Here’s the skinny on the city’s narrowest town house: It just sold for a fat $3.25 million.
The historic, three-story home at 75 1/2 Bedford St. — near Sixth Avenue and Houston Street — weighs in at an underfed 990 square feet.
A tape measure would only stretch to a cinched-in 8 feet and 4 inches wide in the widest rooms — narrow enough for the lankiest Knick to nearly touch two side walls at once.
Still, the completely remodeled home is full of celebrity cred.
It’s where Edna St. Vincent Millay penned her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” in 1923-24.
It’s Millay who famously coined the phrase, “My candle burns at both ends,” suggesting that the poet would have had to orient any such candle longitudinally while working long hours at the address.
Other celebrities who have traipsed — carefully — through the gaunt flat are actor Cary Grant, and, before him, John Barrymore.
Anthropologist Margaret Meade also lived there, as did popular children’s-book writer Ann McGovern, author of “Stone Soup.”
After moving out, McGovern wrote “Mr. Skinner’s Skinny House,” a picture book about a man who moves into the thinnest house in the city and then struggles to find a roommate.
“For seven years, I lived in the narrowest house in New York. It was only eight and a half feet wide!” McGovern said in a Q-and-A on her Web site, annmcgovern.com. “It’s known as the Edna St. Vincent Millay House.”
“Once I saw a man who was standing in front of the house with arms outstretched,” she said. “ ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I’m as big as a house,’ and he was.”
Living in her “doll house,” as she called it, McGovern said she’d begun noodling about the sorts of characters who could never live in a house so narrow, including an actor who plays Pinocchio — one of the characters in “Mr. Skinner’s Skinny House.”The latest buyer is George Gund, according to city property records.
Although thin, the home’s worth has expanded over the years.
It was purchased in 1994 for $270,000 by architectural preservationist Christopher Dubs.
He sold the home in 2000 to Steven Balsamo for a cool $1.6 million. Then, three years ago, the home sold for $2.175 million through Corcoran broker Alex Nicholas.
That buyer never moved in, instead sinking more money into the place by renovating it top to bottom — the kitchen trapdoor, leading to the basement “recreation room,” has been retained.
Built in 1873, the three-bedroom home also features floor-to-ceiling French doors opening to a tree-shaded, 9-foot-9 by 42-foot-4’’ back yard.
The inside is more light and airy than its width would suggest thanks to a third-floor skylight and oversized windows.
The gussying up allowed it to rent for a healthy $14,000 a month.
It then went back on the market at an overly optimistic $4.3 million.
By last year, the asking price had whittled away to $3.495.