61 Perry Street

Two identical Federal houses rose at 61 and 63 Perry Street in 1828, built as an investment by James P. Demarest, a landowner whose own home was across the river in Bergen County, New Jersey. Both were two and a half stories of Flemish bond brick, and beneath them ran an arched cartway to the rear yard. No. 63 is gone. What survives of the cartway is the square headed opening at the west end of No. 61, still closed by its wrought iron gate, and the brick passage behind it that runs to a small two story building at the end of the lot. The Landmarks Preservation Commission recorded all of it in 1969, when it designated the Greenwich Village Historic District.

The front house drew artists early. John Sloan, a founder of the Ashcan School, lived at No. 61 from 1904 to 1913 and painted McSorley’s Bar during those years. By 1942 the sculptor Alice Decker was living in the house and had turned the little building in the rear into her studio, and when the property was advertised in 1949 it was called a home with a rear two story studio house. The painter Loren MacIver and her husband, the poet Lloyd Frankenberg, took the house next and kept it for the rest of their lives. The Whitney gave MacIver a twenty year retrospective in 1953, the Museum of Modern Art sent her to the Venice Biennale in 1962, and she died at 61 Perry Street in 1998. Elizabeth Bishop stayed for long stretches. E. E. Cummings, around the corner in Patchin Place, and Robert Lowell were friends of the house.

The rear house holds a living and dining room under a fifteen foot ceiling, lit by a skylight and warmed by a wood burning fireplace set into exposed brick, with terracotta floors and casement windows onto the courtyard. Stairs lead up to a bedroom with a picture window facing the courtyard trees, and to a second room, usable as an office or a second bedroom, with French doors onto a roof deck laid across the top of the house. One bedroom and one bath, a private entrance, a working fireplace, laundry on the premises, and a brick courtyard shared with the front house. The gate on Perry Street is the only way in.

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