16 Gramercy Park South

A townhouse becomes a home for the arts

The idea took shape in the summer of 1887 aboard the Oneida, the steam yacht of the banker E. C. Benedict, cruising the Maine coast with Booth, Lawrence Barrett, the writers Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Laurence Hutton, and William Bispham on board. “Barrett, Bispham, and Benedict sing well and much,” Booth wrote to Edwina from Boothbay on July 27, “while Aldrich is kept at a white heat of fun by Hutton.” Booth proposed a club on the model of London’s Garrick, where actors would meet writers, artists and men of affairs as friends and equals. Aldrich supplied the name, from Jaques’s speech in As You Like It.

Booth wrote on January 5, 1888: “To-morrow a meeting of actors, managers, and artists, at breakfast, to discuss and organize, if possible, a theatrical club like the ‘Garrick’ of London.” The meeting was at Delmonico’s, arranged by the manager Augustin Daly, whose invitation to Mark Twain survives. On January 7 The Players was incorporated with sixteen founders: Booth, Barrett, Hutton, Bispham, Daly and his brother Judge Joseph F. Daly, the actors Joseph Jefferson, John Drew, James Lewis and Henry Edwards, the manager A. M. Palmer, John A. Lane, the writers Samuel L. Clemens and Brander Matthews, the lawyer Stephen H. Olin, and General William Tecumseh Sherman. The mix was deliberate. Actors, Booth had told Palmer in a letter the club still quotes, “do not mingle enough with minds that influence the world”; he wanted “a place where actors are away from the glamour of the theatre.” A profession that could command enormous public admiration still needed places where its members could be known beyond their performances. The club would also gather the evidence of their work: books, portraits, manuscripts and the easily discarded traces of an evening in the theater.

In May Booth bought No. 16 and put Stanford White, a member, to work on it. White took down the brownstone stoop, brought the entrance to the sidewalk and built the two-story porch he called the loggia: square piers below, Tuscan columns above, a railed deck on top. He designed the ironwork and the two great wrought-iron lanterns beside the door. Inside, he found the marble mantel for the Great Hall. When the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the house in 1966, it admired “how skillfully the porch disguised the conversion” of a high-stooped house into one entered at street level.

The company inside the rooms

The portraits at The Players have always belonged to a social world. They depict people whose work was discussed, admired and, sometimes, teased by the people eating and talking beneath them.

Kobbé recorded one particularly good example. Collier’s large portrait of Booth as Cardinal Richelieu shows him with his right arm raised and three fingers extended, invoking the curse of Rome. Around the time Booth and Barrett were attracting attention for charging three dollars a ticket, Maurice Barrymore supplied his own reading of the painting: “there’s a picture of the ‘old man’ raising the price to $3!”

Completed in 1890, John Singer Sargent’s full-length portrait shows Booth before the Great Hall fire, in his own clothes. The members commissioned it to honor the man who had given them the house. Sargent painted him in his studio a few blocks away and set him against the club’s own fireplace, its embers burning low. The portrait hung over the mantel in the alcove above the entrance, and Sargent also painted Jefferson, as Dr. Pangloss, and Barrett for the club. The Booth is no longer in the house. The club sold it in 2002 to settle its debts, and since 2013 it has hung at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth; a reproduction stands in for it at No. 16. The Barrett portrait was sold in 2012 and was later lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the museum now records it as returned to its lender. The Jefferson remains.

Mark Twain was a founder and a familiar presence when he was in New York. His cue hangs in the Grill above his portrait, and the Players Foundation’s tours take in the pool table where he played. The friendship had one interruption. Around 1903 Twain left the club after what he called “an absurdity committed by the Management.” Friends, among them the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, spent three years looking for a way to bring him back “without damaging my pride,” and finally sent him a petition set to the old Scots air “Will ye no come back again?” The club made him an honorary life member, a class it had created for one other man, Sir Henry Irving, and on January 5, 1906, the members gave him a dinner in the private dining room, Brander Matthews presiding. The honor, Twain said, “afforded me unlimited gratification.”

Upstairs, the surviving possessions bring Booth closer. Among them are a portrait of his first wife, Mary Devlin, and a bronze cast of his hand clasping his daughter Edwina’s. A book of William Winter’s poems remains among his belongings. The room also preserves a skull associated with his performances as Yorick. Aldrich told its story in 1903: a Louisville horse thief bequeathed his skull to the elder Booth for use in Hamlet, and it arrived at the actor’s breakfast table in a covered basket. Edwin carried it as Yorick until a papier-mâché substitute from the property room took its place on stage. Portraits of his parents hung in the bedroom, and so, Winter noted, did one of his brother John Wilkes, “whose terrible act and miserable catastrophe he never ceased to deplore.” These family keepsakes sit alongside the objects of his working life.

Booth’s books and papers also became the nucleus of a much larger collection. The Walter Hampden Memorial Library, named for the club’s fourth president, was incorporated in 1957 and opened to outside researchers two years later, receiving its permanent charter in 1963; it has grown into the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library, which holds some fifty thousand playbills, Booth’s letters and prompt books, and the material through which a performance can be studied after its audience has gone home: annotated scripts, correspondence, photographs, costumes and props. The Players Foundation for Theatre Education, which governs the library, continues to make that history available to researchers and to add to it.

A May 1976 visit by Joe Mysak of the Columbia Daily Spectator shows that public purpose already at work. Several researchers who were not club members were poring over the books when he arrived. Librarian Louis Rachow led him through the collections, including the John Mulholland Magic Collection, and checked the membership books when Mysak wondered whether Basil Rathbone had belonged. He had. Alongside the portraits and keepsakes, the house held records that could still answer a visitor’s questions.

A tribute across the street

The house’s founding story has a visible counterpart across Gramercy Park South. At the center of the Park, Edmond T. Quinn’s bronze shows Booth as Hamlet, standing beside a chair with his head inclined in thought. It took The Players twelve years to put him there. The Trustees of Gramercy Park gave permission in May 1906, on condition that the club would remove the statue on reasonable notice. Augustus Saint-Gaudens offered that July to make the memorial in bronze, but his health failed and he died in August 1907. Frederick MacMonnies took the commission in 1909 and resigned it in 1913 after disagreements with the committee over his design. A competition among eight sculptors followed in 1914, and Quinn won it, with Edwin S. Dodge designing the pedestal. The cost, $25,000, was met by the voluntary contributions of members.

On November 13, 1918, a crowd gathered among the trees for the unveiling. The Armistice had been signed two days earlier. Booth would have turned eighty-five that day; his grandson, Edwin Booth Grossmann, unfastened the cloth, and Edwina watched with her husband, her children and two small great-grandchildren of the actor. In the photographs, hats fill the foreground and faces turn toward the newly revealed figure. The buildings behind them are recognizably our own Gramercy.

There is an especially fitting detail in the memorial committee’s account. The ceremony began at noon because Wednesday was matinee day. Everything was completed in twenty-four minutes, allowing the actors present to get back to work. Even a tribute to one of the great figures of the American stage had to respect the afternoon curtain.

Howard Kyle presented the memorial for the committee, asking the club to “assume the duty of its care and preservation.” John Drew, president of The Players, accepted it as the gift of “a company of loyal, loving hearts,” in words preserved by John B. Pine, who responded for the Trustees and would write the Park’s history three years later. Brander Matthews spoke of Booth’s art. The playwright Percy MacKaye, looking up at the figure, said what many have thought since: “There he is, Edwin Booth taking his eternal curtain call!” The ceremony made the connection between the club and the Park visible for generations to come, and the pledge of 1918 has been honored: the Players Foundation funded a restoration of the memorial, carried out under the Trustees of Gramercy Park.

The work of keeping a house alive

Booth’s rooms are often described as though someone simply closed the door in 1893. Their survival has required far more care than that.

The club has had lean years. A settlement addressing its finances led to the sale of the Sargent portrait of Booth in 2002. Unpaid property taxes later put the house at risk, with a foreclosure action reported in 2014. A new board oversaw a refinancing reported by Crain’s in 2016. The Players Foundation for Theatre Education, established in 2008, cares for the library and collections; the Players Preservation Fund, formed in 2013, raises money for the building itself.

During conservation work in 2023, specialists from EverGreene Architectural Arts uncovered a surviving fragment of the bedroom’s historic wallpaper behind a sconce. That fragment, with old photographs, helped them reproduce the earlier pattern. They also identified the 1888 paint color of Stanford White’s scheme, stabilized plaster and conserved the sitting room’s wallpaper. Femenella & Associates repaired the historic window sashes, retaining original material and glass where possible. Additional UV glass now protects the contents while admitting daylight.

The restoration continued through a second summer in 2024. Booth’s Regency dressing table, daybed and chandelier received individual attention; the mantel mirror was regilded, and paintings and their frames were conserved. A locked cabinet beside the fireplace, long assumed to be decorative, was opened by architect Thomas Fenniman and found to contain Booth’s death mask. The rooms’ survival has depended on this patient work of investigation and repair.