4/5/6 to 14th St–Union Square

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