Lorraine Hansberry Residence

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry lived at 337 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village from 1953 to 1960, the years in which she wrote A Raisin in the Sun. Its 1959 Broadway opening made her the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, and she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for it. The address is also part of LGBTQ history. During these years Hansberry was privately exploring her identity as a lesbian, and in 1957 she wrote letters to The Ladder, the early lesbian magazine published by the Daughters of Bilitis, signed only with her initials. It is a private residential building: view it from the street only.