This charming little house is known as the Goodnight Moon house. It began as a farmhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, built in the middle of the 19^th Century.  At that time is was known as Cobble Court because it was surrounded by cobblestones in its courtyard. In the 1940s Margaret Wise Brown rented the little house for a writing studio and there wrote the children’s book Goodnight Moon.  She also described it in her book The Hidden House, “It was a little house in the middle of a big city. And nobody knew it was there. It had been there for years and years, for over a hundred years, forgotten. And there it stood in a hidden garden in the middle of a big block of skyscrapers.”

Brown wrote most of her 100 children’s books at Cobble Court, including her perennial bestsellers, The Runaway Bunny, Mr. Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Himself, and Goodnight Moon. The fireplace pictured in Goodnight Moon is said to be the Cobble Court fireplace

The house was facing demolition in the 1960s. Tenants Sven and Ingrid Bernhard negotiated to move the house rather than see it destroyed. In 1967, Cobble Court was transported on a flatbed truck to its current location at 121 Charles Street in Greenwich Village, where it remains a private residence and a literary landmark.

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