Inside a West Village passageway leading to a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse
Whenever I stroll through the West Village, I’m well aware that there are two versions of the neighborhood.
One is the Village of cobblestone streets, enchanting houses, and sidewalk cafes. The other is the secret Village behind brick walls, embowering trees, iron fences, and horsewalk doorways.
But sometimes you find a portal into this secret West Village. The one I came across is an arched side entrance at a sweet, three-story white stucco house at 93 Perry Street (below).
Under the arched entrance is a locked gate, which leads to a slender outside passageway that takes you to a small courtyard and a second house. This backhouse, as it’s called, feels right out of a fairy tale—with rounded windows, decorative ironwork on the fire escape, and rustic wood shutters.
Backhouses aren’t unusual in downtown neighborhoods; an estimated 75 of them still stand in Greenwich Village, according to a 2002 New York Times article. Some are visible through cracks between buildings, while others are true secrets hemmed in by buildings.
What makes this backhouse more unusual is the small, shady courtyard in front of it separating the two houses into what seems like distinct entities.
Trees and plants make the court feel more like a front yard; cracks in the stone and concrete on the ground carry an air of neglect. But the privacy it affords is a rarity in contemporary New York. What’s the story behind it?
Backhouses were typically built by the owner of the front-facing house to serve as a carriage house or a workspace. In a 19th century city with fewer housing regulations, they were also used as illegal rental units that could make extra cash for an unscrupulous owner willing to pack in boarders.
The backhouse at 93 Perry Street was built as a workspace for a carpenter who purchased this lot of land in 1811.
“Abraham A. Campbell, a local carpenter-builder, leased the lot for 21 years and built his shop on it in 1827, and his house the following year, making it his home and place of business until late in 1832 when he sold the lease ‘and the buildings thereon,'” states the 1969 Greenwich Village Historic District designation report.
Campbell bought the land under his two houses when the former country village of Greenwich was transitioning into New York City’s newest sought-after neighborhood, thanks to overcrowding and disease outbreaks in the lower city.
Selling his lease in 1832 must have netted Campbell a tidy profit, which he used to relocate to West 12th Street. The West Village continued to grow through the 1800s, and waves of new residents of 93 Perry Street reflected the more middle- and working-class population in later decades. (Above, in 1932)
As for the courtyard, like many of the alleys and lanes of the era that have been paved over and de-mapped, it may have once had a real name.
A wistful 1924 article in the New York Evening Post described the backhouse and delved into the mystery of what the writer called the “nameless” courtyard. This sketch (below) from the article captures the scene in time.
“The city ought to establish a lost-and-found department to help recapture odd little streets and courts and alleys that have wandered away like strayed waifs and lost themselves in the bewildering maze of New York byways,” read the article. “Take, for instance, one little alley just off Perry Street, past Bleecker. Everything about it is lost. Name, country, identification of any sort.”
“Some people have lived there for years, and are still at a loss for an address….Sometimes, to be sure, out of sheer necessity, the residents of Nameless alley supply the title ‘Perry Court.'”
“No one ventures a definite solution of the mystery,” the article concluded. “But there is singing from an open window where bright flowers edge the sill, and the least tinge of corned beef and cabbage is in the air. Everybody’s happy—and what’s in a name?”
One person who made note of this Evening Post writeup when it appeared was author H.P. Lovecraft. A resident of New York City in the 1920s, this horror and science fiction writer published a short story titled “He,” which involved a narrator taking a late-night, time-traveling sojourn through Greenwich Village.
“At the conclusion of ‘He,’ a passerby finds the narrator—bloodied and broken—lying at the entrance to a Perry Street courtyard,” wrote David J. Goodwin, author of the 2023 book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham.
In “He,” from 1925, the narrator calls it “a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section,” as well as “a little black court off Perry Street.”
It would be strange to call the courtyard “grotesque” today, as it and the backhouse have an old-school charm increasingly difficult to find in today’s tidy, hyper-expensive West Village.
These days, the backhouse appears to be a rental building with one- and two-bedroom units—a very different setup from Abraham Campbell’s workshop in the West Village of 200 years ago.
[Sixth image: NYPL, 1932; eighth image: New York Evening Post, August 1924]
