Lorraine Hansberry Residence

Lorraine Hansberry lived in the third-floor apartment of this 1861 building on Bleecker Street from 1953 to 1960 — the years that produced A Raisin in the Sun. She first read the play aloud here to producer Philip Rose in 1957; two years later its Broadway premiere made her the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, and the youngest playwright ever to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. What the public didn't know then is what earns this address a place in LGBTQ history. While living here Hansberry was privately working out her identity as a lesbian: she wrote letters to The Ladder, the pioneering national lesbian magazine, and published lesbian-themed short stories under a pen name. Her Greenwich Village circle included lesbian and bisexual writers Marijane Meaker, Louise Fitzhugh and Patricia Highsmith — and a young Edie Windsor, whose Supreme Court case would one day topple the Defense of Marriage Act. Hansberry died of cancer in 1965 at just 34. Her husband Robert Nemiroff assembled To Be Young, Gifted and Black from her writings, and her reputation as both a literary and queer forebear has only grown since. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in April 2021, recognized for literature, Black heritage and LGBTQ+ history. What you see today: a three-story brick building with shops at street level and private apartments above, on one of the Village's most walkable stretches. There is no plaque; view from the sidewalk. Julius' Bar, the Stonewall National Monument and the rest of the Village's queer-history core are all within a ten-minute walk.