NYC Residences Of Georgia O'Keeffe And Patricia Highsmith Mapped As LGBT Historic Sites

Artist Georgia O'Keeffe, celebrated for her modernist paintings of flowers, and Patricia Highsmith, the prolific writer best known for such works as Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), have been added to New York City's LGBT historical narrative. This month, the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project published two new entries to its website, a compendium of extant sites in all five boroughs where LGBT history has occurred and influenced our city and our nation's culture.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Residence at the Hotel Shelton (525 Lexington Avenue, now the Marriott East Side) is where the artist lived and worked, in suite 3003, from 1925 to 1936. Although married to well-known photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, O'Keeffe had relationships with women throughout her lifetime.

"Georgia O'Keeffe's 30th-floor suite factored heavily into the artist's work," said Amanda Davis, project manager for the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. "It's especially powerful to see O'Keeffe's paintings of her view from the Hotel Shelton, to understand the City as she perceived it from atop, then, the tallest hotel in not only Manhattan but the world."

In the artist's own words: "I know it's unusual for an artist to want to work way up near the roof of a big hotel, in the heart of a roaring city, but I think that's just what the artist of today needs for stimulus. He has to have a place where he can behold the city as a unit before his eyes but at the same time have enough space left to work ..." - Georgia O'Keeffe, 1928

The Patricia Highsmith Residence (48 Grove Street), where the author lived from 1940 to 1942 while a student at Manhattan's Barnard College. Grove Street was featured in at least two of Highsmith's novels: Edith's Diary (1977) and Found in the Street (1986).

"Patricia Highsmith's time at Barnard shaped her as an emerging writer, and it was there that she first started to write fiction," said Sarah Sargent, historic preservationist and researcher who consulted with the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project on both the Highsmith and O'Keeffe sites. "Highsmith also served as editor of the Barnard Quarterly, a campus literary magazine, and it was during her junior year at Barnard that she met artist Buffie Johnson and the two had a brief romantic relationship."

Her most notable work with an LGBT theme was The Price of Salt (1952), a lesbian love story that was based on Highsmith's brief encounter with a woman while working at a Bloomingdale's toy counter. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories in her lifetime.

Highsmith's Greenwich Village neighborhood had a lasting influence that reemerged in her later work. While living at 48 Grove Street, she became enamored with the local piano bars and vibrant city nightlife. She often frequented the nearby lesbian bars, as well as Marie's Crisis Cafe at No. 59 on Grove Street.

Visit the Patricia Highsmith Residence

Other history-making women featured on www.nyclgbtsites.org include:

Lorraine Hansberry: While living at 337 Bleecker Street, pioneering female playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry lived parallel lives: one as a playwright and the other as a woman who privately explored her homosexuality through her writing, relationships, and social circle. Following the success of her work A Raisin in the Sun -- the first play by a black woman to appear on Broadway -- Hansberry purchased and moved to 112 Waverly Place, where she met and began a relationship with Dorothy Secules. (more)

Alice Austen: Pioneering female photographer Alice Austen grew up in her family's home where she later lived with schoolteacher Gertrude Tate, her partner of 53 years. Austen's work includes early images of women embracing and dressed in male drag, which have since become iconic to the LGBT community. In 2017, the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project was proud to successfully amend the home's National Register of Historic Places nomination to include Austen and Tate's relationship, with the support of the Alice Austen House Museum. (more)

Berenice Abbott: A photographer who, according to the New York Times, "provided an invaluable historical record of the physical appearance of the city at a time when it was undergoing rapid transformation," Berenice Abbott lived with her partner, Elizabeth McCausland, in Greenwich Village for thirty years. Abbott's photographs were featured in the iconic book Changing New York and she was also a sought-after portraitist. Among her lesbian subjects were New Yorker writer Janet Flanner, writer Djuna Barnes, and Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, the founders in 1914 of the avant-garde literary magazine Little Review. She also photographed bisexual poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. (more)