35 Perry Street

In February 1939, Thomas Merton rented an apartment. From The Seven Storey Mountain (1948):

I went to Greenwich Village and signed a lease for a one-room apartment and started work on my Ph.D. I suppose the apartment on Perry Street was part of the atmosphere appropriate to an intellectual such as I imagined myself to be and, as a matter of fact, I felt much more important in this large room with a bath and a fireplace and French windows leading out on to a rickety balcony than I had felt in the little place ten feet wide behind the Columbia Library. Besides, I now had a shiny new telephone all my own which rang with a deep, discreet, murmuring sort of a bell as if to invite me suavely to expensive and sophisticated pursuits.

Merton was on the balcony when his friend Robert Lax called with the news of a new pope:

I had been sitting on the balcony in a pair of blue dungarees, drinking Coca-Cola, and getting the sun. When I say sitting on the balcony, I mean sitting on the good boards and letting my feet dangle through the place where the boards had broken. This was what I did a great deal of the time, in the mornings, that spring: surveying Perry Street from the east, where it ran up short against a block of brick apartments, to the west, where it ended at the river, and you could see the black funnels of the Anchor liners.

By September 1940, Merton was living and teaching at St. Bonaventure University in southwestern New York State. In December 1941, he left for the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky.

I found Thomas Merton’s telephone number some years ago, when the New York Public Library put the 1940 directories online. Here’s 35 Perry Street, complete with balcony:

[35 Perry Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The building went up in 1852 as a one-family residence. In the 1890s it became a rooming house. If you look at the larger view carefully and, perhaps, enlarge it a little more, you can see the gaps in the balcony boards. Really.

Was Merton living in this apartment when the WPA fellows took this photograph? I’d like to think that he was inside typing.

Related reading
All OCA Thomas Merton posts (Pinboard) : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[You don’t have to be a theist to love Thomas Merton. Or at least I don’t.]