From Varick Street, take a left on Bedford Street , pausing to peer into Grove Court , a typical secluded West Village mews. Along with nearby Barrow and Commerce streets, Bedford is one of the quietest and most desirable Village addresses - Edna St Vincent Millay, the poet and playwright, lived at no. 75 1/2 - said to be the narrowest house in the city, nine feet wide and topped with a tiny gable. Built in 1799, the clapboard structure next door claims to be the oldest house in the Village, but much renovated since and probably worth a considerable fortune now. Further down Bedford, at no. 86, the former speakeasy Chumley's is recognizable only by the metal grille on its door - a low profile useful in Prohibition years that makes it hard to find today.

Turn right off Bedford onto Grove Street , following it towards Seventh Avenue and looking out for Marie's Crisis Café at no. 59. Now a gay bar, it was once home to Thomas Paine, English by birth but perhaps the most important and radical thinker of the American Revolutionary era, and from whose Crisis Papers the café takes its name. Grove Street meets Seventh Avenue at one of the Village's busiest junctions, Sheridan Square - not in fact a square at all unless you count Christopher Park's slim strip of green, but simply a wide and hazardous confluence of several busy streets. The square was named after General Sheridan, cavalry commander in the Civil War, and holds a pompous-looking statue to his memory. It is better known, however, as the scene of one of the worst and bloodiest of New York's Draft Riots, when a marauding mob assembled here in 1863 and attacked members of the black community, several of whom were lynched.

Bedford and Grove Streets

• Bedford and Grove Streets

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