The pilgrim who travels for books understands that a city has two maps: the one the subway prints and the one the writers leave behind. On Mother’s Day, those two maps refuse to lie flat against each other. You can stand on the corner of Bedford and Commerce and feel the layer underneath the layer — the rented apartments, the borrowed kitchens, the rooms small enough to type in and large enough to fail in. New York, more than almost any American city, was built up by women writers in tenancy. They mostly didn’t own the buildings. They paid the rent and they wrote the books and the buildings absorbed it. This is a guide to the addresses where some of them did the work, ordered as a Sunday-morning-to-evening pilgrimage you can actually walk.

75½ Bedford Street, West Village — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Begin in the West Village, at a doorway you will walk past three times before you trust the number. 75½ Bedford Street is, by most accountings, the narrowest house in Manhattan: nine feet six inches across the front, built in 1873 on what had been a carriage entrance to the lot next door. Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband Eugen Jan Boissevain moved into it as newlyweds in the fall of 1923 and lived there until May 1925, when they decamped for Steepletop, the farmhouse in Austerlitz, New York, that would be Millay’s home for the rest of her life.

The house has had other tenants — anthropologist Margaret Mead, cartoonist William Steig, the children’s author Ann McGovern — but the plaque on the brick refers to it, simply, as the Millay House. It is a useful place to begin a Mother’s Day walk because Millay was the early twentieth century’s loudest argument for the woman writer as a public figure, not a closeted one. She had already won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry by 1923. The house she chose with her husband was not a country retreat or a Park Avenue suite. It was barely wider than a hallway. The pilgrim’s lesson is the lesson the building keeps making: a great deal of American poetry has been written in rooms most landlords would refuse to lease today.

Patchin Place — Djuna Barnes (and the courtyard she shared with cummings)

Walk a few blocks north and east to West 10th Street between Greenwich Avenue and Sixth, and look for the small iron gate that closes off Patchin Place. It is a gated cul-de-sac of ten three-story houses, almost a stage set, and for forty-one years it was where Djuna Barnes wrote and went largely silent. Barnes moved into a room-and-a-half apartment at #5 Patchin Place in 1941 and stayed there until her death in 1982. By then she was an almost mythological recluse — the author of Nightwood, the great difficult modernist novel of 1936 that T. S. Eliot pushed into print, living quietly across the courtyard from e.e. cummings, who was at #4. Cummings is reported to have shouted across the alley periodically, “Are you still alive, Djuna?” — a question the modernist canon has been asking ever since.

The pilgrim cannot enter the courtyard; the gate is locked. The point is to stand at it. The light slants in from Greenwich Avenue. Barnes wrote her last book, the verse drama The Antiphon, behind one of those windows. If you have a copy of Nightwood, this is the place to read the first page of it.

7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn Heights — Carson McCullers and the February House

Take the 1 train to Clark Street and walk into Brooklyn Heights. The address is no longer there. 7 Middagh Street, the mock-Tudor brownstone where editor George Davis assembled what would become known as February House, was demolished in 1945 to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But you can stand near where it stood, on the bluff above the harbor, and tell the story.

From late 1940 through 1941, Davis rented the house as a kind of literary commune. Carson McCullers, twenty-three years old and already the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, lived there. So did W. H. Auden, Paul and Jane Bowles, the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Lotte Lenya, the composer Kurt Weill, two adult children of Thomas Mann, and the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee. The household took its informal name from the fact that an unusual number of its tenants had February birthdays. McCullers began The Ballad of the Sad Café there. Jane Bowles drafted Two Serious Ladies. Gypsy Rose Lee wrote a runaway-bestseller mystery called The G-String Murders. Auden, who imposed a household schedule, published The Double Man the year the house came together.

What the pilgrim is honoring at the empty lot near the BQE is not the building. It is the proposition the building represented: that a woman novelist of twenty-three could rent a chair in the same dining room as the leading English-language poet of the moment, and the dining room could function. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway has eaten more than just one address in this borough. February House is the loss most worth standing for.

140 East 63rd Street, Upper East Side — Sylvia Plath at the Barbizon

Cross back to Manhattan and head to the Upper East Side, to a tall brick tower at the corner of Lexington and 63rd. From 1927 until 1981 it was the Barbizon Hotel for Women, a residence where unaccompanied young women — models, secretaries, magazine interns, would-be actresses — could rent rooms in a building that did not allow men past the lobby. From 1939 to 1979, Mademoiselle magazine housed its college guest editors there for the month of June.

One of those guest editors arrived on May 31, 1953. Sylvia Plath was twenty years old. She paid $15 a week. She had been assigned room 1511. She stayed for four weeks. She wrote home about the wall-to-wall carpet, the dark green bedspread, the radio set into the wall. By the end of June she was unwell in a way the magazine and the hotel could not register. The summer became, ten years later, The Bell Jar, in which the Barbizon is fictionalized as “the Amazon” and the city becomes a “stifling and stagnant” enclave for the protagonist Esther Greenwood.

The building is now a luxury condominium called Barbizon 63. There is no hotel lobby to enter. But the address is the same. On Mother’s Day in particular, this is a difficult and important stop for the pilgrim, because the woman who wrote The Bell Jar is also, by the end of her life, the most cited literary mother of mid-century American poetry, and the conversation about how that fact gets carried is exactly the conversation that should happen at this address. Stand on the southwest corner of Lexington and 63rd. Look up to the eleventh row of windows. Decide for yourself whether you read the room as a cell or a study.

260 Cumberland Street, Fort Greene — Marianne Moore

Take the train back to Brooklyn — Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center, then walk north and east to Fort Greene Park. 260 Cumberland Street is a 1912 apartment building called The Cumberland, designed by the firm Cohn Brothers. Marianne Moore moved in with her mother in 1929, after the literary magazine The Dial, which she had edited, ceased publication. She stayed for thirty-six years. She wrote much of her best-known work in that fifth-floor apartment, including the much-revised “Poetry” and the late-career baseball poems that won her the affection of New Yorkers who otherwise had no use for poetry at all.

By the time she finally left Fort Greene for 35 West 9th Street in Manhattan in 1965, she had been called for years the Poet of Brooklyn. She was a small, precise woman in a tricorne hat who threw out the first pitch at a Yankees game. She kept lists. She corresponded with everyone — Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Ford Motor Company (which had asked her to name a car; she suggested “The Utopian Turtletop,” which Ford did not use). The Cumberland is a private residence; you cannot go inside. You can stand under the cornice and read “The Fish” or “What Are Years?” out loud, which is what the pilgrim is here to do anyway.

East 50th Street and 66 Leonard, Manhattan — Toni Morrison

Two stops, both in Manhattan, and both essential. From 1967 to 1983, Toni Morrison was an editor at Random House — the first Black woman to hold a senior editorial position in the company’s fiction department. The Random House offices were on East 50th Street. From those offices, she edited Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, Muhammad Ali. She also wrote The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977) before leaving the publishing house to write full time.

Morrison was a New Jersey resident for most of her writing life — she once told The New Yorker, “I never lived in Manhattan. I always wanted a garden.” But in 2014, late in life, she purchased a Tribeca condominium at 66 Leonard Street, inside the landmarked Textile Building, designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh in 1901. She lived there until her death in 2019. Two addresses, then: a corporate one where she opened the door for Black writers in American publishing, and a domestic one where the door finally closed for her. A pilgrim should walk both, ideally in that order, with at least one of her books in a bag.

How to Walk This Route on Mother’s Day

Six addresses across two boroughs is a full Sunday but not an unreasonable one. The cleanest order, if you are starting in the morning, is the one above: West Village → Brooklyn Heights → Upper East Side → Fort Greene → Midtown East → Tribeca, finishing where Morrison died. The two Brooklyn stops can be combined if you drive; on the subway, plan to lose half an hour to each river crossing. Bring a small notebook. Bring one book per writer, if you can carry them. The writers all worked in rented rooms; honoring them does not require a reservation.

What this walk is not is a museum tour. There is no admission. Most of the buildings are private. The point of the pilgrimage is the discrepancy between the smallness of the rooms and the size of the work that came out of them. Mother’s Day is the right day for that discrepancy. The American literary canon, for most of its history, treated motherhood as either a backdrop or a problem. The women on this list wrote against that treatment from inside it. Standing under their windows is a gesture. The gesture is the point.

A Pilgrim’s Closing Note

If you can manage only one stop, make it 75½ Bedford Street. It is the building that most stubbornly refuses to be anything other than what it is — a narrow door, a plaque, a held line. Edna St. Vincent Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, the same year she moved into that house, and she did not stop writing because she was twenty-six and famous and crowded into nine and a half feet of street frontage. The pilgrim’s takeaway from a Mother’s Day walk through these addresses is the simplest one: the work was done in the rooms where they lived. The rooms are still here, mostly. New York holds them. Honor them by reading the books on the train home.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you go inside Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house at 75½ Bedford Street?

No. 75½ Bedford Street is a private residence and is not open to the public. The exterior, the marker plaque, and the streetscape are all visible from the public sidewalk on Bedford Street between Commerce and Morton.

Is the February House at 7 Middagh Street still standing?

No. The mock-Tudor brownstone at 7 Middagh Street, where Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Paul and Jane Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee lived together from 1940 to 1941, was razed in 1945 to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The site is on the bluff in Brooklyn Heights, near the BQE.

Where did Sylvia Plath stay during her Mademoiselle guest editorship in 1953?

Sylvia Plath stayed at the Barbizon Hotel for Women at 140 East 63rd Street on the Upper East Side from May 31 through the end of June 1953, in room 1511, at a rate of $15 per week. The Barbizon is now the luxury residential building Barbizon 63. The address figures prominently in The Bell Jar, where the hotel is fictionalized as “the Amazon.”

Can you visit Patchin Place where Djuna Barnes lived?

Patchin Place is a private gated cul-de-sac off West 10th Street between Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue. The gate is closed to the general public, but you can stand at it and view the courtyard. Djuna Barnes lived at #5 Patchin Place from 1941 until her death in 1982; e.e. cummings lived at #4.

Where in Brooklyn did Marianne Moore live?

Marianne Moore lived with her mother at 260 Cumberland Street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn — an apartment building called The Cumberland, designed by the Cohn Brothers in 1912 — from 1929 until 1965, when she moved to 35 West 9th Street in Manhattan. She wrote much of her best-known work, and was widely known as “the Poet of Brooklyn,” during her thirty-six years in Fort Greene.

What was Toni Morrison’s NYC address?

Toni Morrison primarily lived in New Jersey but purchased a Tribeca condominium at 66 Leonard Street, inside the landmarked Textile Building (Henry J. Hardenbergh, 1901), in 2014, and lived there until her death in 2019. From 1967 to 1983 she also worked as a senior editor at Random House, with offices on East 50th Street in Midtown East.