History of Gramercy Park

Before the square, there was water. Cedar Creek wound from the vicinity of Madison Square toward the East River near Eighteenth Street. Streams crossed the ground beneath today’s streets, running between wet lowlands and higher ground. This was part of Lenape Manhattan, home to people with their own paths and settlements long before its farms and estates appeared in colonial deeds.

The name preserves a trace of that terrain. Seventeenth-century records contain forms such as Crommessie and Crummashie, associated with a crooked watercourse. Later writers offered different Dutch derivations, including “little crooked swamp” and “little crooked knife.” The precise translation remains unsettled.

By the eighteenth century, farms and country estates spread north of the compact city at Manhattan’s southern tip. James Duane, a lawyer who would become New York’s first mayor after the Revolution, began acquiring land here in 1761. He assembled several parcels into an estate known as Gramercy Seat. The city was still some distance away.

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 brought it closer, at least on paper. The grid stretched far beyond the built city, across fields and streams that would eventually give way to streets. Buying, draining, and grading that land would take years.

In 1831, a lawyer and developer named Samuel B. Ruggles acquired land from the Duane family and began assembling neighboring parcels. His plan reserved a garden at its center, giving the houses around it an outlook that would help sell the lots.

A permanent garden offered a prospective householder something valuable in a growing city: light, air, and a view that another owner could not build across. Ruggles tied that advantage to an obligation. The houses would benefit from the square, and their owners would pay to keep it.

On December 17, 1831, Samuel B. and Mary R. Ruggles conveyed the Park to five trustees. The founding indenture described an ornamental garden with an iron enclosure, walks, and planting. It set out how the garden would be maintained and how future trustees would succeed the first five.

The land reserved for the Park comprised forty-two lots, including the carriageways and footwalks at its ends. Around it, the plan initially counted sixty-six lots; six were given over to the new streets, leaving the sixty numbered lots associated with the Park’s upkeep. A confirmatory deed of December 24, 1833 further established use of the garden as an easement belonging to those properties.

The neat rectangle of the Park can make the development look deceptively simple. Edwin Smith’s December 1831 map shows the negotiations behind it. Ruggles spent much of that year assembling parcels from different owners, then traded narrow strips with neighbors—including Catherine L. Duane—to bring old property lines into alignment with the new grid. Along the eastern edge, diagonal farm boundaries still left awkward triangular lots. Even the Park’s position was a practical choice: between 20th and 21st Streets, Ruggles could surround it entirely with his own property.

Ruggles also understood that the streets mattered. The original grid left unusually wide blocks between Third and Fourth Avenues. The insertion of Lexington Avenue to the north and Irving Place to the south made the land more accessible and created new residential frontages. Irving Place honored Washington Irving; Lexington recalled the Revolutionary battle. Their alignment made the garden a deliberate interruption in the city’s north–south movement.

July 12, 1832 · A page from Ruggles’s papers

In Ruggles’s own hand

Those new streets also presented a danger: the legislature had authorized a road through the Park toward 30th Street. In this memorandum of July 12, 1832, Ruggles drew his answer. Irving Place would meet the already opened and graded 20th Street in a T-junction, with a continuous curb along the Park’s southern edge.

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

The paving would help persuade officials to leave the garden uncut. Ruggles’s arrangement prevailed: when Lexington Avenue opened in 1835, it began north of the Park.

Read the Museum’s account in The Greatest Grid →

Other squares were taking shape nearby. Ruggles helped advance Union Square, whose public space opened in 1839. Farther east, land conveyed by Peter Gerard Stuyvesant in 1836 became Stuyvesant Square. Streets of substantial houses would link the three gardens: private Gramercy and the two public squares to its west and east.

On the surrounding lots, Ruggles’s deed restrictions specified brick or stone dwelling houses at least three stories tall and discouraged uses considered incompatible with residential life. First, though, the ground had to be made ready for building.

In his 1921 history of the Park, John B. Pine recounts how Ruggles acquired higher ground toward the Bowery as well as the marsh behind it, then moved earth from one to fill the other. The quiet square began with a great deal of digging.

The trees came later. At the first recorded Trustees’ meeting, on November 15, 1844, the orders included a privet border and one hundred trees: horse chestnuts, lindens, elms, maples, walnuts, and mulberries among them. The shade in later photographs was still years away.

The Trustees also wanted a fountain modeled on those before St. Peter’s in Rome. The lot owners declined to pay for it. A more modest fountain was installed in 1848.

Paying for the garden remained a recurring problem. For years, Pine records, the annual charge was ten dollars a lot, supplemented by appeals for more. Around 1877, it rose to thirty dollars.

The Panic of 1837 had slowed construction; by the late 1840s, the neighborhood was growing again. The five townhouses at Gramercy Park West, built between 1844 and 1850, still give a sense of its early scale. Their tall windows, three-window widths, brick fronts, and aligned cornices hold the row together, although the details range from Greek Revival restraint to Italianate ornament. The cast-iron porches at Nos. 3 and 4 are particularly distinctive. A century later, the 1966 designation report would cite these shared proportions and repeated details in the case for preserving the district.

Publisher and former mayor James Harper lived at No. 4; the surgeon Valentine Mott at No. 1. Peter Cooper completed his house at Lexington Avenue and East 22nd Street in 1848. Within a few minutes’ walk of one another lived men whose work ranged from printing and surgery to manufacturing and city government.

Above the new houses rose the two slender wooden spires of James Renwick Jr.’s Calvary Church, consecrated at Fourth Avenue and East 21st Street in 1847. The parish had begun farther uptown in a small frame building, which was moved as the congregation grew.

On the south side of the Park, the broad, restrained Friends Meeting House opened in 1859, designed by King & Kellum. Schools also occupied neighborhood houses: Pine records Henrietta B. Haines’s school for girls at No. 10 as early as 1851.

Visitors could stay on the east side at the Gramercy Park House, long before the better-known Gramercy Park Hotel opened on the north. Under Curtis Judson, Pine remembered, it drew guests from the American South and Cuba. The lot owners held meetings there too.

Some of Gramercy’s most consequential history happened indoors. At the northeast corner of the Park, Cyrus W. Field and his brother David Dudley Field occupied neighboring houses on the site of today’s One Lexington Avenue. Cyrus had made a fortune in paper; David was a lawyer and legal reformer. Their homes became meeting places for a venture that would change the speed of communication across the Atlantic.

In 1854, Cyrus invited Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, and Chandler White to consider the cable undertaking at his dining table. Meetings in the Field houses led to the organization of the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company. The first transatlantic cable carried messages in 1858, prompting a celebration in Gramercy Park, but soon failed. Lasting service followed in 1866, after years of financial and technical setbacks. A project discussed among neighbors had helped bring continents into almost immediate contact.

Peter Cooper could walk south from his Gramercy home to the institution that carried his name. When Cooper Union opened in 1859, his commitment to practical education had a permanent home. His son-in-law Abram S. Hewitt, who had joined the household after marrying Cooper’s daughter in 1855, shared that interest in education and would later become mayor of New York.

Pine remembered the house in detail: its cast-iron lintels came from Cooper’s own foundry, the stable entrance faced East 22nd Street, and Cooper went to work in a one-horse carriage.

During the Civil War, Henry W. Bellows, minister of the nearby All Souls church, helped lead the United States Sanitary Commission, which organized supplies and care for Union soldiers. Gramercy resident George Templeton Strong served as its treasurer, while Louisa Lee Schuyler took a leading part in its relief work. At the Friends Meeting House, women made clothing for formerly enslaved people.

Violence came close to the Park during the July 1863 Draft Riots, when mobs attacked Black New Yorkers and destroyed homes and institutions. Troops occupied the garden; recollections assembled by Pine place cannon near its northeast corner. Fighting along Third Avenue was only a short distance away.

In the following decade, national attention turned to the south side of the square. Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York and the Democratic presidential candidate in the disputed election of 1876, lived in the houses now occupied by the National Arts Club. A year after the election, crowds still filled the street outside his home for a serenade.

Tilden’s bequest helped create another New York institution. His friend John Bigelow, who lived a few doors away, worked to bring the Tilden Trust together with the Astor and Lenox libraries. In 1895, they joined to form the New York Public Library.

As fashionable New York moved north, some of Gramercy’s large houses became lodgings, classrooms, studios, and clubs. Their rooms were well suited to entertaining, whether the guests came for a private dinner or an exhibition. Several of the Park’s best-known institutions began by moving into somebody else’s home.

Theatergoers already knew the southern end of Irving Place. At East 14th Street, the Academy of Music drew audiences for opera, concerts, and public occasions. Pine recalled the ball held there for the visiting Prince of Wales in 1860. From Gramercy’s houses, it was an easy walk.

In 1887, Stuyvesant and Marian “Mamie” Fish came to 19 Gramercy Park South. Mamie Fish’s elaborate entertaining gave the corner of Irving Place a reputation far beyond the neighborhood. A few doors away, Edwin Booth was preparing a gathering place for fellow actors and their friends.

Booth founded The Players at No. 16 in 1888. Stanford White adapted the house, and Booth brought together books, paintings, and theatrical objects. He wanted actors to meet writers, painters, musicians, and others as friends. He kept his own rooms upstairs, living above the club until his death in 1893.

Next door, the National Arts Club moved into Tilden’s mansion in 1906. Founded in 1898, it had admitted women to full membership from the beginning. The house, combined with its neighbor and richly remodeled by Calvert Vaux between 1881 and 1884, now held exhibitions and lectures. Studios and apartments behind it would let members live and work on the premises.

Charles De Kay, one of the Club’s founders, had described the approaching move in a September 1905 portrait of the neighborhood. Along the south side, clubs were bringing together actors, Columbia graduates, alumnae of a women’s college, and soon the artists bound for Tilden’s house. De Kay expected the main disturbance to be extra footsteps and cabs at dinner time.

He was particularly interested in the proposed National Arts Club annex. Its studios and apartments would rise behind the old mansion, with upper floors reaching the north light above the house and garden. Many studios had already been spoken for, he reported, before the foundations were laid.

There was plenty of traffic nearby. Streetcars ran on Fourth and Third Avenues; the Third Avenue elevated and the subway’s 18th Street station were close by. Gramercy was easy to reach, yet the avenues’ bustle seemed to pass it by. De Kay called it a “quiet eddy.”

Farther south on Irving Place, Elsie de Wolfe and theatrical agent Elizabeth Marbury lived at No. 49 between 1892 and 1911. Photographer Clarence H. White later lived and taught there. Nearby East 17th Street housed musicians, theatrical figures, and people in the piano trade, part of the adjoining German-American cultural world described in the Landmarks Commission’s history of these blocks.

The side streets were also becoming home to more working- and middle-class tenants. Boarding houses and subdivided residences made room for them, as did new apartment buildings. The Fanwood Apartments replaced two row houses in 1890–1891; the Irving flats followed in 1901–1902. From the street, their scale remained close to that of the older houses.

At 109 East 21st Street, on the future site of 60 Gramercy Park North, Mildred Minturn was working with the Consumers’ League of New York on labor reform. She also translated Jean Jaurès’s Studies in Socialism, published in English in 1906.

At 4 Lexington Avenue, reform acquired an address of its own. The Russell Sage Foundation’s headquarters, opened in 1913, contained offices, meeting rooms, and a library for the study of social conditions. Margaret Olivia Sage’s philanthropy brought researchers concerned with housing, work, and poverty into the same neighborhood as drawing rooms and artists’ studios.

The first great change in scale came from the east. When George W. da Cunha’s 34 Gramercy Park East was completed in 1883, its turrets and tall brick walls rose above the neighboring houses. Inside was an equally striking experiment: residents owned shares in a company, held proprietary leases, and elected directors to run their common home.

An elevator changed what a comfortable home could be. The upper floors became desirable rather than a long climb, and shared services took over some of the work of maintaining an individual house. Gramercy offered a particularly appealing setting for this new arrangement: an apartment could look out over the same garden that had first attracted townhouse owners.

Other buildings developed the idea in distinct ways. 24 Gramercy Park South joined residence to the requirements of artistic life. James Riely Gordon’s 36 Gramercy Park East, built in 1908–1910, gave a cooperative apartment house elaborate Gothic dress in glazed terra cotta. At One Lexington Avenue, completed in 1911, Herbert Lucas arranged duplexes and studios that could preserve some of the individuality of a private house within a shared structure.

Early plans show how much work those comfortable interiors required: kitchens, pantries, rooms for domestic staff, and separate routes for service. Cooks, cleaners, elevator operators, and building staff kept the new apartment houses running.

As buildings changed, the survival of the open square required attention. Ruggles had argued in 1832 against carrying a street through the garden. In 1890, the Trustees opposed a proposed cable railway through it; 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 for the neighborhood.

The north side changed most dramatically in the next decade. The Gramercy Park Hotel opened in 1925, replacing houses with a sixteen-story residential hotel. Emery Roth’s 60 Gramercy Park North followed in 1928, its red-tiled roofs and decorative tower making a new landmark above the trees. Calvary House, dedicated the same year, stacked meeting rooms, workspaces, and living quarters on a narrow lot beside the church.

From a path inside the Park, the change was unmistakable. The Metropolitan Life tower had once seemed to rise beyond a foreground of low houses; now new apartment buildings and the hotel stood much closer to the trees. More households could share the square’s outlook, while fewer of the original houses remained to frame it. Not everyone welcomed the new scale. In November 1926, The New Yorker mourned the disappearance of the square’s “quiet, drowsing atmosphere” as houses came down for apartment hotels.

On East 20th Street, preservation took an unusual form: rebuilding a house that had already been lost. Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace, where he was born in 1858, was demolished in 1916. After his death, a memorial association led by women commissioned Theodate Pope Riddle to reconstruct it. The recreated birthplace opened in 1923.

Owners on the side streets were remodeling too. East 18th Street kept narrow Anglo-Italianate houses alongside façades reworked in the 1920s. On East 19th Street’s “Block Beautiful,” former stables and townhouses acquired Tudor, Gothic, and Italian-inspired details. Small gardens, colored façades, and iron railings tied them together. Many of the details that now seem to belong to the original houses were later additions.

Flowers, broad-brimmed hats, even a small dog posed on the table: a Bain News Service photographer caught the Park in a sociable mood in 1918. The occasion was a garden party benefiting soldiers of the 307th Regiment and their families.

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In May 1918, four nurses from the Seattle area posed in the Park in their new outdoor uniforms. They were waiting in New York for transport to Army hospitals in France. On June 12, they sailed aboard the SS Megantic. Passing the Statue of Liberty, Abbie Ewart wrote that “we seemed to leave a little of us behind.”

Nearby houses accommodated the wartime arrivals. The former Stanford White house at Lexington Avenue and East 21st Street served the United Service Club, bringing together officers of the Allied armies. In the Schieffelin residence, Pine recorded “Pershing House,” a canteen for troops returning from France.

Two days after the Armistice, Gramercy gathered for a different kind of ceremony. On November 13, 1918, the memorial to Edwin Booth was unveiled in the garden. Edmond T. Quinn’s bronze actor, dressed as Hamlet, faced The Players across the street; Edwin S. Dodge designed the pedestal. Booth had died twenty-five years earlier. Now his likeness stood within sight of the home he had given his friends.

The statue displaced the old central fountain. Smaller fountains designed by Charles I. Berg were arranged toward the east and west entrances. The western one became a memorial to Ruggles, with Quinn’s bronze portrait of the founder.

In 1930, Bernice Breen and E. B. White introduced readers of The New Yorker to James “Teck” Hannon, the Park’s watchful caretaker. His young helpers regarded using the lawnmower as a privilege; smaller children raked and cleared dead leaves. Each summer, neighbors leaving town entrusted their goldfish to him for a holiday of their own in the east fountain.

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The locked gate occasionally supplied its own comedy. In “No Admittance,” published in The New Yorker in 1934, a woman without a key was stranded inside the Park. A passerby who said he was related to Samuel Ruggles fetched her doorman, who let her out. When she asked that her rescuer be allowed a look around, the doorman refused: “Against the rules.”

At 11 Gramercy Park South, composer Samuel L. M. Barlow and writer Ernesta Drinker Barlow made their home after their marriage in 1928. Samuel H. Gottscho’s photographs of 1931 record rooms filled with books and arranged for company and intimate performances. During the Second World War, Ernesta reached a much larger audience through NBC’s Commando Mary, telling women about opportunities to participate in the war effort.

The hotel offered a more public version of domestic life. Writers and performers occupied suites beside families and long-term residents who preferred a familiar staff to a household of their own. Humphrey Bogart married Helen Menken in her suite in 1926. Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy spent the winter of 1943–44 here with their young son. When S. J. Perelman arrived in 1972, the neighborhood put favorite restaurants, The Players, and the Mercantile Library within reach. For all its famous guests, the Gramercy was also somewhere to come home.

At Calvary, the parish house provided rooms for hospitality and conversation. Under the Rev. Sam Shoemaker, the church became associated with the spiritual ideas and friendships that influenced the early development of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Music drew another circle around nearby St. George’s Church, where singer and composer Harry T. Burleigh worked. His exchange with Antonín Dvořák connected this East Side congregation to one of the important encounters in American musical history. Dr. Arthur Lewin’s account of Black history in Gramercy follows Burleigh and other figures whose work took them beyond the square.

In the Park, 1944

The Gramercy Park Flower Show, begun in 1947, gave residents a regular occasion to share what they grew.

At the gate and around Booth

Bob Dylan, 1963

In 1963, Bob Dylan posed beside Gramercy Park, leaning against a street sign beneath two one-way arrows. It was the year of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the album that included “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

By the 1960s, the mixture of old houses, remodeled façades, and apartment buildings had itself become something people wanted to preserve. The question had changed since Ruggles’s day. How could a neighborhood keep the character accumulated over a century while remaining a place where people actually lived?

On September 20, 1966, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Gramercy Park Historic District. Its report valued the way the buildings stood together: original houses beside remodeled ones, small gardens and porches beside the apartment buildings that had changed the skyline.

At the public hearing on April 12, 1966, four witnesses had spoken in support, among them Sherman Drake, president of the Gramercy Park Association, representing four hundred members. The Commission also received favorable letters and a statement from the Park’s Trustees. No one spoke in opposition.

The protected district covered only part of the neighborhood. The north-side buildings lay outside its original boundary, which extended instead into selected streets to the south. The designation map shows precisely which buildings were included.

In 1974, Brotherhood Synagogue bought the former Friends Meeting House. Architect James Stewart Polshek contributed his services to its adaptation, and the congregation moved in the following year. The old meeting house remained a place of worship, now serving a new community.

At the Gramercy Park Hotel, musicians were joining the permanent residents and passing guests. David Bowie, Blondie, and the company assembling for Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue all passed through during the 1970s and 1980s. Performance venues and nightlife were close by, even if the view from the hotel windows remained a quiet garden.

The historic district entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

In 1984, Suzannah Lessard reported in The New Yorker on a National Arts Club lecture by ophthalmologist and amateur historian Dr. Eugene Weise, dressed for the occasion in nineteenth-century clothes. His slides included an old photograph of the very gallery where his audience sat. A surviving ceiling ornament helped them recognize the room beneath its later alterations.

In 1988, the City extended its local district to include 36 Gramercy Park East. Gordon’s tall terra-cotta cooperative, once a conspicuous departure from the scale of the old houses, was now protected alongside them.

On August 19, 1989, a 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.

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Five years later, people were arriving at the Gramercy Park Hotel to look at art in bedrooms. Dealers Colin de Land, Pat Hearn, Matthew Marks, and Paul Morris had devised an informal fair for a younger generation of galleries. In April 1994, thirty-seven exhibitors took over three upper floors. The beds and bathrooms became part of the exhibition space; the hotel corridor became a route from one gallery to the next. The Gramercy International Art Fair would become the Armory Show.

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The fair moved to the 69th Regiment Armory in 1999. What had begun with galleries squeezed into hotel rooms was becoming one of the city’s major art fairs.

Residents were also organizing around safety, preservation, and the condition of the streets. In March 1994, Arlene Harrison founded the Gramercy Park Block Association. Harrison also served for more than twenty years as a Trustee, bringing the same personal dedication to protecting the Park itself that she brought to the surrounding community. The Block Association’s work in the surrounding neighborhood was separate from the Trustees’ care of the Park itself.

After September 11, 2001, those local connections took on an urgent purpose. Restaurants, schools, congregations, hotels, building staff, and residents helped feed and support rescue and recovery workers. The GPBA worked with Danny Meyer and his staff on meal deliveries; a round-the-clock operation began at the 13th Precinct on September 12. Calvary Church received supplies, children sent pictures and messages, and neighbors from approximately fifty buildings participated.

The relief accounts describe months of cooking, collecting supplies, and finding places for exhausted workers to rest. From November 2001 into 2002, an operation with the Olive Leaf Wholeness Center at Kenmore Hall provided showers, sleeping space, and supplies.

Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen bought the Gramercy Park Hotel in 2003. It reopened in August 2006 after extensive rebuilding, with interiors by Julian Schnabel. The familiar name now belonged to a markedly different hotel, with new rooms, bars, and a new audience.

Danny Meyer’s Maialino opened in 2009, bringing a Roman trattoria overlooking the Park. In 2012, the roof was reworked as Gramercy Terrace. The dining rooms and terraces drew neighborhood regulars as well as hotel guests.

Inside the garden, Alexander Calder’s Janey Waney arrived in 2011: a standing mobile among the trees and older monuments. The loan was meant to last a year. Instead, apart from a period away for exhibitions in Europe, the sculpture stayed until 2021.

The fence and gates needed less conspicuous work. In their 2009 conservation campaign, the Trustees worked with Gabriel Popian to repair the ironwork and brownstone curb. The gates returned to specialist workshops in 2026.

For the Booth memorial’s centenary in 2018, the Trustees commissioned conservation funded by the Players Foundation for Theatre Education. A hundred years after the unveiling, the bronze Hamlet still faced Booth’s house across the street.

The hotel closed in March 2020 and remained shuttered. MCR and MORSE Development later announced plans for an extensive renovation. The pandemic disrupted schools, restaurants, and households throughout the neighborhood. Neighbors helped older residents with groceries, supplied meals and protective equipment to essential workers, and found computers for children learning at home. The Block Association’s contemporary accounts record those efforts.

The photographs show another, slower change. Nineteenth-century views leave open sky between individual trees; later ones show a canopy. Storms, age, and replanting have repeatedly altered the garden and the street trees beyond the fence. The shade that seems so much a part of Gramercy has taken generations to grow.

In 2026, water returned to the Ruggles Fountain after a restoration directed by architect Thomas Fenniman. The Trustees’ project used marble from the original Tennessee quarry and a raised base to improve stability and water management. Beside the western gate, the founder’s portrait once again looked out over a working fountain.