There are a lot of things to love about Doctor Strange. His costume is amazing. His powers are potentially limitless. And then there’s his headquarters – a mysterious townhouse located at 177A Bleecker Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. A veritable museum of magical treasures, Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum is one of New York’s greatest landmarks in the superhero community.
But just why is Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum located in Greenwich? Many outsiders, from demons to overzealous fans, have speculated about the significance of Strange’s address. While most suspect some dark, magic-related secret, the truth – revealed by Strange himself – is both hilarious and heartwarming.
In the MCU films, Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum is one of three Sanctums in the world – with the other two being in London and Hong Kong. Protected by the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj, Strange learns the Sanctums are strategically positioned to form a protective shield around the Earth, guarding it against other dimensional threats. When the master of the New York Sanctum is killed, Strange inherits the house and becomes its new guardian.
In the comics, however, Doctor Strange acquires the Sanctum through more mundane means – he rented it! Needing a base of operations from which to fulfill his duties as a mystic guardian (and later Sorcerer Supreme), Strange found the three-story townhouse fit his needs well and proceeded to stock it with all of his mystical artifacts and books.
Unfortunately, this sentiment wasn’t shared by a building inspector who appeared in Strange Tales #147 and told Strange that the building would be condemned in six months if Strange didn’t get the place painted and “seal up these moldy trap doors and hidden passageways!” Strange was forced to find ways of making money to pay for the repairs – and at one point even entertained the idea of working as a stage magician!
Other stories claimed the Sanctum was built upon a site of pagan sacrifices and Native American rituals, making it a focal point for supernatural energies. While this helped explain some of the general weirdness that happened in Strange’s house, in Doctor Strange #9, writer Mark Waid helped reveal the real reason Strange chooses to live in Greenwich Village.
The story begins years earlier with Strange shopping at a local grocery store and learning that Bleecker Street is in danger of being “gentrified” by the Falston Corporation that’s been trying to buy up the whole block. The news upsets Strange’s neighbors who like the character and history of the Village the way it is.
Strange agrees and refuses to sell his house – but when an aggressive realtor tries to push him around, Strange invites him into the Sanctum – and proceeds to freak him out with the house’s MC Escher-type architecture and its tendency to rewrite the laws of gravity, causing the realtor to nearly fall to his death just by walking through the front door. Falston’s plans fall through and Bleecker Street retains its unique character.
But the real estate companies aren’t through with Strange’s neighborhood yet. Five years later, Strange is babysitting his neighbor’s kids (who love the fact that they get to fly around on unicorns and play with floating blocks when they hang out in the Sanctum) when some goons from Eldrichan, a new real estate conglomerate, plant a bomb in the neighborhood laundromat to scare the owners into selling. Strange protects his friends and restores the bomb back to its original state (complete with incriminating fingerprints) and then informs the new company that his neighborhood is not for sale.
However, the president of Eldrichan informs Strange that he’s just an underling – and two years later, the company attempts to tear apart the neighborhood by spreading bad press about Strange being an “evil Satanist.” More of Strange’s neighbors get hurt by demonstrators, so the good doctor introduces the company to his “lawyer” – a seven-foot-tall horned demon carrying a briefcase. Once again, Eldrichan caves and prints retractions on all of their fake news articles.
While Strange was content to treat Eldrichan as a minor annoyance up to this point, eventually he comes face-to-face with its big boss – a multi-tentacled demon who reveals he was summoned by original realtors to secure the land deal. Convinced that Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum must be built on a “nexus point of arcane forces,” the demon has been trying to buy Strange’s neighborhood to gain these “hellmouths to unspeakable power” for himself.
Annoyed by the demon’s ridiculous rantings, Strange blasts his enemy away and then reveals why he’s really so protective of Bleecker Street – he likes the people who live there. According to Strange:
“This is a wonderful neighborhood full of joy and life! It is quirky and it is charming and good families have built lives here that I will not let you destroy! That’s what I’m protecting!”
To emphasize his point, Strange teleports the entire Sanctum Sanctorum to the moon, revealing that he can make his house go anywhere but prefers to remain in Greenwich Village. Kicking the demon out of his home, Strange tells him to gentrify fourteen-point-six-million square miles of lifeless, airless terrain before teleporting back to Greenwich.
It’s a hilarious ending (and one heck of an endorsement of Greenwich Village), but sadly one that can’t be used in the MCU Doctor Strange movies. By opting for a “cosmic” explanation of why the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj live in the Sanctums, the films show that Strange only lives in Greenwich Village out of a sense of duty, not personal preference. Ironically, this makes the comic book Doctor Strange a bit more down-to-earth as his living accommodations reflect his need to stay in touch with his humanity even while his job takes him to more fantastic realms.
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