Editing Nero Wolfe (section)

===Brownstone===
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{{blockquote|I rarely leave my house. I do like it here. I would be an idiot to leave this chair, made to fit me —|Nero Wolfe in "[[Before I Die (short story)|Before I Die]]" (1947), chapter 2}}

Wolfe has expensive tastes, living in a comfortable and luxurious New York City [[brownstone]] on the south side of West 35th Street. The brownstone has three floors plus a large basement with living quarters, a rooftop greenhouse also with living quarters, and a small elevator, used almost exclusively by Wolfe. Other unique features include a timer-activated window-opening device that regulates the temperature in Wolfe's bedroom, an alarm system that sounds a gong in Archie's room if someone approaches Wolfe's bedroom door or windows, and climate-controlled plant rooms on the top floor. Wolfe is a well-known amateur [[orchid]] grower and has 10,000 plants in the brownstone's greenhouse. He employs three live-in staff to see to his needs: Archie Goodwin (assistant), Fritz Brenner (chef), and Theodore Horstmann (orchidist).

The front door is equipped with a chain bolt, a bell that can be shut off as needed, and a pane of [[two-way mirror|one-way glass]], which enables Archie to see who is on the [[Stoop (architecture)|stoop]] before deciding whether to open the door.{{efn|In most of the corpus, it is seven steps from the sidewalk to the stoop (for example, "[[The Squirt and the Monkey]]"; ''[[Before Midnight (novel)|Before Midnight]]'', chapter 5; ''[[Might as Well Be Dead]]'', chapter 2; ''[[A Family Affair (novel)|A Family Affair]]'', chapter 3), but it is eight steps in "[[Booby Trap (novella)|Booby Trap]]", chapter 5.}} The front room is used as a waiting area for visitors while Archie informs Wolfe of their arrival, and also as a place for Archie to hide one visitor from another.

Wolfe's bedroom is on the second floor of the brownstone, and Archie's is on the third. Each of these floors also includes one spare bedroom, used on occasion to house a variety of clients, witnesses, and sometimes even culprits. Wolfe takes pride in being able to offer such assistance and once remarked, "The guest is a jewel resting on the cushion of hospitality".<ref>''[[Too Many Cooks (novel)|Too Many Cooks]]'', chapter 6.</ref>

Wolfe's office becomes nearly soundproof when the doors connecting it to the front room and the hallway are closed. There is a [[Peephole|small hole in the office wall]] covered by what Archie calls a "trick picture of a waterfall".<ref>''[[The Doorbell Rang]]'', chapter 13. According to chapter 16 of ''[[Too Many Clients]]'', the picture measures 14 by 17 inches.</ref> A person in an alcove at the end of the hallway can open a sliding panel covering the hole, so as to see and hear conversations and other events in the office without being noticed. The chair behind Wolfe's desk is custom-built, with special springs to hold his weight; according to Archie, it is the only chair that Wolfe really enjoys sitting in.{{efn|Wolfe has another chair in the bedroom that is nearly as good as the one in the office. In "[[Help Wanted, Male]]" (chapter 5) it is called his "number two chair".}} Near the desk is a large chair upholstered in red leather, which is usually reserved for Inspector Cramer, a current or prospective client, or the person whom Wolfe and Archie want to question. In the short story "[[The Squirt and the Monkey]]", Wolfe and Archie have a hidden tape recorder and microphone installed in the office, with controls in the kitchen. In the story "[[Eeny Meeny Murder Mo]]", the system is modified to transmit sound to a speaker in the front room.

The brownstone has a back entrance leading to a private garden, as noted in ''[[Champagne for One]]'' (chapter 10) and elsewhere, from which a passage leads to 34th Street—used to enter or leave Wolfe's home when it is necessary to evade surveillance. Archie says that Fritz tries to grow herbs such as chives in the garden.

"That readers have proved endlessly fascinated with the topography of Wolfe's brownstone temple should not be surprising", wrote J. Kenneth Van Dover in ''At Wolfe's Door'':

<blockquote>It is the center from which moral order emanates, and the details of its layout and its operations are signs of its stability. For forty years, Wolfe prepares menus with Fritz and pots orchids with Theodore. For forty years, Archie takes notes at his desk, the client sits in the red chair and the other principals distribute themselves in the yellow chairs, and Wolfe presides from his custom-made throne. For forty years, Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley Stebbins ring the doorbell, enter the office, and explode with indignation at Wolfe's intractability. The front room, the elevator, the three-foot globe—all persist in place through forty years of American history. ... Like Holmes's 221B Baker Street, Wolfe's West Thirty-Fifth Street remains a fixed point in a turning world.<ref name="Van Dover"/>{{Rp|3}}</blockquote>

In the course of the books, ten different street addresses are given on West 35th Street:
* 506 in ''[[Over My Dead Body (novel)|Over My Dead Body]]'', chapter 12
* 618 in ''[[Too Many Clients]]'', chapter 4
* 902 in ''[[Murder by the Book]]'', chapter 7
* 909 in ''[[Before I Die (short story)|Before I Die]]'', chapter 10
* 914 in ''[[Too Many Women (novel)|Too Many Women]]'', chapter 24
* 918 in ''[[The Red Box]]'', chapter 3
* 919 in ''[[The Silent Speaker]]'', chapter 12
* 922 in ''[[The Silent Speaker]],'' chapter 2
* 924 in ''[[Man Alive (short story)|Man Alive]]'', chapter 9
* 938 in ''[[Death of a Doxy]]'', chapter 4{{efn|[[Ken Darby]] identifies the ten brownstone addresses and additional stories in which they appear. The most frequently used address for Nero Wolfe's residence is 918 West 35th Street—the address that Darby found in ''[[The Red Box]]'', ''[[And Be a Villain]]'', "[[The Next Witness]]" and "[[Method Three for Murder]]".<ref name="Darby">{{cite book |last=Darby |first=Ken |author-link=Ken Darby |date=1983 |title=The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe |location=Boston and Toronto |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |isbn=0-316-17280-4 |url=https://archive.org/details/brownstonehouseo00darb }}</ref>{{Rp|9}}}}

"Curiously, the 900 block of West 35th Street would be in the Hudson River", wrote American writer [[Randy Cohen]], who created a map of the literary stars' homes for ''[[The New York Times]]'' in 2005. "It's a non-address, the real estate equivalent of those [[555 (telephone number)|555 telephone numbers]] used in movies." Cohen settled on 922 West 35th Street—the address printed on Archie's business card in ''The Silent Speaker''—as Nero Wolfe's address.<ref>{{cite news |last=Cohen |first=Randy |author-link=Randy Cohen |date=May 1, 2005 |title=We'll Map Manhattan |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/books/review/well-map-manhattan.html |newspaper=The New York Times  |access-date=2015-10-31 }}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last=Cohen |first=Randy |date=June 5, 2005 |title=We Mapped Manhattan |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/books/review/we-mapped-manhattan.html |newspaper=The New York Times  |access-date=2015-10-31 }}</ref> On the "Literary Map of Manhattan", the brownstone is numbered 58 and is placed in the middle of the Hudson River.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Cohen |first1=Randy |last2=Holmes  |first2=Nigel |date=June 5, 2005 |title=A Literary Map of Manhattan |url=https://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/06/05/books/20050605_BOOKMAP_GRAPHIC.html |newspaper=The New York Times  |access-date=2015-10-31 }}</ref>

It is described in the opening chapter of ''[[The Second Confession]]'' as being on West Thirty-Fifth Street "nearly to 11th Avenue", which would put it in the 500 block.

Writing as Archie Goodwin, [[Ken Darby]] suggests that "the actual location was on East 22nd Street in the [[Gramercy Park]] District. ... Wolfe merely moved us, fictionally, from one place to the other in order to preserve his particular brand of privacy. As far as ''I'' can discover, there never ''were'' brownstone houses on West 35th Street."<ref name="Darby"/>{{Rp|8}}{{efn|Stout was playfully erratic about details in the stories. Besides the varying street addresses, he retained minor inconsistencies, and catching them is one of the pleasures of readers of the Nero Wolfe stories. Inspector Cramer's first name, rarely invoked, was originally Fergus, and later modified to L.T. Wolfe's attorney Nathaniel Parker was also known as Henry Parker and Henry Barber. An assistant district attorney was either Mandel or Mandelbaum. The same surnames are assigned to supporting characters in different stories: Jarrett, Jaret, Jarrell, Dykes, Annis, Avery, Bowen, Yerkes, Whipple and others.}}

The absence of brownstones in Wolfe's neighborhood sent television producers to the Upper West Side of Manhattan for an appropriate home and setting for select exterior shots, used in the [[A&E Network|A&E]] TV series ''[[Nero Wolfe (2001 TV series)|Nero Wolfe]]''. This Manhattan brownstone lacked some peculiarities of Wolfe's home, unlike the model specially constructed on the Toronto set where most of the series was filmed{{efn|"And Hutton, bless him, took pains to make sure that the stoop, meticulously recreated in a freezing Ontario warehouse soundstage really did have seven steps", reported Martin Sieff of [[United Press International]].<ref>{{cite news |last=Sieff |first=Martin |date=December 25, 2001 |title=Happy Christmas, Santa Wolfe |url=http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2001/12/25/Happy_Christmas_Santa_Wolfe/UPI-97501009257337/ |newspaper=[[United Press International]] |access-date=2015-10-31 }}</ref>}}—for example, the correct number of steps leading up to the stoop. It was, therefore, shown from angles that would camouflage any slight discrepancies.{{efn|WireImage (image numbers 253302 – 253308) and [[Getty Images]] (image number 1302172) document the location photography directed by Timothy Hutton on October 15, 2000, also seen in the A&E documentary ''The Making of Nero Wolfe''.}} The series settled on "914" for the brownstone's address. This number can be seen on the studio set representing the front door exterior in several episodes and on a closeup of Archie's paycheck in "[[Prisoner's Base#A Nero Wolfe Mystery (A&E Network)|Prisoner's Base]]".