The house stands in the West Village, one of the few stretches of Manhattan where the streets escape the orthogonal grid that orders the rest of the island, because the layout of the old village was preserved as the city grew around it. They are narrow, tree-lined streets, faced with nineteenth-century brick and stone row houses, an ensemble that the city protected in 1969 when it created the Greenwich Village Historic District and that, for a long time, was home to New York's artistic and literary bohemia.