Gay Street

Gay Street Review

A curved, one-block lane lined with small row houses, Gay Street is named after Sydney Howard Gay, managing editor of the long-defunct New York Tribune, who lived here during the Civil War with his wife and fellow abolitionist Lucretia Mott. In the 1930s this darling thoroughfare and nearby Christopher Street became famous nationwide when, from No. 14, Ruth McKenney wrote her somewhat zany autobiographical stories published in The New Yorker and later in My Sister Eileen, based on what happened when she and her sister moved to Greenwich Village from Ohio.