PATCHIN PLACE & MILLIGAN PLACE

Patchin Place and Milligan Place are treasures and tiny time capsules of old Greenwich Village and old New York.  Patchin Place is a small, charming, and very quaint dead-end alley consisting of ten three-story houses that were built in 1848.  Patchin Place has one of the original NYC gas lamps and is a landmark location at West 10th Street just off of Sixth Avenue and directly across from another landmark building, the Jefferson Market Courthouse.  

Numerous artists and writers lived here including Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, E.E. Cummings, and Ezar Pound.  American journalist socialist John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, briefly lived here.  Lesbian writer Djuna Barnes penned her then shocking novel, Nightwood, about homosexuality here.  The young Marlon Brando shared his sister's house at this location.  This landmark dwelling plays a role in the novels Tabloid City by Pete Hamill and the Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer.

Patchin Place was purchased by a British Royal Navy officer, Sir Peter Warren, who led a British naval attack on a French fortress in Nova Scotia in 1745.  Its small brick houses are surrounded by a small courtyard which is full of towering ailanthus trees.  The houses are some of the narrowest in Manhattan and are said to have been built for the staff of the once fancy Brevoort Hotel (1854 - 1954) at 11 Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street.  Today many of the houses are offices of psychotherapists.   

Around the corner from Patchin Place on Sixth Avenue (between 10th & 11th street) is  Milligan Place a cluster of four small houses built in 1799 in a triangular-shaped alley.  Milligan Place's original owner, Samuel Milligan, built Patchin Place for his daughter and his son-in-law, surveyor Aaron Patchin, for whom it was named.