The Cherry Ames Page: No. 9 Standish Street

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No. 9 Standish Street

"I met a tiger on the sidewalk," Mai Lee panted.

"That's the Village," Gwen said brightly. "Always something exotic. ... Isn't it fascinating to go out marketing and meet celebrities?"

"No!" they thundered at her.

--From Cherry Ames, Visiting Nurse, pp. 23-24

When Cherry and five other members of the Spencer Club decide to embark on new careers as Visiting Nurses in New York City (Visiting Nurse), they take an apartment together in Greenwich Village, at 9 Standish Street--referred to most often as No. 9.

Standish Street is narrow and crooked, with a row of demure, little old brick houses from Revolutionary War days. The buildings have brass doorposts, many-paned windows with crisp curtains, white shutters, and window boxes trailing ivy and geraniums.

Behind the Door

The door to No. 9 is two steps up from the sidewalk, and leads to a dim hallway where a mahogany table holds a bowl of fresh flowers and a pile of mail for the building tenants. A carpeted stairway winds its way upstairs. On the ground floor is a blue door, next to which the nurses have tacked a neat row of engraved cards with their names. Behind that door is their apartment.

The living room has attractive gold-and-white sprigged wallpaper and a passable carpet. Against one wall is a stately fireplace, with a handsome clock from Ann on the mantel. Chairs are grouped on either side of the fireplace, and a sofa and low tables are on the opposite wall. On the far wall stand tall twin chests of drawers.

Victorian Living in Hilton

The Ames family home in Hilton is large and serene. Can you guess the color scheme in Cherry's bedroom? Click here to read more!

The street windows are curtained with thin gold gauze curtains, bought with a check sent by Cherry's father. Under the windows are low bookcases, painted yellow and overflowing with books and magazines. Several lamps illuminate the room, and one wall is decorated with Mai Lee's Chinese prints.

Blue Furniture

The kitchen is a converted closet, with a small unreliable stove, a miniature icebox, and a tiny sink. Shelves are built into the remaining space.

A narrow hallway with a trap door leads to three small double bedrooms, poky and rather cheerless; Cherry shares a room with Gwen. Farther down the hall is a back parlor, square, good-sized, and sunny, with windows facing the garden. The room has a wooden table and chairs and sideboard that the girls, at Cherry's suggestion, paint bright blue, for fun (without permission, leading to dire threats from the janitor). They paper the room in red, white, and blue Pennsylvania Dutch wallpaper, and use it as a dining room and to entertain guests.

A back door leads from this room to the garden: a tiny square of grass enclosed by a high board fence, with a row of tall brick houses looking down on it; to Cherry it seems like the bottom of a well. Mai Lee grows flowers there: nasturtiums and marigolds, and morning glories climbing the fence.

Cherry and the others often leave New York City for other jobs, and rarely are all six of them in residence. But they retain the apartment as a kind of headquarters and periodically have reunions there.