11 Gramercy Park South

A family house facing the garden

Built around 1855, No. 11 is a mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-Italianate brownstone on the south side of Gramercy Park. Its early residents, Oliver De Forest Grant and his wife, Eliza Adeline Suydam, belonged to the prosperous New York world that grew up around Samuel B. Ruggles’s private garden.

The house announced its place in that world through its tall parlor windows, triangular pediments, and continuous iron balcony. A high stoop once brought callers directly to the principal floor. Above it, the windows grew simpler toward the cornice: a measured, dignified front overlooking the Park.

The Grants’ name would travel much farther than this quiet stretch of East 20th Street. In the 1860s Oliver and his sons took control of a locomotive manufacturer in Paterson, New Jersey, the business that became Grant Locomotive Works.

An engine fit for Paris

For the Paris International Exposition of 1867, the works produced America, a passenger locomotive dressed for an international audience. Its boiler was sheathed in German silver, its cab finished in fine American woods. The imposing wheels and elaborate headlamp made an industrial machine into a showpiece of craftsmanship and ambition.

After Paris, America went to work on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. It offers a vivid glimpse of the enterprise behind the Grant family’s wealth, while their Gramercy address remained a home. By 1900, George De Forest Grant was still listed at No. 11.

A new way to live in an old house

In 1917, plans were drawn to divide the former family residence into apartments. Architect John E. Nitchie prepared the alterations for Mrs. Charles W. Sherwood. The old stoop eventually disappeared, and the entrance moved to the lower level.

Such changes opened Gramercy’s large houses to smaller households. At No. 11, apartment living would make room for one of the neighborhood’s most memorable creative partnerships.

Samuel and Ernesta

Samuel Latham Mitchell Barlow and Ernesta Beaux married in 1928. He was a composer with a musical life on both sides of the Atlantic; she was a writer and designer who had already published a book about wartime Europe. Together they made their Gramercy home a place where music and conversation belonged to everyday life.

Ernesta had grown up in a family of artists and writers. The painter Cecilia Beaux was her aunt, and the biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen her sister. Beaux’s full-length portrait of Ernesta, painted in 1914, shows her in a white dress beside a tea table: a poised young woman whose later life would carry her well beyond the drawing room.

In the Barlows’ home, the pleasures of a beautiful interior served the pleasures of company. Small groups could gather close to the performers; a concert could become a conversation, and a literary celebration could turn into an evening of music.

Inside the rooms, 1931

Gottscho’s photographs bring that setting into view. In the living room, slender chairs stand around a patterned carpet. Flowers soften the formal wall panels; a tall mirror rises above the fireplace, reflecting the ornament of the opposite wall. There is grandeur here, but also room to draw a chair closer.

Beyond the living room, open doorways lead the eye through the apartment. A chair beside a doorway, a bust on a pedestal, and another room glimpsed in the distance give the photographs the feeling of a house waiting for its guests.

In the upper hall, books fill shelves on either side of a sculpted bust. A deep sofa and two embroidered chairs turn a passage into a place to sit. The arrangement captures something essential about the Barlows’ household: culture was at hand, on the shelves and around the room.

Poet Paul Engle later remembered Ernesta finding paneling in an eighteenth-century French château being dismantled and bringing it to New York for the music room. Listening there, he recalled, was “like sitting inside the music.”

Ernesta finds a national audience

Ernesta’s curiosity about the wider world long predated the salon. In 1916 she traveled through Germany and Austria with her first husband, William C. Bullitt. Her observations appeared the following year as An Uncensored Diary from the Central Empires, published under the name Ernesta Drinker Bullitt.

During the Second World War, she turned from the printed page to radio. A short feature on WEAF, You and the War, grew into NBC’s network program Commando Mary. From 1942 to 1945, Ernesta told women about the work they could do, the training available, and the ways they could take part in the war effort.

Her subjects were practical. One broadcast described women in Caledonia, Michigan, sending hometown news to service members. Other programs explored factory work and opportunities for volunteers of different ages and abilities. She made a vast national emergency understandable through particular people and useful tasks.

The woman who welcomed a small audience into her Gramercy rooms was now addressing listeners across the country. Her surviving scripts preserve that other side of the hostess: an experienced observer with a clear public voice.