She wrote about it herself for a magazine spread photographed by Horst, describing a sleeping balcony built from salvaged porch fragments and a living room furnished with seven-dollar pillows and secondhand couches. At the time she was already one of the country’s most recognized magazine writers, a couple of years from co-founding the publication that would define her career.
Steinem died on September 2, 2026, at her home in New York City, at 92. She’d lived in a version of that same three-story Upper East Side brownstone for more than six decades, and by the end of her life the building had become something close to an archive of the feminist movement she helped build.
VIDEO | Architectural Digest: Inside Gloria Steinem’s history-filled New York home
By 1970, Steinem had spent most of a decade building a reputation as a journalist, first with an undercover article on working as a Playboy Bunny in 1963, then with a political column for New York magazine called “The City Politic.” A 1968 meeting with the radical feminist group Redstockings pushed her toward the cause that would define the rest of her life.
Within a couple of years, she’d helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus alongside Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, and Ms. magazine followed in 1972. Many of its earliest planning meetings happened right there, in the apartment she’d just finished decorating on a budget.
The photos and clippings collected here show that apartment as Steinem described it, including the salvaged balcony bolted to the wall so it could come down without a fight with her landlord, and small personal touches like Indian scarves and a photo of actress Jeanne Moreau propped in the fireplace.
Take a look at Gloria Steinem’s home (1970)
Of her New York apartment, Steinem wrote: “After too much moving… cheerful rooms to live in, a private place to work.”
By Gloria Steinem (Photography by Horst)
The sleeping balcony allows me to use the other room in my brownstone floor-through as an office.
The corner under the balcony was useless anyway, except as a dining room for the sit-down dinners I never give. Now, it’s good for sprawling around and listening to music or just talking.
The big pillows cost all of $7 each (an invention of Jane’s small decorating firm, Hitana), the little plastic tables came from Albrizzi, and the Indian dishes are the rewards of travel. The whole balcony is bolted to the wall and can be taken away — a necessity imposed by New York landlords.
If I’m smiling, it’s because I have a grown-up apartment at last.
Steinem’s “grown up” ’70s apartment in New York
One day, I figured out that I had not been completely unpacked in eight years. College books were still stored in some dormitory attic, patient friends were keeping more books plus mementos of two years in India, and my mother was looking after clothes and letters unsorted since high school days.
I’d had several apartments, but none I really liked. For three years, I’d been living in a studio that was pleasant but much too small: Friends referred to its decor as “Pop-Art-Collier-Brothers.”
Since I work at home, I was determined to find a decent-sized apartment, and to do something about making it a cheerful place to be.
This may not sound unusual to normal people who live in houses and work from nine to five, but for a transitory New Yorker, especially a freelance writer who lives an odd unstructured life, it was a major decision.
It took nearly a year to find the apartment, and a year after that I still have things to do.
“If I don’t work well in this room, the fault can only be mine.”
The decoration got done in fits and starts: First, a junkyard yielded fragments of somebody’s old front porch, which made a perfect sleeping balcony; then I found an out-of-work art director to nail it up.
Finally, Jane Holzer, an actress with a genius for color and beautiful bargains, helped me find printed fabric for the curtains and walls and Indian scarves for the alcove under the balcony, because I wanted a reminder of India.
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The couches at the other end of the living room, are good ones, down-filled, bought secondhand, and slipcovered with the wall fabric.
The Italian benches are remnants of another apartment, as is the Bermuda bed in my workroom. Its cotton flame-stitch cover dictated the wall and curtains, but I liked Jane’s idea of adding an under-curtain for depth. Posters and friendly faces disguise a big cupboard.
The 12-inch cubicles are my favorite kind of bookcase, the country roulette wheel was another wrecking company find, and that’s actress Jeanne Moreau in the fireplace.
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Gloria Steinem on the cover of Newsweek magazine (1971)
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