James Dean’s Studio Apartment

Despite being just steps from a glamorous stretch of Central Park, James Dean’s studio apartment on West 68th Street in New York City was decidedly collegiate. The actor lived in the rented space, off and on, from 1953 until his death in a car crash two years later. (The photograph here was published in Life magazine, six months before Dean was killed.) On the top floor of a five-story, 19th-century redbrick townhouse, Dean’s New York City home was furnished with bohemian casualness. Outfitted with indifferent, seemingly secondhand furniture and knotty-pine shelves, the small, round-windowed interior had abstract art tacked to the walls and a matador’s cape hanging above the bed—the latter possession echoed in one of the books above the built-in desk: Volume 5 of Los Toros, a 1943 encyclopedia of bullfighting by José María Cossío. The bath, shared with other tenants, was located down the hall.