On May 19, 1930, a child was born in Chicago who would, by the age of twenty-eight, change the geography of American theater from a third-floor walk-up on Bleecker Street. To walk Lorraine Hansberry’s New York on her birthday is to walk a literary pilgrimage that begins above two storefronts in Greenwich Village, passes through a townhouse just west of Washington Square, ends at a Broadway marquee at 47th and Eighth, and continues — in archive boxes — at the Schomburg Center on Malcolm X Boulevard. Each address is a verifiable place. Each place still stands. And each contains a quieter truth about how one of the most consequential American plays of the twentieth century was actually written: at a desk, in a book-lined room, by a woman in her twenties whose private life remained largely unknown to her own audiences.
Stop One: 337 Bleecker Street, Third Floor
The pilgrimage properly begins at the building the National Park Service catalogues as the Lorraine Hansberry Residence at 337 Bleecker Street. The structure — five window bays wide, with two ground-floor storefronts flanking a central door that opens onto a stairway to the upper apartments — was built in 1861. In 1953, the year she married songwriter and producer Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry moved with him into the third-floor apartment. She would live and work here until 1960. As the National Park Service records: “Hansberry resided in a third-floor apartment in this building from 1953 to 1960, the period in which she created her most important works.”
It was here, beginning in 1956, that she began to flesh out a play about a Black family in segregated Chicago — her own native city — that she would title A Raisin in the Sun, after a line in Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem.” The play was completed, in revision after revision, inside this apartment. In 1957 — the same year she and Nemiroff separated, though they remained friends and he kept the production rights — she first read the script aloud, in this room, to her friend Philip Rose. Rose became its producer.
On March 11, 1959, A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on West 47th Street, directed by Lloyd Richards and starring Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Ivan Dixon, Lonne Elder III, John Fiedler, Ed Hall, and Glynn Turman. Hansberry was twenty-eight years old. She became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. The production ran for 530 performances. She also became the first African American playwright — and the youngest playwright — to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play.
One month after the premiere, the photographer David Attie was sent by Vogue magazine to the Bleecker Street apartment. He photographed her in the room where the play had been written, surrounded by books. That image — Hansberry at home, in the act of being herself rather than the act of being a celebrity — remains the most cited photograph of her by literary archives. The Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust holds it. The NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project reproduces it. It is the visual that anchors the pilgrim’s first stop.
This building was listed on the New York State Register of Historic Places in March 2021 and on the National Register of Historic Places in April 2021, with Reference Number 100006490. The National Park Service classifies its significance under both “Literature” and “Social History: LGB & Ethnic Heritage, Black.” The building is privately managed and not open to the public — a fact worth respecting. The pilgrim stands on the sidewalk, looks up to the third floor, and considers what was made there.
Stop Two: 112 Waverly Place
From Bleecker Street, the pilgrim walks east toward Washington Square. Just west of the park, at 112 Waverly Place, stands the second Hansberry residence. In 1960 — using the profits from A Raisin in the Sun — Hansberry purchased the building. She lived here until her death in 1965, at the age of thirty-four, of pancreatic cancer. The most prolific years of her activism took place in this house. She co-chaired the NAACP Life Membership Committee and worked to establish an NAACP branch in Greenwich Village. In 1963, alongside her friend and fellow Village resident James Baldwin, she joined the now-historic meeting between civil rights activists and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in which she pressed the federal government on its handling of racial violence in the American South.
On October 17, 2017, Village Preservation (formerly the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) and the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center unveiled a permanent historic plaque on the façade of 112 Waverly Place. The plaque is the eleventh in Village Preservation’s historic plaque program. It marks the house where she finished living, where she organized, and where, in her final years, she also worked on later plays — The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which opened on Broadway in October 1964, and the unfinished Les Blancs, which her ex-husband and lifelong literary executor Robert Nemiroff completed and produced posthumously.
If Bleecker Street is the address of arrival, Waverly Place is the address of consequence. Stand at the curb. Read the plaque. The block is a working residential block in the heart of the Village. It does not advertise its history. That is part of why the pilgrim came.
Stop Three: The Ethel Barrymore Theatre
The pilgrimage proceeds uptown — by subway, on foot, by bus, by the long meditative walk up Sixth Avenue if time allows — to the Theater District. The Ethel Barrymore Theatre sits at 243 West 47th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. It is where A Raisin in the Sun premiered on the evening of March 11, 1959.
James Baldwin, in his 1969 essay “Sweet Lorraine,” remembered what that opening night was like from the seats: “I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. Black people had ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.” That sentence is the most quoted line about A Raisin in the Sun‘s premiere because no one in the room said it better, and no critic in the next morning’s papers tried. Baldwin had been her friend. He had been in the apartment on Bleecker. He saw what changed.
The pilgrim does not need a ticket to stand in front of the Barrymore. The marquee is its own monument. Stand on the south side of 47th Street, look at the building, and consider that on March 11, 1959, the playbill in the lobby carried the name of a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman as the author, of a Black director — Lloyd Richards, the first Black director on Broadway — and of a company of Black actors who would, almost to a person, become household names. Then walk back south, slowly.
Stop Four: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
The final stop is in Harlem, at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard — the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library of the New York Public Library. The Schomburg’s Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division holds the Lorraine Hansberry Papers, call number Sc MG 680. The collection is organized into four series — Personal Papers, Writings, Professional, and Legacy — and contains virtually all of Hansberry’s writings: her journals, diaries, short stories, poems, speeches, professional correspondence, personal correspondence, and the play scripts themselves. The folder for A Raisin in the Sun sits in the same series as the folders for The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Les Blancs, the unfinished Toussaint, The Drinking Gourd, What Use Are Flowers?, and Masters of the Dew. Her self-portrait, drawn in March 1959 — the month of the Broadway premiere — is in this collection. So is the typed letter she wrote about a 1952 trip to Uruguay.
The papers came to the Schomburg through the executors of her estate: Robert Nemiroff and, later, his third wife Jewell Gresham-Nemiroff. Portions of the collection have been digitized and are accessible online through NYPL Digital Collections. In-person access to the physical papers requires a research appointment, which can be requested through the Schomburg Center’s website. The pilgrim who wants to read Hansberry’s actual handwriting can, with planning, do so.
It is worth pausing here on what the Schomburg’s holdings make possible. Without an archive, the pilgrimage ends at the door of a private apartment building and a Broadway theater. With the archive, the pilgrimage opens into the working life of the writer: the drafts, the cross-outs, the unsent letters, the unfinished plays. The Schomburg is what keeps Hansberry from being only a plaque.
What the Pilgrim Carries Home
There is a separate biography running through these four addresses — one that, for decades, was not visible on any plaque. Hansberry privately identified as a lesbian. She wrote to The Ladder, the national lesbian magazine of the Daughters of Bilitis, beginning in the 1950s, signing her letters “L.N.H.” or “L.N.” Using the pen name Emily Jones, she published four lesbian-themed short stories: The Budget, The Anticipation of Eve, and Renascence in the Los Angeles gay magazine ONE, and Chanson du Konallis in a 1958 issue of The Ladder. Her 1957 letter to The Ladder contains a sentence that the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project reproduces in full and which is worth carrying through this walk:
“I wanted to leap into the questions raised on heterosexually married lesbians. I am one of those. How could we ever begin to guess the numbers of women who are not prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taught all their lives to believe was their natural destiny — AND — their only expectation for ECONOMIC security?”
Lorraine Hansberry, letter to The Ladder, 1957
The double designation that the Lorraine Hansberry Residence at 337 Bleecker now carries from the National Park Service — “Literature” and “LGB & Ethnic Heritage, Black” — is not an editorial flourish. It is a recognition, made formal in 2021, of who was actually living in that apartment when A Raisin in the Sun was being written. The pilgrim does not need to perform a verdict on her private life. The pilgrim simply notes that the plaque was added because the truth of the address required it.
The walk, in its essentials, is short. Bleecker to Waverly is roughly five blocks. Waverly to the Ethel Barrymore is roughly forty blocks north — twenty minutes by subway, an hour at a pilgrim’s pace on foot up Sixth Avenue and through the Theater District. The Ethel Barrymore to the Schomburg is the longest leg: about ninety blocks north and across Central Park to Lenox Avenue. The full route can be completed in a single Tuesday in May. It can also be completed in a single afternoon if the pilgrim takes the train. Either way, on the way home, the pilgrim has been to the room where the play was written, the house where the playwright finished her life, the theater where the play opened, and the archive where the papers rest.
That is what Hansberry’s New York looks like on her birthday. Ninety-six years to the day after she was born in Chicago, the four addresses are all still here. The plaques are mounted. The papers are accessible. The Barrymore still puts up new shows under the same name. And the third-floor windows on Bleecker Street still look down at the same sidewalk where, in April 1959, a celebrity playwright who was also a private dissident walked home from rehearsal carrying a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a secret correspondence with a magazine published out of San Francisco.
46-Day Capture
[46-Day capture block — to be populated by the desk’s longitudinal capture routine. Tracks reader engagement, citation pickups, and pilgrim photo submissions for this article through July 4, 2026.]
Pilgrim’s Notes & Sources
- 337 Bleecker Street — National Park Service, Lorraine Hansberry Residence; National Register of Historic Places Reference #100006490 (listed April 2021). Private residence — view from sidewalk only.
- NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project — Lorraine Hansberry Residence (337 Bleecker), entry by Amanda Davis (March 2018; revised April 2021).
- 112 Waverly Place — Village Preservation historic plaque, unveiled October 17, 2017.
- Ethel Barrymore Theatre — A Raisin in the Sun, premiered March 11, 1959, 530 performances; Playbill production record.
- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture — Lorraine Hansberry Papers, Sc MG 680, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library.
- Quotation source — James Baldwin, “Sweet Lorraine” (1969), in Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words: To Be Young, Gifted and Black, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), xviii — as reproduced by the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project.
- Hansberry to The Ladder, 1957 — reproduced by the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project from the Lorraine Hansberry Papers, Schomburg Center.
