History of Gramercy Park

Water beneath the streets

Before there was a square, there was water. A clear stream known as Cedar Creek rose from springs near Madison Square and Sunfish Pond—where Manhattan boys once went to swim—and wound southeast across the low basin beneath today’s Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets before emptying into the East River near Eighteenth Street. Long before colonial deeds divided this ground into farms, it was part of Lenape Manhattan, crossed by footpaths linking seasonal fishing camps and planting fields between the Hudson and the East River.

The neighborhood’s name preserves a trace of that vanished terrain. Seventeenth-century Dutch records use spellings such as Crommessie, Crummashie, and Krom Moerasje, all tied to a crooked watercourse or marsh. Later writers offered two main Dutch derivations: krom moerasje (“little crooked swamp”) and krom mesje (“little crooked knife,” after the hook-shaped bend of the brook and its adjoining ridge). Over the eighteenth century the word settled into English as “Gramercy,” outliving both the swamp and the stream.

Gramercy Seat

By the middle of the eighteenth century, country estates and bowery farms spread north of the crowded port at Manhattan’s southern tip. Beginning in 1761, a young lawyer named James Duane bought a series of adjoining parcels along the Kip’s Bay road east of the Bowery Lane, assembling roughly twenty acres of pasture, orchard, and woodland into a country retreat he called Gramercy Seat.

After serving in the Continental Congress during the Revolution, Duane rode back into Manhattan alongside General George Washington when British troops evacuated the city in November 1783, and was appointed New York’s first post-Revolutionary mayor. Between his duties downtown at City Hall and later on the federal bench, he returned to Gramercy Seat to repair his plundered farmhouse and replant his orchards. The city still felt miles away.

The city on paper

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 brought the city to Duane’s pastures, at least on paper. Its grid of avenues and numbered cross streets marched north to 155th Street across hills, valleys, and streams as if Manhattan were a flat sheet of ledger paper. Turning those ink lines into actual streets and buildable lots would take decades.

In the spring of 1831, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer and canal promoter named Samuel Bulkley Ruggles bought the twenty-two-acre Gramercy Farm from Duane’s heirs, led by the mayor’s daughter Catharine Livingston Duane. Where less imaginative buyers saw a wet hollow cut by a brook, Ruggles saw the chance to build a neighborhood around a private square modeled on London’s residential parks—reserving a garden at the center so the houses around it would always have light, air, and an open view.

Moving a hill into a marsh

Before anyone could build a house around the square, the land itself had to be remade. In his 1921 history of the Park, John B. Pine recounts how Ruggles bought higher ground toward the Bowery known as Cedar Hill alongside the marsh below it, then hired teams of horses and laborers to haul nearly a million cartloads of earth from the hill into the swamp and enclose the old stream in underground culverts. The quiet square began with a great deal of digging.

At a time when New York speculators usually built on every available foot, Ruggles made a calculated wager: he took forty-two city lots off the market to create a garden. On December 17, 1831, Samuel B. and Mary Rosalie Rathbone Ruggles conveyed the Park—a rectangle measuring 520 feet by 184 feet between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets, including the carriageways and footwalks at its ends—to five Trustees: Charles Augustus Davis, Thomas L. Wells, Robert D. Weeks, Thomas R. Mercein, and Philo T. Ruggles. The founding indenture called for an ornamental garden enclosed by an iron railing, set deadlines for fencing and planting, and established how the Trustees would maintain the Park and choose their successors.

Around the square, Ruggles laid out sixty-six building lots. Six were soon given over to the city for new streets, leaving the sixty numbered lots that shared the right to use the Park and the obligation to pay for its upkeep. A confirmatory deed of December 24, 1833, secured those garden privileges as a permanent easement tied to the sixty lots, while deed restrictions required brick or stone dwelling houses at least three stories tall and barred stables, factories, taverns, and trade. Each lot bore one-sixtieth of the cost of maintaining the garden.

The neat rectangle of the Park makes the undertaking look simpler than it was. City Surveyor Edwin Smith’s map of December 31, 1831, shows the negotiations behind it: Ruggles spent much of that year buying parcels from different owners and trading narrow strips of land with neighbors, including Catharine L. Duane and Cornelius T. Williams, to square diagonal colonial farm boundaries with the 1811 street grid. Even the Park’s location between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets was a practical choice: there, Ruggles could surround the garden entirely with his own land.

In Ruggles’s own hand

Ruggles also understood that the 920-foot blocks between Third and Fourth Avenues were too wide for a walkable residential neighborhood. In 1832 he won permission from the state legislature to cut two new north–south streets meeting at the center of his square: Irving Place to the south, named for his friend Washington Irving, and Lexington Avenue to the north, recalling the Revolutionary battle.

Those new streets immediately created a danger: the legislature had authorized continuing a road straight through the Park toward Thirtieth Street. In a surviving memorandum and sketch dated July 12, 1832, Ruggles drew his answer. Irving Place would meet the already graded Twentieth Street in a T-junction, with a continuous sidewalk and curb running unbroken along the Park’s southern edge and a fence set right behind it:

“it would be most expedient not to open the new street through the park—at least not for the present.”

The paving helped persuade officials to leave the garden uncut. When Lexington Avenue opened in 1835, it began on the north side of Twenty-first Street, making the garden a deliberate interruption in the city’s north–south traffic.

Three neighboring squares

Other squares were taking shape nearby. Ruggles helped advance Union Square, which opened to the public in 1839. Two blocks to the east, land conveyed by Peter Gerard Stuyvesant in 1836 became Stuyvesant Square. Streets of substantial brick and brownstone houses soon linked all three gardens: private Gramercy at the center, and the two public squares to its west and east.

Planting the garden

The Panic of 1837 slowed building across New York for nearly a decade, and the trees came later than the fence. At the first recorded Trustees’ meeting, on November 15, 1844, the board ordered a privet border and one hundred trees: horse chestnuts, lindens, elms, maples, black walnuts, and mulberries among them. The shade in later photographs was still years away.

In 1846, the Trustees wanted a grand stone fountain modeled on those in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, to be paid for by the lot owners. The owners declined to pay for it. A simpler tiered cast-iron fountain was installed in 1848, six years after the Croton Aqueduct brought running water to Manhattan, and in 1866 the Park’s treasurer was directed to top it with a pewter water nymph who presided over the center of the garden for the next half century. Paying for the Park’s care remained a recurring problem: for years, Pine records, the annual charge was ten dollars a lot, supplemented by appeals for more, before rising to thirty dollars around 1877.

The first houses around the fence

By the late 1840s and 1850s, houses were rising on all four sides of the square. The five townhouses at 1–5 Gramercy Park West, built between 1844 and 1850, still give a sense of the neighborhood’s early scale. Paper merchant and Park Trustee Norman White developed two pairs along the row: Nos. 3 and 4, united by lacy cast-iron porches attributed to Alexander Jackson Davis, and the Italianate pair at Nos. 1 and 2.

Within a few doors of one another lived men whose work spanned publishing, medicine, and city government. Publisher James Harper, the eldest of the four brothers behind Harper & Brothers and mayor of New York in 1844–1845, moved into No. 4 in 1847; the cast-iron lamps that marked a mayor’s residence still stand at the foot of his steps. At No. 1 lived Dr. Valentine Mott, a founder of the New York University School of Medicine who had made his name pioneering vascular surgery before the age of anesthesia. Police Commissioner Richard French lived at No. 2, Columbia law professor Benjamin Franklin Lee later made his home at No. 3, and the Crocker and Hone families lived at No. 5.

Around the corner at Fourth Avenue and East 21st Street rose the two slender wooden spires of James Renwick Jr.’s brownstone Calvary Church, consecrated in June 1847. The parish had begun farther uptown in 1836 in a small green wooden church built so that it could be lifted off its basement and moved—and in 1841, a house-mover rolled it down Fourth Avenue to 22nd Street before the congregation built Renwick’s stone church on 21st Street. Construction outran the treasury so badly that Renwick and the builders had to be paid partly in church pews, and when rent on the gallery organ went unpaid, a vestryman bought the church’s interest in the instrument at a sheriff’s sale for ten dollars. An auction of every pew in October 1850 finally put the parish on solid ground. Samuel B. Ruggles served on its vestry until his death.

On the north side of the Park, Peter Cooper completed his house at Lexington Avenue and East 22nd Street (the site of today’s No. 7) around 1850. Pine remembered the house in detail: its cast-iron window lintels came from Cooper’s own foundry, the stable entrance faced 22nd Street, and Cooper drove to work in a one-horse carriage. At the northeast corner of the Park, on the site of One Lexington Avenue, brothers Cyrus W. Field and David Dudley Field built matching brownstones around 1852 with a shared double stoop and sliding parlor doors so their rooms could be thrown into one.

A hotel, two sanctuaries, and a school for girls

On the east side of the Park, Oscar S. Stebbins bought the entire blockfront in 1852 and put up a row of houses that were joined together the next year as Sanderson’s Family Hotel. By the 1860s, under proprietor Curtis Judson, it was the Gramercy Park House—a hotel “of colossal proportions” facing the Park’s shrubbery that drew guests from the American South and Cuba and hosted meetings of the Park’s lot owners long before the better-known Gramercy Park Hotel opened on the north side.

Along Gramercy Park South, two very different houses of worship stood near opposite ends of the block. At the corner of Fourth Avenue (No. 8) rose architect Jacob Wrey Mould’s red-and-cream-striped All Souls Unitarian Church—promptly nicknamed “The Church of the Holy Zebra” when it opened on Christmas Day 1855—beside an equally exuberant polychrome rectory. Near the eastern end of the walk at No. 28, architects King & Kellum completed the calm, restrained sandstone Friends Meeting House in 1859.

Between those two sanctuaries, brownstones housed families and schools. At Nos. 9 and 10, Henrietta B. Haines opened her school for girls by 1851; six-year-old Louise Whitfield (later Mrs. Andrew Carnegie) arrived as a pupil in 1863 and stayed for twelve years, and in 1872 German-trained educator Maria Boelté opened one of America’s first kindergartens in the house. Next door lived locomotive manufacturer Oliver De Forest Grant at No. 11 (whose Paterson works built the silver-clad locomotive America for the 1867 Paris Exposition), Superior Court Chief Justice Thomas Jackson Oakley behind the palm-leaf doorway pilasters of No. 12, banker Luther C. Clark at No. 18 (whose wisteria vine grew so thick it eventually lifted the iron fence off its stone coping), and Colonel Horace Brooks at No. 19.

The adjoining streets had begun filling even earlier. Garmey dates Nos. 144 and 146 East 19th Street to 1838–39 and credits Ruggles’s contractor George A. Furst. At the Irving Place corner, William Samuel Johnson’s 1853–54 house at No. 80 had its carriage house at 127 East 19th Street, one of the small service buildings that would later attract architects and artists.

Four evenings at Field’s dining table

Some of Gramercy’s most consequential history happened indoors. Early in 1854, telegraph entrepreneur Frederick Gisborne approached Cyrus W. Field at 123 East 21st Street about a telegraph line across Newfoundland. Studying a globe in his library afterward, Field wondered why a line could not continue across the ocean floor to Ireland. He wrote to Samuel F. B. Morse about the electrical questions and to oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury about the seabed, then invited four neighbors and fellow investors into his dining room: Peter Cooper (who had only a short walk from 9 Lexington Avenue), Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, and Chandler White.

For four consecutive March evenings, the five men examined company records, studied maps, and worked through estimates around Field’s dining table, signing an agreement on March 10, 1854. The next founding meeting took place next door at six in the morning on May 8—one of the men had to leave town that day, so they met before breakfast in the parlor of Cyrus’s brother David Dudley Field, whose 1848 Field Code of civil procedure had simplified the rules for bringing lawsuits across America. In the first morning light, they organized the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company, chose Cooper as president, and committed $1.5 million in capital.

In August 1858, Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan exchanged the first congratulatory messages across the ocean, setting off celebrations in Gramercy Park while Tiffany sold souvenir sections of cable. Within weeks the signal failed. Eight more years of snapped cables and Atlantic expeditions followed until the steamship Great Eastern established permanent service in July 1866. Meanwhile, Peter Cooper could walk south from his Gramercy home to Cooper Union, which opened in 1859. His son-in-law Abram S. Hewitt, who had joined the household after marrying Cooper’s daughter Sarah Amelia in 1855, shared that commitment to public life, later winning New York’s storied 1886 mayoral race over Henry George and a twenty-eight-year-old Theodore Roosevelt and earning lasting fame as the “Father of the New York Subway.”

The Sanitary Commission and howitzers in the Park

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, All Souls minister Henry Whitney Bellows helped organize and led the United States Sanitary Commission, which oversaw medical supplies, hospital ships, and camp inspections for the Union Army. Samuel Ruggles’s son-in-law, the diarist George Templeton Strong (who lived with Ruggles at 74 East 21st Street), served as the Commission’s treasurer, while parishioner Louisa Lee Schuyler took a leading part in its women’s relief network. Across the Park at the Friends Meeting House, Quaker women made clothing for formerly enslaved people, and future 34 Gramercy Park East resident Lucy Seaman Bainbridge served as a Union nurse with the Army of the Potomac.

In July 1863, the violence of the New York City Draft Riots came within a block of the garden. As mobs attacked Black New Yorkers, burned buildings, and fought soldiers along Third Avenue and Twenty-first Street, troops of the Eighth U.S. Artillery camped inside Gramercy Park and placed two howitzers near the northeast gate to guard the square and its surrounding houses. Austin Flint later recalled William T. Lusk commanding a detachment in the Park. In 1865, the Trustees applied unsuccessfully for reimbursement of expenses caused by the military occupation.

Tilden’s mansion and Bigelow’s library

In the 1870s, national attention turned to the south side of the Park. Samuel J. Tilden, the reform governor of New York who had helped break the Tweed Ring and won the national popular vote in the disputed presidential election of 1876, lived at 15 Gramercy Park South. A year after the election, on October 27, 1877, crowds still filled the street outside his door for a torchlight serenade. In 1881 Tilden bought adjoining No. 14 and hired Central Park co-designer Calvert Vaux to unite the two houses into the mansion now occupied by the National Arts Club—complete with carved stone heads of Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Franklin, and Dante on the facade, rolling steel shutters inside the windows to protect Tilden from political assassins, and an underground escape passage to 19th Street.

When Tilden died in 1886, he left the bulk of his fortune to create a free public library. His friend and chief executor John Bigelow, the former U.S. Minister to France who lived four doors east at 21 Gramercy Park South, worked from his book-lined study overlooking the Park to bring the Tilden Trust together with the Astor and Lenox libraries. In May 1895 they joined to form the New York Public Library, with Bigelow serving as its first president until his death at ninety-four in 1911.

Fifty-minute dinners, The Players, and a palace with painted ceilings

As fashionable New York moved north up Fifth Avenue, Gramercy’s large houses took on new lives. Theatergoers already knew the southern end of Irving Place, where the Academy of Music at East 14th Street had hosted opera, concerts, and public balls since 1854. In 1887, railroad president Stuyvesant Fish and his wife, Marian “Mamie” Fish, moved into the corner mansion at 19 Gramercy Park South, where Mrs. Fish’s sharp wit, top-floor balls, and brisk “fifty-minute dinners” made the house famous. Across the square at 2 Gramercy Park West, James and Mary Eno Pinchot bought their house the same year; there they welcomed naturalist John Muir, and there their son Gifford Pinchot opened America’s first consulting forestry office in 1893 before becoming first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

Three doors west of the Fish house, the tragedian Edwin Booth bought 16 Gramercy Park South in 1888. Stanford White remodeled the front with a two-story Renaissance loggia overlooking the Park, and on New Year’s Eve 1888 Booth handed over the deed and his theatrical collections to The Players. He wanted actors to meet writers, painters, sculptors, and architects—among them Mark Twain, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent—as friends, and he kept his own bedroom suite upstairs on the third floor until his death in June 1893.

Stanford White knew the square as a neighbor as well as an architect. He had created elaborate interiors for his own house at the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 21st Street, and between 1899 and 1901 he united the two Field brownstones across the avenue for banker and railroad publisher Henry William Poor, giving the combined mansion a new address: One Lexington Avenue. Inside were a glass conservatory, an indoor squash court, rare books, and painted ceilings from Italian palaces. The splendor lasted less than a decade. After Poor’s banking firm failed following the Panic of 1907, a four-day auction inside the house in April 1909 scattered everything—including a twelfth-century marble altar canopy bought by the Metropolitan Museum and the painted ceilings themselves, which were unscrewed from the overhead beams by their buyers.

Next door to The Players, the National Arts Club moved into Tilden’s mansion at Nos. 14–15 in 1906. Founded in 1898 by New York Times critic Charles de Kay, the Club had admitted women to full membership from the beginning, and it soon built a fourteen-story studio and apartment annex behind the mansion on East 19th Street. Describing the approaching move in the Times in September 1905, de Kay noted that clubs for actors, Columbia graduates (then at No. 18), university women (at No. 10), and artists were turning the south side into a gathering place of its own. Streetcars ran on Third and Fourth Avenues, and the Third Avenue elevated and the new 18th Street subway station sat close by, yet the avenues’ noise seemed to pass the garden by. De Kay called it a “quiet eddy.”

Artists on the top floor and reformers around the square

Painters and writers soon filled the surrounding blocks. In 1909, Ashcan School leader Robert Henri and his wife, cartoonist Marjorie Organ, moved into a top-floor studio at 10 Gramercy Park South, painting there for twenty years (and exhibiting together in the 1913 Armory Show) while George Bellows, John La Farge, William Merritt Chase, and Ernest Lawson worked in the National Arts Club studios next door. Farther south on Irving Place, interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and theatrical agent Elizabeth Marbury hosted a Sunday salon at No. 49 between 1892 and 1911, succeeded in the house by photographer Clarence H. White. A few doors north at No. 55 lived William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), who wrote stories like “The Gift of the Magi” in the neighborhood and frequented Healy’s Café (now Pete’s Tavern) at 18th Street, while nearby East 17th Street housed musicians, actors, and piano makers in a lively German-American community.

Music had its own less conspicuous address. Garmey places Arthur Sullivan at 45 East 20th Street, completing The Pirates of Penzance on December 31, 1879, the day of its New York premiere. A room on a residential side street belonged to the same theatrical city as the Academy of Music and The Players.

The neighboring houses also sheltered professional and academic lives. Dr. James Hyslop lived at 109 East 19th Street; No. 113 was associated with William Rhinelander and, later, theater architects Herts & Tallant. At No. 116, the Reverend Howard Crosby, chancellor of New York University, lived from 1875 to 1891. Garmey recalls childhoods on Irving Place as well: Gladys Brooks at the earlier No. 81 and future educator Henry Noble MacCracken at No. 84, the address recorded for his father’s household in contemporary university publications.

During these same years, women around the square built institutions of their own. At 9 Lexington Avenue, Peter Cooper’s granddaughters Sarah Cooper Hewitt, Eleanor Garnier Hewitt, and Amy Hewitt Green pooled their allowances to found the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration in 1897—assembling the textiles, drawings, and decorative arts that form today’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. At Calvary Church under Rector Henry Yates Satterlee, parishioner Rebecca Salome Foster—known across the city as the “Tombs Angel”—arrived in the church vestibule at nine o’clock each morning to meet people in trouble; on a single morning she recorded finding seven people waiting, giving money for food and rent to three, buying shoes for two, and walking the last two to department stores to ask for jobs before heading downtown to help women and first-time offenders in the criminal courts. When she died in a hotel fire in 1902, Manhattan’s criminal courts delayed opening so judges and prosecutors could sit beside former prisoners at her funeral in Calvary.

Other houses around the fence were put to new social and intellectual uses. Grace Hoadley Dodge helped equip the YWCA National Training School at 3 Gramercy Park West (where graduating students held a springtime candlelight procession through the Park), while John S. Kennedy’s Christian Workers’ Home stood at No. 7. In her suite at 10 Gramercy Park South, Dr. Beatrice Moses Hinkle—who had co-founded America’s first psychotherapy clinic—practiced analysis and completed the first authorized English translation of Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious in 1916. Across the Park at 109 East 21st Street, Mildred Minturn worked with the Consumers’ League of New York on labor reform and translated Jean Jaurès’s Studies in Socialism in 1906, while her sister Edith Minturn Stokes posed in a crisp white walking skirt for John Singer Sargent’s 1897 portrait at the Metropolitan Museum (her husband stepping into the background after the Great Dane meant to pose beside her proved unavailable). And at 4 Lexington Avenue, Margaret Olivia Sage opened the Russell Sage Foundation Building in 1913, bringing researchers studying housing, labor, and poverty into the same neighborhood as drawing rooms and studios.

Keeping the garden open also meant defending its tax status in court. In January 1894, a World editorial opposed a reported $600,000 assessment and $10,800 annual tax on the Park, arguing that neighbors and passersby shared its light, air, and view while the surrounding properties already paid higher taxes because the garden was there. In People ex rel. Poor v. Wells, decided on appeal in 1910, the courts struck down separate assessments on the Park for 1903–1905: the Park’s legal restrictions left the garden plot without a separate market value, while the value of Park access was already taxed in the assessments on the sixty surrounding lots.

Equal prices on every floor and an elevator run on water

A nearby experiment had already tested apartment living on a fashionable street. Richard Morris Hunt designed the Stuyvesant Apartments at 142 East 18th Street for Rutherfurd Stuyvesant in 1869, an early purpose-built apartment house that stood until 1959. Hunt kept his own atelier at 28 East 21st Street from 1871 to 1877; across the street, Bruce Price’s curved-front townhouse at No. 21 followed in 1878.

The first great change in scale came from the east. When George W. da Cunha’s ten-story Queen Anne apartment house at 34 Gramercy Park East (The Gramercy) was completed in 1883 on part of the old Gramercy Park House site, its red brick, winged lions, and turrets rose 112 feet above the neighboring houses—built just two years before the city capped new apartment houses at seventy to eighty feet. Inside was an equally striking experiment: promoter Charles A. Gerlach organized The Gramercy Company so residents owned shares, held proprietary leases, and elected directors to run their common home. At a time when living high above the street still meant trusting an unfamiliar machine, Gerlach refused to let height divide the house into classes: apartments cost the exact same on every floor, so that a family on the ninth floor felt quite equal to one on the first.

For 111 years, until 1994, the building’s original Otis passenger elevator ran on water pressure from a tank on the roof, announcing itself with a clunk of valves and a rush of water as the doorman pulled a control cable running through the cab. Caterer Louis Sherry ran a restaurant on the eighth floor during the building’s first year, sending meals down to the apartments, and concert soprano Emma Thursby bought her apartment in 1883 and hosted Friday musical salons there for nearly half a century—welcoming Mary Garden, young pupil Geraldine Farrar, and Swami Vivekananda, alongside a talking mynah bird credited with five languages who watched the children in the Park from the window and begged, “Mamma, mamma, I want to get out! I’ll come right back.” Today, No. 34 is New York City’s oldest continuously operating cooperative.

Duplexes, armored knights, and a bold financial bargain

After smaller apartment buildings replaced row houses at The Fanwood (23 Gramercy Park South, 1890–1891) and The Irving (26 Gramercy Park South, 1901–1902), three twelve-story cooperatives rose between 1908 and 1911 to offer the space of a private house high above the Park. At 24 Gramercy Park South (1908–1909), architect Herbert Lucas joined with Century editor Richard Watson Gilder, comic-opera star Francis Wilson (who while living there led the 1919 Broadway strike as founding president of Actors’ Equity), Lincoln Memorial muralist Jules Guérin, and Park historian John B. Pine to build Colonial Revival duplexes with internal staircases and double-height studios (later home to classical scholar Edith Hamilton). At 36 Gramercy Park East (1908–1910), Texas courthouse architect James Riely Gordon clad the Gramercy Park Club House in white glazed terra cotta with two life-sized armored knights at the entrance and more than 120 sculpted putti on the facade; actor John Barrymore, circus co-founder Alfred Ringling, and Lincoln Memorial sculptor Daniel Chester French all lived there.

And at One Lexington Avenue, completed in September 1911 on the site of Henry W. Poor’s demolished mansion, Herbert Lucas retained Stanford White’s iron sidewalk fence while building a twelve-story cooperative of mostly duplex apartments. Like several early cooperatives, One Lexington was organized around an ambitious bargain: the corporation kept some apartments to rent out, promising that the rental income would cover the building’s operating expenses and spare shareholders from paying annual maintenance. (That promise proved too optimistic, and in the 1950s the rental apartments were gradually sold to shareholders.) Early residents included editors John S. Phillips and Mark Sullivan, publisher William Warder Norton, painter Henry Salem Hubbell (who paid to add a custom skylight over his studio), and New York Times editor John Huston Finley, who walked through the Park each day and once a year walked Manhattan’s entire thirty-two-mile perimeter. Floor plans from all three buildings show how much household labor those generous rooms required: kitchens, pantries, service elevators, basement laundry timetables, and small maids’ rooms at the back.

A publisher’s buffer and the 1920s north-side boom

As apartment houses multiplied, defending the open square required constant attention. In 1890, the Trustees opposed a proposed cable railway through the garden, and Governor David B. Hill declined to sign the legislation. A renewed street-extension proposal in 1912 helped bring the Gramercy Park Association into being; its campaign preserved the interruption between Irving Place and Lexington Avenue, and residential zoning in 1916 offered another measure of protection.

One homeowner tried a more personal defense. In December 1911, three months after twelve-story One Lexington Avenue opened at the corner, publisher Henry Sleeper Harper bought the four-story brownstone next door to his own at 133 East 21st Street simply to keep an apartment builder from rising beside him at No. 131. Four months later, in April 1912, Harper, his wife Myra, Cairo dragoman Hammad Hassab, and their Pekingese dog, Sun Yat Sen, boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg and survived the sinking in Lifeboat No. 3.

By the mid-1920s, not even Harper’s buffer could hold back the apartment boom along the north side. In 1925, brothers Leo and Alexander Bing (Bing & Bing) opened the Gramercy Park Hotel at 2 Lexington Avenue on the site of Stanford White’s former house and 117 East 21st Street, the longtime home of freethinker Courtlandt Palmer and the orator Robert G. Ingersoll (commemorating Ingersoll with a plaque and library inside the hotel—just before the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church moved in). In 1926–1927, as the old brownstone row came down, Harper finally left the Park and sold his houses to Bing & Bing for fourteen-story 45 Gramercy Park North, designed by brothers George and Henry Boehm. In an ironic turn, Harper hired Herbert Lucas—the very architect whose cooperative at One Lexington Avenue had prompted his defensive purchase fifteen years earlier—to remodel his new home on East 38th Street. Between One Lexington and No. 45, Edward Ringwood Hewitt’s narrow five-story townhouse at 48 Gramercy Park North survived alone, its iron verandas meeting twelve- and fourteen-story brick walls on either side.

In 1928, Emery Roth completed the sixteen-story complex at 60 Gramercy Park North, its red-tiled gables and triple-arched water-tower belfry rising above a circular rotunda and garden courts that linked 21st and 22nd Streets. That same year, Calvary Church dedicated nine-story Calvary House at 61 Gramercy Park North (shortly after a section of plaster ceiling in the old rectory crashed onto a chair a staff member had vacated minutes earlier). And in 1929–1930, Schwartz & Gross completed the sixteen-story Tudor Revival tower at 44 Gramercy Park North, whose quiet fittings—rubber shock-absorbers on the doors and house bells that squeaked rather than rang—charmed The New Yorker’s apartment critic when it opened. Only 40 Gramercy Park North remained as a single-family house on the north side. Across the garden, the seventeen-story Parkside Hotel rose at 18 Gramercy Park South in 1927, and a six-story apartment house replaced All Souls Church at 8 Gramercy Park South in 1938 after a 1931 fire gutted the vacated church. On the side streets, meanwhile, Theodate Pope Riddle reconstructed Theodore Roosevelt’s demolished 1858 birthplace on East 20th Street in 1923, while former stables and houses on East 19th Street’s “Block Beautiful” acquired pastel stucco fronts, iron railings, and courtyard gardens.

East 19th Street’s artistic households helped give the “Block Beautiful” its character. George Bellows bought No. 146 in 1910 and worked in its third-floor studio until his death in 1925. Albert and Frederick Sterner developed the kitchenless studio building at No. 132, associated with actress Theda Bara, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and portraitist Cecilia Beaux, and gave No. 135 a Tudor façade for Joseph B. Thomas in the 1920s.

At Nos. 147–149, Robert Winthrop Chanler carried his decorative imagination to the street, with fruit-plucking giraffes above the doorways. Across the way, Lincoln Kirstein would make his home in a house dating to 1846–47. Garmey’s account follows these addresses from older domestic buildings into artists’ working and social lives.

Wartime in the garden and the unveiling of Edwin Booth

During the First World War, the garden opened its gates to soldiers, nurses, and wartime benefits. In May 1918, a Bain News Service photographer caught a springtime garden party on the lawns benefiting soldiers of the 307th Infantry Regiment and their families: flower baskets, broad-brimmed hats, and a small dog posed on a collection table. That same month, four Army nurses from the Seattle area—Nell “Brownie” Brown, Esther Backenlus, Abbie Ewart, and Adelaide “Woodsy” Woods—posed in the Park in their new wool outdoor uniforms while waiting to sail for base hospitals in France; passing the Statue of Liberty aboard the SS Megantic on June 12, Ewart wrote that “we seemed to leave a little of us behind.” Across the street at Lexington Avenue and 21st Street, Stanford White’s former house served the United Service Club for Allied officers, while the Schieffelin residence became “Pershing House,” a canteen for troops returning from France.

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Two days after the Armistice, at noon on November 13, 1918, the neighborhood gathered in the garden for a different ceremony: the unveiling of the memorial to Edwin Booth on his eighty-fifth birthday. First proposed by The Players in 1906, the monument had taken twelve years and three sculptors—Augustus Saint-Gaudens died in 1907 before signing a contract, Frederick MacMonnies resigned in 1913 after his plan for a stone proscenium arch divided the committee, and the winning 1914 anonymous competition entry by sculptor Edmond T. Quinn and architect Edwin S. Dodge was held up by a flawed block of granite and wartime rail embargoes. Dressed as Hamlet and rising from a medieval chair, Quinn’s bronze actor looked south across the fence toward the third-floor bedroom windows of the clubhouse Booth had given his friends thirty years earlier.

The statue took the place of the 1848 central fountain. In its stead, resident architect Charles I. Berg designed two smaller semicircular stone fountains near the east and west gates. Stripped of old coats of white and gold paint and returned to her natural pewter, the 1866 water nymph moved to the eastern fountain. At the western gate around 1920, Ruggles’s grandson John Ruggles Strong—who as a young man in 1875 had set the bluestone founding tablet in the sidewalk outside the gate—gave the Samuel B. Ruggles Memorial Fountain, pairing Berg’s Tennessee marble shaft with Quinn’s bronze profile portrait of the founder.

“Teck” Hannon’s goldfish and the centenary pageant

Between the wars, the life of the square became a favorite subject for The New Yorker. In March 1928, E. B. White gave a speaking voice to Booth’s statue in his poem “Gramercy Park,” and in July 1930 he and Bernice Breen introduced readers to James “Teck” Hannon, the Park’s watchful caretaker. Neighborhood children regarded pushing his lawnmower as a privilege, smaller helpers raked dead leaves, and each summer families leaving town entrusted their pet goldfish to him for a holiday of their own in the eastern fountain until autumn. (In 1937, New York Times editor John Huston Finley presented Hannon with a bronze medal and $1,000 on behalf of grateful neighborhood parents.)

For the Park’s hundredth birthday on May 16, 1931, the neighborhood dressed for its past. An album preserved at The New York Historical records a costumed procession and garden party on the lawn: beaver top hats, bonnets in an open carriage, and children circling a maypole in front of 36 Gramercy Park East. That same month, James Thurber marked the anniversary in The New Yorker with a short piece on Ruggles, amused that two Park tablets promised him “a mild sort of immortality.” Three years later, in “No Admittance” (September 1934), the magazine recounted how a woman who had forgotten her key got stranded inside the Park; a passerby who said he was related to Samuel Ruggles fetched her doorman to let her out, and when she asked that her rescuer be allowed a look around his ancestor’s garden, the doorman refused: “Against the rules.”

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Paris on the ceiling, A.A. at Calvary House, and a sign at the fence

Around the perimeter, older houses and newer apartments sheltered an extraordinary mix of mid-century lives. In December 1934, a still-drinking Wall Street speculator named Bill Wilson walked into Calvary’s mission on East 23rd Street, and after his final stay at Towns Hospital he and his wife, Lois, became regulars at the Oxford Group meetings held inside Calvary House at 61 Gramercy Park North—where Rector Sam Shoemaker’s teaching helped shape the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Four blocks east at St. George’s Church, baritone and composer Harry T. Burleigh sang for over five decades and introduced Antonín Dvořák to African American spirituals, part of the neighborhood’s Black musical and literary history traced by Dr. Arthur Lewin.

Along the south side, composer Samuel L. M. Barlow—the first American to have an opera staged at the Opéra-Comique in Paris—and writer Ernesta Drinker Barlow lived from 1928 at 11 Gramercy Park South, where Samuel H. Gottscho photographed their French château-paneled salon in 1931 and from which Ernesta spoke to a wartime radio audience on NBC as “Commando Mary.” A few doors east at 20 Gramercy Park South, writer and artist Ludwig Bemelmans wrote and illustrated Madeline (1939); cut off from Europe during the Second World War and unable to sleep, he pasted a large street map of Paris onto his bedroom ceiling and traced the bridges of the Seine with a flashlight until morning broke over the trees of Gramercy Park. In 1945, public-relations adviser and collector Benjamin Sonnenberg and his wife, Hilda, bought both 19 and 20 Gramercy Park South from the Fish estate and united them into a thirty-seven-room house where guests rode up to a fifth-floor ballroom to watch pre-release movies on red plush divans before descending for midnight roast-beef sandwiches overlooking the square.

Modern design could be almost invisible from the sidewalk. Garmey records an apartment color scheme devised by Le Corbusier at 155 East 22nd Street in the early 1950s: sand, red, and gray within an otherwise familiar neighborhood interior.

Across the Park at the Gramercy Park Hotel, writers and actors lived beside long-term families: Humphrey Bogart married Helen Menken in her suite in 1926, Joseph P. Kennedy housed his young family—including ten-year-old John F. Kennedy—on the second floor in 1927, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy spent the winter of 1943–1944 there with their young son, and S. J. Perelman moved in during 1972 to be near The Players and the Mercantile Library.

The Gramercy Park Flower Show, begun in 1947, gave residents a regular spring occasion to share what they grew. In the 1950s, postwar brick apartment buildings replaced older structures at 7 Lexington Avenue (1951, after the Cooper–Hewitt house was demolished and its twelve thousand objects dispersed) and, following the 1955 demolition of the Third Avenue El, at 32 Gramercy Park South (1956) and 39 Gramercy Park North (1956–1957). In 1963—the year of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, with “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—a twenty-two-year-old Bob Dylan posed beside the Park fence, leaning against a street sign beneath two one-way arrows.

Saving the Meeting House and designating the district

By the 1960s, the mix of 1840s townhouses, remodeled studio fronts, and early apartment houses had itself become something people wanted to protect. The question had changed since Ruggles’s day: how could a neighborhood keep the character gathered over more than a century while remaining a place where people actually lived? In March 1965, word spread that the 1859 Friends Meeting House at 28 Gramercy Park South was under contract to a developer who planned to replace the two-story sandstone sanctuary with a thirty-story apartment tower. Neighbors rallied alongside the newly created Landmarks Preservation Commission to win the building’s designation as one of the city’s earliest individual landmarks that October.

On September 20, 1966, the Commission designated the Gramercy Park Historic District. At the public hearing that April, four witnesses had spoken in favor, including Gramercy Park Association president Sherman Drake representing four hundred members, alongside support from the Park’s Trustees and not a single voice in opposition. The Commission’s report valued the way the buildings stood together: original houses beside remodeled ones, iron porches and front gardens beside the apartment buildings that had changed the skyline.

Midnight organ recitals, Halloween on the ninth floor, and new congregations

Winning landmark protection did not by itself settle the future of the old Friends Meeting House. When a performing-arts proposal fell through in 1969, neighbor Benjamin Sonnenberg organized a group of Gramercy residents to buy and hold the building until a permanent steward could be found. In 1974, Brotherhood Synagogue—which had spent twenty years sharing a Greenwich Village church—bought the water-damaged meetinghouse; architect James Stewart Polshek contributed his services to its restoration, and the congregation moved in the following year.

In 1976, Calvary Church joined with St. George’s Church and the Church of the Holy Communion to form Calvary–St. George’s Parish. Inside Renwick’s sanctuary, organist Calvin Hampton’s free “Fridays at Midnight” recitals drew crowds from 1974 to 1983 at an hour when almost every other church in Manhattan was locked and dark, with listeners stretching out on the nave floor beneath dramatic lighting to hear Bach, Messiaen, and Hampton’s own orchestral transcriptions. Next door at the Gramercy Park Hotel, touring musicians—including David Bowie, Blondie, and the company assembling for Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue—shared the lobby and corridors with permanent residents during the 1970s and 1980s.

Across the square at 34 Gramercy Park East, another neighbor left a different kind of memory. Margaret Hamilton, whose performance in The Wizard of Oz had made her face and voice terrifying to generations of children, lived on the ninth floor. A former kindergarten teacher, she cared deeply about that effect, and each Halloween she decorated the hallways with carved, candle-lit pumpkins and set out baskets of freshly baked cookies for the building’s children. Downstairs in the same building, potter Susan Tunick looked out her window at the carved clay heads peering from the 1883 brickwork, an interest that led her to head the Friends of Terra Cotta and write Terra-Cotta Skyline.

In January 1980, the wider Gramercy Park Historic District, including the north-side buildings left outside the 1966 city boundary, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Another work of sculpture joined the garden in the early 1980s. Greg Wyatt’s Fantasy Fountain, loaned to the Park in 1981 according to the Fantasy Fountain Fund, took its place among the older memorials to Ruggles and Booth. The Fund’s history and unveiling photograph record its arrival.

In 1984, Suzannah Lessard wrote in The New Yorker about a National Arts Club lecture by ophthalmologist and historian Dr. Eugene Weise, dressed in nineteenth-century clothes, whose lantern slides included an old photograph of the very gallery where his audience sat—allowing them to look up and recognize a surviving ceiling ornament above their heads. And in July 1988, the City extended its local district to include 36 Gramercy Park East, protecting Gordon’s tall terra-cotta cooperative alongside the older houses.

Recovery, art at the hotel, and community work

On August 19, 1989, a high-pressure steam-pipe explosion outside 32 Gramercy Park South killed three people, injured two dozen others, and coated the area in asbestos-laden mud. Hundreds of residents were displaced during the months of cleanup. The Block Association’s later account recalls Arlene Harrison serving as a community liaison during the response.

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Five years later, in April 1994, thirty-seven galleries took over three upper floors of the Gramercy Park Hotel for the first Gramercy International Art Fair. Paintings hung above hotel bedspreads, sculptures sat in bathrooms, and the corridors became a route from one gallery to the next. In 1999, the fair moved to the 69th Regiment Armory as the Armory Show.

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In March 1994, Arlene Harrison and neighbors formed the Gramercy Park Block Association to work on safety, preservation, and the care of the surrounding streets—a neighborhood role distinct from the Trustees’ stewardship of the Park itself. After September 11, 2001, those local ties took on an urgent purpose: restaurants, schools, congregations, hotels, building staffs, and neighbors from roughly fifty buildings worked through the 13th Precinct, Calvary Church, and the Olive Leaf Wholeness Center at Kenmore Hall to cook meals and provide showers, cots, and supplies for rescue and recovery workers.

Caring for the garden and its buildings

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, historic buildings around the fence—including the former hotel annex at 50 Gramercy Park North, the former residence at 18 Gramercy Park South, and the terra-cotta, brick, and brownstone fronts at 36 and 34 Gramercy Park East, One Lexington Avenue, and 45 Gramercy Park North—underwent major restorations and adaptations. Inside the garden, Alexander Calder’s standing mobile Janey Waney arrived on loan in 2011; meant to stay for a year, the sculpture remained among the trees and older monuments until 2021.

A December 2011 Trustees’ report pictured a smaller memorial behind the Ruggles Fountain. Junipers and miniature evergreens surrounded the Christmas Grove’s plaque, dedicated to Emergency Service Squad 1. The planting honored officers from ESU Truck 1 and the 13th Precinct killed in the line of duty, particularly those lost on September 11.

Hurricane Sandy took two large sidewalk trees on the Park’s southeast side in 2012. Bartlett Tree Experts planted their replacements in October 2013. That month, inside the fence, the Trustees completed a perimeter planting plan designed by Park Project Manager Kathleen Scupp with Anthony Bulfamante Landscaping, moving and adding shrubs and small trees along the garden’s edge.

When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted schools, restaurants, and households in 2020, neighbors worked through the Block Association to help older residents with groceries, supply meals and protective gear to essential workers, and find computers for children learning at home.

The photographs record a slower change as well. Nineteenth-century views leave open sky between young trees; later ones show a full canopy inside the fence and forty-one city-owned street trees along the sidewalks outside, kept going through storms, age, and replanting. In 2025, Bartlett Tree Experts inventoried those forty-one street trees for the Block Association using ArborScope, linking brass tags to digital records of condition and care. Inside the fence, a December 2025 report counted 104 trees of nineteen species under the Trustees’ care.

The iron enclosure has needed its own cycle of repair. A 2006–2009 campaign restored the fence and brownstone curb. In 2026, the Trustees sent the east and west gates to specialist workshops for restoration.

At the center of the garden, the Trustees oversaw a centenary conservation of the Edwin Booth statue in 2018, funded by The Players Foundation for Theatre Education.

In May 2026, the Trustees completed a restoration of the Ruggles Fountain using marble from the original Tennessee quarry—bringing water back to the founder’s memorial beside the western gate.