5 Patchin Place

[5 Patchin Place, West Village, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Last Sunday I posted the tax photograph of 154 W. 10th Street, home to Three Lives & Company and, in the past, Djuna Books. Which leads me today to 5 Patchin Place, long the home of the writer Djuna Barnes. The street is one with considerable history. No. 5 is to the right of the stone fireplace in the photograph above.

From Phillip Herring’s Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (1995):

Back in New York, the happiest news of these years in Djuna’s life was that she found an apartment, upstairs at 5 Patchin Place, a private court with iron gate (usually open) near Greenwich Avenue and Tenth Street. Patchin Place, a picturesque reminder of what Greenwich Village once had been, contained fifty flats in two rows, built in 1848 as boardinghouses for the Basque waiters at the old Breevort Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Many famous writers and intellectuals had dwelled in the short cul-de-sac, including John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, Padraic Colum, and Jane Bowles. E.E. Cummings lived across the way from Djuna, downstairs at number 4.

Barnes moved to no. 5 in September 1940. Her rent: $40 a month. Aside from a brief stay in a nursing home, she stayed on Patchin Place, largely a recluse, through numerous and varied adversities, for the rest of her life. Herring tells a well-known story:

In 1952, [Barnes] fell and broke her shoulder. She crawled to her telephone and called on her neighbor E.E. Cummings, who climbed the fire escape, let himself in, and telephoned for the ambulance that took her to the French Hospital. Thereafter he would occasionally raise his window and shout, “Are you still alive, Djuna?” She outlasted Cummings by twenty years.

From Andew Field’s Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (1983):

In 1963 a developer purchased Patchin Place for $630,000 and said that, if the tenants would not permit him a reasonable return on his investment, then he would be forced to rip down the old buildings and erect a multi-storey on the site. There was a tenants’ protest meeting (reported in The New York Times, September 30, 1963: “Patchin and Milligan Tenants Unite to Preserve Quiet Corner”). Miss Barnes spoke at the meeting and said that she would die if she was forced to move uptown. More than that, the neighbourhood needed to be preserved as it was so that the young people had a suitable place to practice their mugging. The landlord backed away, and life continued on for her as before in small, difficult days.

Barnes’s rent in 1963: $49.50 a month.

[From the Times article, for which Barnes consented to an interview. The article does not mention a Barnes appearance at a protest meeting. Click for a larger view.]

Djuna Barnes died in her apartment on June 18, 1982, days after her ninetieth birthday.

Here’s more about 5 Patchin Place, from Ephemeral New York and the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Here’s a famous photograph of Barnes standing inside the Patchin Place gate. And here are Trulia’s real-estate photographs of the apartment’s interior, all 500 square feet of it. The apartment is off the market.

I’m no Barnes expert, but I can highly recommend the novel Nightwood (1936), which I dared to teach several times. It’s a great modernist novel, a great modern novel, and a great novel.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : “Smith going backward” (A phrase from Djuna Barnes)