One Gramercy Park West

Samuel B. Ruggles’s plan for Gramercy Park offered New Yorkers something difficult to secure in a growing city: a planted square whose future was tied to the surrounding land. The arrangement dates to 1831. As houses gradually rose around the garden, their owners acquired a lasting interest in what stood—or would never be built—across the street.

Norman White helped give the western side its form. A prosperous paper merchant, he was also deeply involved in the city’s religious and philanthropic institutions. In 1844 he built houses near the middle of the block. Five years later he completed his development and moved into the corner house at No. 1. The family remained there for ten years.

For White, these streets were both a real-estate investment and a place to live. His family biography records the transaction that ended his Gramercy years: in the spring of 1859 he sold the house and moved to Fifth Avenue at 36th Street. The city’s fashionable residential world was advancing north. The brick house he left behind was beginning the chapter that would make it best remembered.

Before following its occupants, look at the building itself. No. 1 and its neighbor, No. 2, began as an Italianate pair. Three openings across each Park-facing front, curved stone window hoods, and projecting cornices gave them a shared rhythm. At the corner, No. 1 turns a long flank toward East 21st Street; the cornice continues around it, making the side elevation part of the composition.

The photograph published in Old Buildings of New York City in 1907 preserves the entrance before its transformation. The heavy hood above the old door differs from the curved heads of the windows beside it. Below, the stair rises behind the iron railing. A passerby at the corner gives the house a human scale, while the long side wall reveals how much building lies behind its narrow frontage.

The stoop organized the encounter between house and street. Callers climbed toward the principal rooms, lifted above the pavement and the lower floor. The entrance announced a single household. Later, when the rooms were divided among several households, that approach would be reconsidered too.

After White’s departure, the house became the home of Dr. Valentine Mott and his wife, Louisa. By the Civil War years, No. 1 was associated with one of the country’s best-known surgeons. Mott had studied in New York and trained with Astley Cooper in London; his working life reached back to an era before surgical anesthesia.

Mott was a teacher as well as an operator. In 1841 he had joined the six founding professors of the Medical Department of the University of New York, the ancestor of today’s NYU medical school. Its first class numbered 239 students. His Gramercy years came late in a career that had helped shape medical education in the city.

The National Library of Medicine preserves his correspondence, lecture notes, case histories, and accounts. Together they record the less theatrical labor behind a famous medical name: consultation, observation, teaching, and the exchange of knowledge across generations of physicians.

The household’s connections also extended into European society. Old Buildings of New York City recalled Mott’s friendship with Louis Philippe and the welcome his family gave the exiled French royal family. During the American Civil War, members of that family visited the Gramercy Park house. The reception rooms of a New York surgeon could connect worlds that rarely appear together in the history of a townhouse.

By 1882, advertisements offered rooms with board at No. 1. Later notices promoted access to the Park and the possibility of taking meals. The house was adapting to residents who wanted a Gramercy address without the expense and obligations of maintaining an entire mansion.

That change became a building project in 1917. The Record and Guide reported a $20,000 alteration at No. 1 for the Harriet S. Merrill Estate. Adolph Mertin was the architect; Christopher Campbell, Inc., held the general contract. The trade notice described a five-story brick apartment house measuring 26 by 76 feet.

By November, a newspaper account described Nos. 1 and 2 as converted into studio apartments, their high stoops removed. At No. 1, the old doorway became a window and the entrance moved to the lower level. A columned portico gave the new approach a formal character of its own.

The contrast is unusually easy to read in photographs. In the earlier view, the stair occupies the foreground and draws the eye upward. In the present house, attention settles on the entrance courtyard and its columns. The façade still contains the memory of the old door, but the building now admits its residents by a different route.

The neighboring houses underwent separate projects. No. 2’s conversion is associated with Grosvenor Atterbury; the contemporary contract notice names Mertin at No. 1. Their later differences sit over the proportions of the original pair.

When the city assessed the row for landmark protection, it found merit in the changed entrance. The Ionic portico’s roof continued the horizontal line of nearby balconies. An alteration made to accommodate new uses had become part of the streetscape worth preserving.

The new century brought a different kind of celebrity to the address. Władysław Teodor Benda, the Polish American illustrator, worked in a Gramercy Park studio identified by his biographer with No. 1. His commercial drawings reached a broad magazine audience; the masks he made introduced another, more theatrical dimension to his art.

On November 8, 1920, Benda married Romola Campfield in his studio at No. 1. A notice in Billboard recorded that only a few friends were present. The artist had made his workplace the setting for a private celebration, bringing the house’s domestic and creative lives together in a single room.

The small wedding is a revealing counterpoint to the grand receptions associated with nineteenth-century Gramercy. Benda did not need a houseful of formal rooms to make the address his own. The studio served as the center of a working life and, for that day, a gathering place for the people closest to him.

In 1920, Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield visited Benda’s Gramercy studio and encountered those masks. Photographs followed in the magazine. A private workplace beside the Park had become a point of contact between the illustrator’s experiments and New York’s expanding culture of fashion, photography, and performance.

Benda’s masks were made to be worn. Their fixed expressions changed through movement, light, and the body of the performer. Arnold Genthe’s photograph of a display of the masks offers a glimpse of their variety: eleven faces, each with its own character, arranged beside a kneeling woman.

The studio was also a social address. Anna Rudek-Śmiechowska’s account describes a small domestic annex, furniture Benda made or decorated, and visits from journalists, dancers, and Polish travelers. Work and hospitality occupied the same rooms. For this house, the studio years added another way of living to the family residence and the boarding-house rooms that had preceded them.

On September 20, 1966, the Gramercy Park Historic District was designated. No. 1 became part of the protected western row. The designation recognized the houses as a group, including the later changes that had allowed them to remain in use.

In July 2013, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved alterations to No. 1’s areaway and sidewalk and the installation of ironwork. Such work rarely attracts the attention given to a new building. Yet these are precisely the places where an old house meets the daily life of the street.

LOCI Architecture subsequently documented a completed exterior restoration for Dermer Management Company. Its project account identifies repairs to the brick, brownstone window surrounds, cast-iron railings, and stone-paved entrance courtyard. The firm names Edward Jose and Anthony Harris as the project team.

Those materials have different demands: brick joints, carved stone, iron exposed to the weather, and paving underfoot. Their care is inseparable from the appearance of the whole. John Bartelstone’s photograph of the completed work shows the composition clearly, from the cornice at the roofline to the entrance below.

The building remains a residential cooperative. Several households occupy the former single-family home, sharing responsibility for its fabric. Its survival rests in part on that continuing use: an old house kept within the life of its neighborhood.

At East 21st Street, follow the cornice around the corner, then return to the lower entrance. The two views span the history of No. 1. One belongs to the merchant who completed his row in 1849; the other records a house changed to accommodate the people who came after him.