Patchin Place is a gated cul-de-sac located off of 10th Street between Greenwich Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Its ten 3-story brick row houses, said to have been originally built as housing for the Basque staff of the nearby Brevoort House hotel, have been home to several famous writers, including Theodore Dreiser, E. E. Cummings, John Cowper Powys and Djuna Barnes, making it a stop on Greenwich Village walking tours. Today it is a popular location for psychotherapists' offices.
Patchin Place in 2011
The 1917 book about Greenwich Village in which this illustration first appeared described Patchin Place as "one of the strange little 'lost courts' given over to the Villagers and their pursuits".
Patchin Place street sign
Edward Estlin Cummings, who was mainly known as e e cummings and also E. E. Cummings,, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He was an ambulance driver during World War I and was in an internment camp, which provided the basis for his novel The Enormous Room (1922). The following year he published his first collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, which showed his early experiments with grammar and typography. He wrote four plays; HIM (1927) and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946) were most successful. He wrote EIMI (1933), a travelogue of the Soviet Union, and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in poetry, published as i—six nonlectures (1953). Fairy Tales (1965), a collection of short stories, was published posthumously.
Cummings in 1953
Masthead from volume 56 of The Harvard Monthly; Cummings was an editor and contributor to this literary journal while at Harvard
Grave of E. E. Cummings
Sketched self-portrait circa 1920