16 Gramercy Park South
The Players · An actor’s gift at midnight, a clubhouse for the arts, and a room preserved above the Park
A HOME ABOVE THE CLUB
On New Year’s Eve in 1888, Edwin Booth gave away the house in which he intended to spend his last years. Standing before the Great Hall fireplace at 16 Gramercy Park South, he presented its deed, furnishings, theatrical library and art to The Players. Actors would have a home where they could meet writers, painters, architects and patrons of the arts as friends. Upstairs, Booth kept a bedroom and sitting room for himself.
The Players still occupies that house. Stanford White transformed the mid-1840s townhouse with a columned sandstone porch, elaborate iron lanterns and rooms made for conversation. Booth’s apartment survives on the third floor, overlooking the Park where his bronze likeness as Hamlet was unveiled in 1918. The house, the rooms and the statue remain connected by the club’s ceremonies and its daily life.
The house and Edwin Booth
Elihu Townsend, General Robert B. Potter, and Congressman Clarkson Nott Potter (1845–1888)
Standing on the south side of Gramercy Park immediately east of the National Arts Club at Nos. 14–15 and just west of 18 Gramercy Park South (which absorbed the site of attorney James W. Gerard’s lost townhouse at old No. 17), the house at 16 Gramercy Park South is four decades older than the club that bears its address. Built around 1845–1847 as a Gothic Revival pair with No. 15 next door, it was erected for Wall Street banker Elihu Townsend—one of the earliest buyers of Samuel B. Ruggles’s lots—and subsequently owned in the 1850s by merchant and Gramercy Park Trustee Valentine G. Hall.
Garmey places the house in an early group at Nos. 15–17 dating to 1844–45, when Gothic porches and cast-iron verandas linked these neighboring fronts. White’s later loggia replaced that first, more domestic relationship between the townhouse and the sidewalk.
By the Civil War, 16 Gramercy Park South had become the home of two remarkable brothers—sons of Pennsylvania Episcopal Bishop Alonzo Potter, grandsons of Union College president Eliphalet Nott, and brothers of future New York Episcopal Bishop Henry Codman Potter and architects William Appleton Potter and Edward Tuckerman Potter. Major General Robert Brown Potter (1829–1887), commander of the Union Ninth Corps who had famously backed his division’s sapper regiment in tunneling the 511-foot mine shaft beneath Confederate lines at the Crater, was carried home to 16 Gramercy Park South in the spring of 1865 to recover after being shot through the body during the final assault on Petersburg on April 2, 1865.
When General Potter moved to England in 1869, the house passed to his elder brother, prominent attorney and five-term Democratic Congressman Clarkson Nott Potter (1825–1882). In May 1878, Clarkson Potter chaired the special House committee—known across the nation as the “Potter Committee”—appointed to investigate the disputed 1876 presidential election lost by a single electoral vote by his next-door neighbor at 15 Gramercy Park South, Governor Samuel J. Tilden. To the astonishment of the Democratic sponsors, the committee’s subpoena of Western Union’s “cipher dispatches” uncovered coded telegrams sent by Tilden’s nephew Colonel William T. Pelton from No. 15 attempting to bargain for contested electoral votes. Although Tilden was cleared of personal involvement, the revelation ended his hopes for 1880, and the two men remained next-door neighbors until Clarkson Potter—by then president of the American Bar Association—died in the parlor of No. 16 on January 23, 1882. Six years later, in May 1888, his widow Virginia Davidson Potter sold 16 Gramercy Park South for $75,000 to fifty-four-year-old actor Edwin Booth.
America’s Prince of Players—triumph, tragedy, and resilience
Born on his father’s farm near Bel Air, Maryland, on November 13, 1833, during the great Leonid meteor shower, Edwin Thomas Booth (1833–1893) was the son of the brilliant, erratic English-born tragedian Junius Brutus Booth. Making his stage debut in 1849 and tempering his father’s fiery Romanticism with quiet psychological depth and musical diction, Edwin became the undisputed leader of the nineteenth-century American stage. In the winter of 1864–1865 at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre, his landmark production of Hamlet ran for one hundred consecutive nights—a New York record for the play that stood until fellow Player John Barrymore’s 101st performance in 1923.
Three weeks after that hundredth-night triumph, on April 14, 1865, Edwin’s younger brother John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. A devoted Unionist who had voted for Lincoln in 1864—and who, roughly a year before the assassination, had personally saved the President’s eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, from being crushed between a moving train and a crowded station platform in Jersey City—Edwin was plunged into grief and withdrew from the stage until January 3, 1866, when a standing-room crowd at the Winter Garden welcomed him back as Hamlet with a thunderous ovation.
Booth also knew every hardship and social stigma of the actor’s life from the inside. He had buried two beloved wives—Mary Devlin (mother of his daughter Edwina) in 1863, and Mary McVicker in 1881—and after building the magnificent Booth’s Theatre at Sixth Avenue and West 23rd Street in 1869, he lost the theatre and his fortune in the Panic of 1873, spending years on exhausting cross-country and European tours to pay off every creditor. With prejudice against the stage still shaping actors’ social standing, Booth resolved to use his restored fortune to create a permanent home that would elevate his profession.
The neighborhood had offered Edwin Booth shelter long before he bought No. 16. After Mary Devlin’s death in February 1863, he gave up drinking and moved with his mother and young daughter Edwina first to a house rented from publisher George Putnam on East 17th Street, then to a house he bought on East 19th Street. John Wilkes was a frequent visitor there, but his pro-Confederate tirades became so volatile that Edwin forbade discussion of Lincoln, slavery, or the war inside his home.
On April 15, 1865, as news of the assassination reached New York, Edwin returned from Boston to that darkened East 19th Street house, pushing past crowds of onlookers. He summoned his neighbor, the Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows, for spiritual counsel. Grief in the neighborhood was so raw that waiters at a nearby hotel were dismissed on the spot for speaking lightly of the President’s death.
For nine months, the East 19th Street house was his retreat. When financial necessity helped bring him back to the Winter Garden in January 1866, his Gramercy neighbors filled the front rows. They led nine rounds of applause and tossed bouquets onto the stage to welcome him home.
Years later, in his third-floor suite at The Players, sleep could still elude him. Sitting at the front window with the Park’s silvery gates and shadowed trees before him, Booth called these moonlit vigils his “vulture hours,” filled with “vulture thoughts.” Daylight brought gentler routines: lunch in the Grill Room, Shakespeare in the parlor beneath John Singer Sargent’s portrait, and a walk around the Park. The great tragedian would sometimes kneel on the pavement beside the fence to play marbles with the neighborhood boys.
A home for the arts
From the yacht Oneida to Delmonico’s (1887–1888)
The idea for The Players took shape in July 1887 aboard the steam yacht Oneida, owned by Greenwich, Connecticut banker Commodore Elias Cornelius Benedict, during a summer cruise along the coast of Maine with Edwin Booth, his co-star Lawrence Barrett, writers Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Laurence Hutton, and Booth’s friend William Bispham. “Barrett, Bispham, and Benedict sing well and much,” Booth wrote to his daughter Edwina from Boothbay Harbor on July 27, 1887, “while Aldrich is kept at a white heat of fun by Hutton.” Over deck-chair conversations, Booth proposed founding a New York club modeled on London’s Garrick Club, where actors would meet writers, painters, sculptors, architects, and patrons of the arts as friends and social equals. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, supplied the name from Jaques’s speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.”
On January 6, 1888, theatre manager Augustin Daly hosted an organizational breakfast at Delmonico’s (his handwritten invitation to Mark Twain still survives in the archives). The following day, January 7, 1888, The Players was formally incorporated in New York by sixteen founders: Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, Joseph Jefferson, John Drew Jr., James Lewis, Henry Edwards, Augustin Daly, Judge Joseph F. Daly, A. M. Palmer, Laurence Hutton, Brander Matthews, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), William Bispham, John A. Lane, attorney Stephen H. Olin, and Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman.
The blend of callings was central to Booth’s charter. Actors, Booth wrote to A. M. Palmer in a letter the club still cherishes, “do not mingle enough with minds that influence the world”; he wanted “a place where actors are away from the glamour of the theatre,” enriched by a dramatic library and collection of stage history.
Stanford White’s Renaissance Revival loggia and lanterns (May–December 1888)
After purchasing 16 Gramercy Park South from Virginia Potter in May 1888 for $75,000, Booth entrusted its transformation to thirty-four-year-old architect Stanford White (1853–1906) of McKim, Mead & White, who became an early member of the club and waived his fee. White’s adaptation of the 1840s Gothic Revival townhouse was a tour de force of Italian Renaissance Revival design. Removing the old high brownstone stoop, he lowered the main entrance to street level beneath a majestic two-story sandstone porch—which he called the loggia—supported by rusticated square piers at the sidewalk, fluted Tuscan columns on the parlor floor, and a balustraded open-air promenade at the third story overlooking Gramercy Park.
White’s plans were completed on July 2, 1888. Lowering the entrance required an adjustment upstairs: he raised the front writing-room floor to provide headroom beneath it. His proposed square boxes of green shrubs did not survive the design process. According to Garmey, neighbors objected that they would make the porch look like a German beer garden.
Flanking the lower piers, White hung two monumental wrought-iron bracket lanterns crowned by theatrical masks and scrolls, while sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens modeled the club’s twin masks of Comedy and Tragedy. Inside, White created the oak-paneled Great Hall with its antique Italian marble hearth, the subterranean Grill Room, a billiard room, a dramatic library spanning the second floor, and a quiet suite of two rooms on the third floor overlooking the Park for Booth himself. When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the clubhouse an individual landmark in March 1966, the commissioners marveled at “how skillfully the porch disguised the conversion” of a high-stoop residence into a street-level clubhouse.
The lanterns looked to Florence, taking their inspiration from those at the Palazzo Strozzi. Within the remodeled house, Booth also leased guest rooms to his friend and fellow actor Lawrence Barrett, bringing a familiar theatrical companion into the home above the club.
Founder’s Night and the William Warren loving cup (New Year’s Eve 1888)
The clubhouse opened on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1888. Beginning at eleven o’clock, more than a hundred founders and members gathered in the parlors and around the Great Hall fireplace beneath Thomas Sully’s portrait of Junius Brutus Booth. Stepping onto a dais before the hearth, Edwin Booth presented the title deeds to 16 Gramercy Park South—along with all its furnishings, paintings, rare folios, and theatrical relics—as his personal gift to The Players. Augustin Daly accepted the deeds “not alone in the name of the Players now existent, but also in the name of generations of Players yet to come.”
Lawrence Barrett then read a letter from Booth’s daughter Edwina, who had sent a laurel wreath for her father and a dedicatory ode by poet Thomas William Parsons; just as Barrett spoke the line “Tragedian, take the crown,” the clock struck twelve for the arrival of 1889. Deeply moved, Booth called for the lighting of the Yule log (also sent by Edwina) and passed the silver William Warren Loving Cup—a Tiffany & Co. vessel presented in 1882 to Boston’s beloved comic actor William Warren by Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough, and Mary Anderson, bequeathed by Warren to Jefferson, and donated by Jefferson to the club.
Booth’s gift made room for the practical needs of working performers. Actor members were granted the lower initiation fees and annual dues of non-resident members, while he settled into the third-floor rooms he called his “nest among the treetops of Gramercy Park.”
By one o’clock on New Year’s Day, as Carole Klein recounts, Booth came downstairs to find members lunching in the Grill Room and reading in the library, whose first thousand books came from his own collection. He told Edwina that the club seemed as though it had always existed.
Founder’s Night commemorates Booth’s gift of December 31, 1888. Reading the founding documents and passing the William Warren Loving Cup became enduring rituals of the celebration, which has often been held on New Year’s Eve. His November 13 birthday brings a further annual observance, Founder’s Day, centered on the actor and his memorial in the Park.
The company inside the rooms
John Singer Sargent’s portraits and Maurice Barrymore’s quip
From its first winter, the walls of 16 Gramercy Park South were hung with portraits of stage legends whose performances were debated—and affectionately teased—by the members dining beneath them. As critic Gustav Kobbé recounted in 1905, English artist John Collier’s dramatic life-size canvas of Edwin Booth as Cardinal Richelieu depicted the actor with his right arm raised aloft and three fingers extended as he invoked the solemn curse of Rome. When Booth and Lawrence Barrett made headlines for raising top ticket prices on their joint tour to three dollars, wit and matinee idol Maurice Barrymore (patriarch of the Barrymore dynasty) pointed up at the canvas in the clubhouse and declared: “There’s a picture of the ‘old man’ raising the price to $3!”
Completed in 1890, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Booth was commissioned by the members of The Players. It shows him in the dark civilian clothes his friends knew at No. 16. The full-length portrait places him before the Great Hall fireplace, with his thumbs hooked into his pockets and his gaze turned slightly away. High on the mantel, Sargent included the club’s injunction against repeating the gossip shared within its walls. Booth posed in Sargent’s nearby studio, with the familiar clubhouse interior supplying the setting.
The painting hung for more than a century in the reading-room alcove. The club sold it in 2002, and it entered the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth in 2013. A reproduction now occupies its place at No. 16. Sargent also painted Lawrence Barrett, whose portrait was sold in 2012, and Joseph Jefferson as Dr. Pangloss. The Jefferson remains in the clubhouse, alongside work by Thomas Sully, Eastman Johnson and Childe Hassam.
Mark Twain’s billiard cue and the 1906 homecoming dinner
Charter founder Samuel L. Clemens—Mark Twain—was one of the clubhouse’s most devoted regulars whenever he was in New York, spending hours at the pocket billiard table downstairs in the Grill Room, where his personal cue still hangs on the wall above his portrait. Around 1903, however, Twain resigned in a huff over what he called “an absurdity committed by the Management” involving a disputed house-account charge.
Determined to bring him back “without damaging my pride,” a committee of his closest friends at The Players—led by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens—spent three years crafting a peace offering, finally sending Twain an illuminated parchment petition set to the old Scottish Jacobite air “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” The club elected Twain an Honorary Life Member—an honor previously bestowed on only one person, English actor-manager Sir Henry Irving—and welcomed him home at a jubilant dinner in the private dining room on January 5, 1906, with Brander Matthews in the chair. The reunion, Twain dictated in his autobiography eleven days later, “afforded me unlimited gratification.”
Yorick’s real skull in the Booth Room and the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library
Upstairs, in the third-floor apartment, Edwin Booth’s preserved third-floor bedroom and sitting room hold the intimate relics of his life: a portrait of his first wife, Mary Devlin; a bronze cast of his right hand clasping the infant hand of his daughter Edwina; a volume of poems by critic William Winter with the bookmark left at the page Booth was reading on the night he died; portraits of his parents; and, as Winter noted, a framed portrait of his brother John Wilkes Booth, “whose terrible act and miserable catastrophe he never ceased to deplore.”
The room also holds a genuine human skull used for Yorick in Hamlet. As Thomas Bailey Aldrich recounted in 1903, a notorious nineteenth-century Kentucky horse thief named Fontaine (“Lovett”), whom Junius Brutus Booth had once befriended in a Louisville jail, willed his skull to the elder Booth with the request that it appear on stage in Hamlet. Delivered to the Booth breakfast table in a covered basket, the skull was inherited by Edwin Booth, who held it in the graveyard scene until a stagehand accidentally chipped it and a papier-mâché prop took its place on tour.
Beside these theatrical relics are the tools of an actor’s working life, including Booth’s enormous dictionary, held together in a vise. His collection of Shakespeare, promptbooks and correspondence became the cornerstone of the club’s library. Incorporated in 1957 as the Walter Hampden Memorial Library (in honor of fourth president Walter Hampden) and opened to outside scholars in 1959 under longtime librarian Louis A. Rachow, the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library—governed since 2008 by The Players Foundation for Theatre Education—safeguards some 50,000 playbills, alongside annotated scripts, letters, stage costumes and the John Mulholland Magic Collection.
Booth’s lasting presence
The final performance and the Little Church (1891–1893)
At a Brooklyn Academy of Music matinee on April 4, 1891, fifty-seven-year-old Edwin Booth gave what proved to be his final performance, playing Hamlet. His last years centered on his rooms at The Players. After a stroke in April 1893, he died there in the early hours of June 7. Edwina’s account recalls a storm the previous afternoon and the failure of the clubhouse’s electric lights that night. She remembered the sudden darkness in both the chamber and the street below.
On June 9, 1893, his funeral was held at the Church of the Transfiguration on East 29th Street—christened “The Little Church Around the Corner” in 1870 when Joseph Jefferson brought the body of fellow actor George Holland there after a neighboring pastor refused to bury an actor. In a poignant Gramercy circle, the service was conducted by Episcopal Bishop Henry Codman Potter, brother of the two Potter owners who had lived at 16 Gramercy Park South before Booth, while Joseph Jefferson, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Bispham, A. M. Palmer, and painter Eastman Johnson served as pallbearers before Booth was laid to rest beside Mary Devlin at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (By a haunting historical coincidence, at the very hour Booth’s funeral was underway on June 9, 1893, the interior floors of Ford’s Theatre in Washington—then used as a War Department record office—collapsed, killing twenty-two federal clerks.) Five years later, in 1898, The Players dedicated John La Farge’s stained-glass memorial window to Booth at the Little Church Around the Corner.
Unveiling the bronze Hamlet across Gramercy Park South (1906–1918)
Directly across the street from the clubhouse loggia stands the physical link between Edwin Booth’s home and Samuel B. Ruggles’s garden. Edmond T. Quinn’s bronze statue of Booth as Hamlet stands on a circular Conway pink granite pedestal designed by architect Edwin S. Dodge.
Conceived in March 1906 when William Bispham first asked the Trustees of Gramercy Park for permission to place a bust of Booth inside the fence, the $25,000 monument funded by voluntary subscriptions from members of The Players took twelve years to realize—passing from a 1906 consultation with a dying Augustus Saint-Gaudens to a 1909–1913 commission with Frederick MacMonnies (who proposed the central Park site before resigning over his controversial stone proscenium arch), and finally to the anonymous October 2, 1914 competition among eight sculptor-members of The Players judged next door at the National Arts Club.
Unveiled at noon on Wednesday, November 13, 1918—Booth’s eighty-fifth birthday and just two days after the Armistice ending the First World War—the ceremony was timed to finish in exactly twenty-four minutes so the Broadway actors in the crowd could make their Wednesday matinee curtains. After Booth’s grandson Edwin Booth Grossman, Players librarian Guy Nichols, and clubhouse steward Walter Ottel drew away the canvas shroud, committee secretary Howard Kyle presented the monument, third Players president John Drew Jr. accepted it in the name of “a company of loyal, loving hearts,” and Gramercy Park Trustee John B. Pine (of 24 Gramercy Park South) welcomed “the distinguished guest you have brought us”—prompting dramatist Percy MacKaye to look back from the south gate and exclaim: “There he is, Edwin Booth taking his eternal curtain call!”
November 13 and the birthday procession
On November 13, the connection between house and monument becomes a living ritual. The Players observes Booth’s birthday as Founder’s Day, gathering at the clubhouse and processing into Gramercy Park to honor him at the statue. The club’s account of its 2017 celebration describes a candlelight procession, the laying of a laurel wreath and a return to No. 16 for dinner. It is an annual expression of affection for the actor whose rooms still overlook the garden.
The story of its commission and unveiling continues in the profile of the Edwin Booth Statue.
The house grows with its members
The Equity Room (1913), Pipe Nights, and the Broadway revivals
McKim, Mead & White continued to adapt the house after Booth’s death. Additions in 1904 and 1906 brought a rear dining-room bay window and a three-sided porch around the yard, extending the members’ rooms toward the quieter back of the property.
In the winter of 1912–1913, conversations inside a quiet second-floor room at 16 Gramercy Park South transformed the working conditions of the American theatre. Following the dissolution of the old Actors’ Society of America in December 1912, a determined committee of actors met regularly behind closed doors at The Players to draft the constitution of a true labor union that would end unpaid rehearsal periods, stranded touring companies, and arbitrary dismissals. Those meetings culminated on May 26, 1913, when 112 performers gathered at the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel to found the Actors’ Equity Association, electing Player and 24 Gramercy Park South co-founder Francis Wilson as its first president. A bronze plaque records the Equity Room’s part in that organizing.
The room also preserves a piece of Booth’s earlier ambition for the stage. Its stained-glass portrait of Shakespeare once hung in his theatre on West 23rd Street.
Downstairs in the Grill Room and Great Hall, the club cultivated its own distinctive rituals. In 1905, members inaugurated “Pipe Nights”—convivial late-night gatherings named for the long white clay churchwarden pipes distributed at the tables. In 1911, members broke precedent to host a special tribute at the clubhouse honoring French stage legend Sarah Bernhardt, and beginning with a 1936 tribute to Sir John Gielgud, Pipe Nights evolved into the club’s black-tie testimonial dinners honoring giants of the performing arts. Between 1922 and 1940, The Players also stepped onto the Broadway stage as a producer, mounting a celebrated series of annual one-week all-star classical revivals cast from the club’s membership—beginning with Sheridan’s The Rivals in June 1922 and continuing through She Stoops to Conquer, Julius Caesar, Becky Sharp, The Way of the World, Troilus and Cressida, and Otis Skinner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1933).
Another room acquired its name by accident. Garmey recounts that Sarah Bernhardt became trapped in Booth’s small passenger lift during a Ladies’ Day visit. The lift thereafter went by the affectionate name “the Bernhardt Room.”
Walter Hampden, Howard Lindsay, and the women of April 23, 1989
Two long-serving twentieth-century presidents shaped the modern clubhouse: classical actor Walter Hampden (1879–1955), who served for twenty-seven years as fourth president from 1927 to 1954 and gave his name to the library, and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, actor, and producer Howard Lindsay (1889–1968, co-author of Life with Father and The Sound of Music), who served as fifth president from 1955 to 1965 and oversaw the 1960 expansion of the main dining room over the storm-damaged rear courtyard, nearly tripling its seating capacity.
For the club’s first hundred years, membership was restricted to men. Women attended the spring reception known as Ladies’ Day, held on April 23 in celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, as well as occasional special tributes such as the evening for Sarah Bernhardt. In 1987, following a decisive vote of the membership, that century-old barrier fell. On Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1989, The Players inducted its inaugural class of thirty distinguished women of the arts, led by First Lady of the American Theatre Helen Hayes and including Lauren Bacall, Agnes de Mille, Lillian Gish, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Angela Lansbury, Toni Morrison, Gwen Verdon, and Eudora Welty. Five years later, in 1994, British-American actress and playwright Lynn Redgrave (1943–2010) was elected the first woman president in the history of The Players.
Keeping the house alive
Conserving the Booth Room and discovering the death mask (2023–2024)
Preserving Edwin Booth’s rooms has required continuing care for their fabrics, furniture, finishes and windows. The Players Foundation for Theatre Education stewards the library, museum collections and educational programs. The Players Preservation Fund supports the landmark building. Together with the club, they keep the house and its collections in use.
The Foundation conserved the bedroom and sitting room in two phases during the summers of 2023 and 2024. A wallpaper fragment found beneath an electrical plate helped recover the bedroom’s original pattern. EverGreene Architectural Arts identified Stanford White’s 1888 paint colors, while Femenella & Associates repaired the old window sashes and retained the original glass wherever possible. Added UV-filtering panes protect the interiors. The small “teapot” window locks also survive.
The second phase restored furniture, paintings and the chandelier, and strengthened and regilded the mantel mirror. Original sitting-room wallpaper salvaged from behind that mirror supplied patches for damaged areas.
The locked cabinet beside the fireplace held a further discovery. Architect Thomas Fenniman opened it with an electric saw and found Booth’s death mask inside. The Foundation’s illustrated conservation record follows the work object by object.
Exhibitions, staged readings, and the Hampden-Booth Library today
Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962 and an individual New York City Landmark on March 15, 1966 (six months before the creation of the Gramercy Park Historic District), 16 Gramercy Park South remains a vital working clubhouse for theatre, film, music, visual art, and letters.
The house continues to host exhibitions, readings and performances. Its recent calendar has included the Members’ Artists Exhibition, Gingold Theatrical Group’s Project Shaw readings and WORDTheatre’s Author–Actor series.
On the fourth floor, the Foundation’s renovated Research Room brings together more than 2,500 volumes from Booth’s personal library, works connected with his contemporaries and books donated by Walter Hampden. Michael Gerbino guided its redesign, which added cabinetry, flooring, ceiling and electrical improvements to protect the paper collections and make them easier to study. Researchers can inquire through the Foundation’s Research Room page.
Residents of Note
The People of Gramercy- Lauren BacallTony Award–winning Broadway actress and Hollywood screen legend (1924–2014); inducted in the inaugural April 23, 1989 class of women members of The Players
- Lawrence BarrettCelebrated nineteenth-century American Shakespearean actor and co-star of Edwin Booth (1838–1891); charter incorporator of The Players in 1888
- Edwin Thomas BoothAmerica’s foremost nineteenth-century Shakespearean tragedian (1833–1893); purchased 16 Gramercy Park South in May 1888, founded The Players on New Year’s Eve 1888, and lived in his third-floor rooms until his death on June 7, 1893
- Augustin DalyInfluential nineteenth-century Broadway playwright, theatre manager, and impresario (1838–1899); hosted the January 1888 Delmonico’s organizing breakfast and served as vice president of The Players
- Agnes de MillePioneering American choreographer of Oklahoma!, Rodeo, and Carousel (1905–1993); inducted in the inaugural 1989 class of women members of The Players
- John Drew Jr.Celebrated Broadway leading man and matinee idol (1853–1927); charter 1888 incorporator and third president of The Players (1905–1927)
- Lillian GishLegendary silent-screen and Broadway actress (1893–1993); inducted in the inaugural 1989 class of women members of The Players
- Walter HampdenAcclaimed classical stage actor famous for Cyrano de Bergerac (1879–1955); fourth president of The Players for twenty-seven years (1927–1954) and namesake of the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library
- Kitty Carlisle HartBroadway actress, singer, and longtime chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts (1910–2007); inducted in the inaugural 1989 class of women members
- Helen Hayes“First Lady of the American Theatre” and dual Tony and Academy Award winner (1900–1993); first woman inducted into membership at The Players on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1989
- Joseph JeffersonBeloved nineteenth-century American comic actor famous for Rip Van Winkle (1829–1905); charter 1888 incorporator, donor of the William Warren Loving Cup, and second president of The Players (1893–1905)
- Angela LansburyFive-time Tony Award–winning Broadway and screen actress (1925–2022); inducted in the inaugural 1989 class of women members of The Players
- Howard LindsayPulitzer Prize–winning playwright, actor, and producer of Life with Father and The Sound of Music (1889–1968); fifth president of The Players (1955–1965) who oversaw the 1960 dining-room expansion
- Brander MatthewsFirst professor of dramatic literature in the United States at Columbia University (1852–1929); charter 1888 incorporator of The Players
- Toni MorrisonNobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist (1931–2019); inducted in the inaugural 1989 class of women members of The Players
- Clarkson Nott PotterFive-term U.S. Representative, chairman of the 1878 House committee investigating the 1876 presidential election, and president of the American Bar Association (1825–1882); owned and lived at 16 Gramercy Park South from 1869 until his death here in January 1882
- Major General Robert Brown PotterUnion Ninth Corps commander wounded in the final assault on Petersburg in April 1865 (1829–1887); convalesced and resided at 16 Gramercy Park South from 1864 to 1869
- Lynn RedgraveTony- and Academy Award–nominated British-American actress and playwright (1943–2010); elected in 1994 as the first woman president of The Players
- General William Tecumseh ShermanCommanding General of the United States Army and devoted theatregoer (1820–1891); charter 1888 incorporator of The Players
- Elihu TownsendProminent Wall Street banker and early Gramercy lot purchaser (1786–1853); built the original Gothic Revival townhouse at 16 Gramercy Park South in the mid-1840s
- Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)Master American humorist and novelist (1835–1910); charter 1888 incorporator, avid Grill Room billiard player, and Honorary Life Member of The Players
- Gwen VerdonFour-time Tony Award–winning Broadway musical star and dancer (1925–2000); inducted in the inaugural 1989 class of women members of The Players
- Eudora WeltyPulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer and essayist (1909–2001); inducted in the inaugural 1989 class of women members of The Players
- Stanford WhitePartner in McKim, Mead & White and early member of The Players (1853–1906); remodeled 16 Gramercy Park South into the clubhouse in 1888 and designed its two-story Renaissance Revival loggia and iron lanterns
Building at a glance
Built c. 1845–1847 · Remodeled 1888 by Stanford White for Edwin Booth
The building record
- Address
- 16 Gramercy Park South (Manhattan Block 875, Lot 68)
- Historic names
- The Players · earlier Elihu Townsend House, Valentine G. Hall House & Clarkson Nott Potter House
- Original house built
- c. 1845–1847 (built in the Gothic Revival style as a pair with No. 15 for banker Elihu Townsend; subsequently home to Valentine G. Hall and brothers Maj. Gen. Robert B. Potter and Congressman Clarkson Nott Potter)
- Clubhouse conversion
- May–December 1888 (purchased May 1888 for $75,000 by Edwin Booth from Virginia Potter; remodeled by architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White with a street-level entrance, two-story Tuscan sandstone loggia, wrought-iron lanterns, and Great Hall) White’s plans were completed July 2, 1888; the front writing-room floor was raised to give the new entrance adequate headroom.
- Founder’s gift
- December 31, 1888 (deeded at midnight on New Year’s Eve by Edwin Booth, who retained his third-floor bedroom and sitting room until his death on June 7, 1893) Lawrence Barrett also leased guest rooms in the house.
- Landmark designations
- National Historic Landmark (designated December 19, 1962) · Individual NYC Landmark (LP-0224, March 15, 1966) · Gramercy Park Historic District (LP-0251, September 20, 1966) · National Register of Historic Places (October 15, 1966)
- Stewardship & library
- The Players (founded 1888) · Hampden-Booth Theatre Library (incorporated 1957) · The Players Foundation for Theatre Education (established 2008; 2023–2024 Booth Room conservation) · The Players Preservation Fund (established 2013)
Over time
A Gramercy townhouse
The private residence that will become The Players is built on the Park’s south side for the banker Elihu Townsend.
The Potters
General Robert B. Potter recovers here from his Petersburg wound; his brother Clarkson N. Potter, congressman and neighbor of Samuel J. Tilden, dies in the house on January 23, 1882.
An idea at sea
Cruising the Maine coast on the yacht Oneida in July, Booth proposes a club for actors and their fellow artists; Aldrich names it.
A home for The Players
Delmonico’s, January 6; incorporation, January 7; Booth buys the house in May; White adapts it; the clubhouse opens on New Year’s Eve.
Sargent paints Booth
Sargent completes the full-length portrait commissioned by the members to honor Booth.
Booth’s rooms remain
Edwin Booth dies in his third-floor bedroom on June 7; his preserved bedroom, sitting room, and theatrical collections become the enduring heart of the clubhouse.
Pipe Nights begin
Late-night entertainments that will become the club’s testimonial dinners.
Actors organize
Planning meetings at The Players lead to Actors’ Equity, founded May 26.
The statue is unveiled
Neighbors and members gather in Gramercy Park on November 13, two days after the Armistice.
The Players on Broadway
Annual all-star revivals, beginning with The Rivals.
A library for scholars
The Walter Hampden Memorial Library is incorporated; it opens to outside researchers in 1959.
Making room for members
During Howard Lindsay’s presidency, the dining room expands over the storm-damaged rear garden.
Women become members
Thirty women are inducted on April 23; Helen Hayes is first.
The Sargent leaves
The club sells its portrait of Booth; it goes to the Amon Carter Museum in 2013.
New stewards
The Players Foundation for Theatre Education (collections) and the Players Preservation Fund (building) are formed.
Conserving Booth’s rooms
Two phases restore historic finishes, windows, furniture and paintings; Booth’s death mask is discovered in a locked cabinet in 2024.
A working house for the arts
Members exhibit their work, actors gather for readings, and the Foundation opens new conversations through its collections.
Sources cited
Period sources
- 1889. “Gotham’s Players’ Club,” Savannah Morning News, January 1, 1889, page 2 — Contemporary newspaper report of the New Year’s Eve clubhouse opening and Edwin Booth’s midnight gift of the deed.
- 1893. William Winter, Life and Art of Edwin Booth (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1893) — Booth’s close friend and drama critic on the hundred nights of Hamlet, the 1866 return to the stage, the founding of The Players, and Booth’s death and funeral.
- 1894. Edwina Booth Grossmann, Edwin Booth: Recollections by His Daughter, and Letters to Her and to His Friends (New York: The Century Co., 1894) — Publishes Booth’s letters from the July 1887 Oneida cruise and the eve of the January 1888 Delmonico’s breakfast.
- 1903. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Poor Yorick,” in Ponkapog Papers (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903) — The writer who named The Players recounts the history of the real skull preserved in Booth’s third-floor rooms.
- 1905. Gustav Kobbé, Famous Actors and Their Homes (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1905), “The Players,” pages 203–221 — Period tour of the clubhouse illustrated with interior photographs by Byron.
- 1906 & 1912. Mark Twain, Autobiographical Dictation (January 16, 1906, Mark Twain Project), and Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), Vol. II, Chapter CLXVI, and Vol. III, Chapter CCXXXVIII — Documenting the 1888 founding conversations, Twain’s brief resignation, and his January 5, 1906 homecoming dinner as an Honorary Life Member.
- 1909. Richard Watson Gilder, “A Grouping of Letters: Edwin Booth and Lincoln,” The Century Magazine, Vol. 77, No. 6 (April 1909), pages 919–920 — Robert Todd Lincoln’s firsthand account of Edwin Booth saving his life on the Jersey City railroad platform.
- 1918. Howard Kyle, The History of the Edwin Booth Memorial: April 2nd, 1906 to November 13th, 1918 (New York: The Players, 1918) — The memorial committee’s firsthand record of the twelve-year commission and the November 13, 1918 unveiling in Gramercy Park.
- 1921. John B. Pine, The Story of Gramercy Park, 1831–1921 (New York: Gramercy Park Association, 1921) — Documents the early south-side lots, Edwin Booth’s gift of The Players, and John Drew Jr.’s acceptance of the Booth Memorial.
- 1976. Joe Mysak, “History-heavy Artists’ Clubs Far from Sedentary,” Columbia Daily Spectator, May 27, 1976, pages 4–5 — Visit to the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library with librarian Louis A. Rachow.
Histories and reference
- 1966 & 1975 Landmark reports. New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, The Players Designation Report (LP-0224, March 15, 1966) and Gramercy Park Historic District Designation Report (LP-0251, September 20, 1966); and Cathy A. Alexander, The Players National Historic Landmark Nomination (National Park Service, 1975).
- The Townsend and Potter households. Tom Miller, “The Players — No. 16 Gramercy Park” (November 20, 2010) and “The Lost James W. Gerard House — 17 Gramercy Park” (April 6, 2020), Daytonian in Manhattan; and Report of the Potter Committee Investigating the Presidential Election of 1876 (U.S. House of Representatives, 45th Congress, 1878–1879).
- Edwin Booth, Lincoln, and the June 9, 1893 funeral. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. (Edwin Booth collection and 1865 hundredth-performance Hamlet program); Booth-Grossman Family Papers (MssCol 340), Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library; Jason Emerson, “Edwin Booth Saved Robert Todd Lincoln’s Life,” Civil War Times (2005); Emma O’Neill-Dietel, “Ford’s Theatre’s Forgotten Tragedy,” WETA Boundary Stones (October 7, 2022), on the June 9, 1893 collapse of Ford’s Theatre during Booth’s funeral; and Parish Archives of the Church of the Transfiguration (“The Little Church Around the Corner,” 1 East 29th Street), recording the 1870 George Holland burial and John La Farge’s 1898 Edwin Booth memorial window.
- The Oneida, the Warren Loving Cup, and Actors’ Equity. Greenwich Historical Society records on Commodore E. C. Benedict’s yacht Oneida; Michael Gerbino, “William Warren Loving Cup,” The Brief Chronicles (December 30, 2025); and Morgen Stevens-Garmon, “100 Years of the Actors’ Equity Association,” Museum of the City of New York (May 21, 2013), documenting the 1912–1913 planning committee in the Equity Room at The Players.
- Broadway revivals, presidents, and the first women members. Internet Broadway Database records of The Players’ annual Broadway revivals (1922–1940); C. Claiborne Ray, “A Classic Player: Howard Lindsay, 1889–1968,” The Brief Chronicles (June 26, 2019); Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1989 (reporting the April 23, 1989 induction of the first thirty women members); and Rebecca Johnson, “Lynn Redgrave, Player,” The New Yorker, May 2, 1994.
- John Singer Sargent’s portraits and modern stewardship. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth (accession record 2013.7 for John Singer Sargent’s 1890 portrait Edwin Booth); The Metropolitan Museum of Art archives (Sargent’s 1890 portrait Lawrence Barrett); Crain’s New York Business (March 18, 2014, and September 7, 2016); Martha Steketee, “The Players Library Collections,” HowlRound (February 15, 2015); and Lansing Moore Jr., “Edwin Booth’s Curtain Call,” The Magazine Antiques (2024), also available as an illustrated article hosted by The Players.
- Stephen Garmey, Gramercy Park (Balsam Press, 1984), pp. 132–139, 161. The early house, White’s July 2, 1888 plans, the raised writing-room floor, Strozzi-inspired lanterns, Booth’s life upstairs, and the 1904 and 1906 additions. Garmey draws on The Players’ archives, Eleanor Ruggles’s Prince of Players (1953), and Gramercy Graphic, April 1951, p. 10, for the clubhouse recollections and Sarah Bernhardt lift anecdote.
- Carole Klein · 1987. Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), pp. 92–115, 154–156. “Drama in Gramercy Park,” Booth’s earlier neighborhood homes, the founding of The Players, its first New Year’s Day (p. 115), and his final years. Page references follow the printed book.
- Founder’s Night. “Founder’s Night,” The New Yorker, January 19, 1963, and The Players’ 2017 year-end celebration announcement. These accounts document the ceremony and its scheduling.
- Founder’s Day and the birthday procession. “The Players to Mark Founder Edwin Booth’s 184th Birthday,” BroadwayWorld, November 10, 2017. The club’s announcement describes the November 13 observance, candlelight procession and wreath-laying.
- Booth’s last days. Charles Townsend Copeland, Edwin Booth (1901), pp. 154–155, quoting Edwina Booth Grossmann’s account.
- Barrymore’s Hamlet chronology. New York Public Library, John Barrymore papers, chronology for February 9, 1923.
The Players and its Foundation
- The Players & The Players Preservation Fund. Official club history and archival records on the 1888 incorporation, Pipe Nights, the Equity Room, and building preservation.
- The Players Foundation for Theatre Education & EverGreene Architectural Arts (2023–2026). Institutional records on the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library, the fourth-floor Research Room, arranged docent tours, the 2018 centenary restoration of the Edwin Booth Statue with the Trustees of Gramercy Park, and the 2023–2024 two-phase conservation of the Booth Room (including EverGreene Architectural Arts’ wallpaper and paint-color recovery, Femenella & Associates’ window conservation, and Thomas A. Fenniman’s 2024 discovery of Edwin Booth’s death mask).
- 2026 cultural programming. Victoria L. Dammer, “Inside The Players’ 5th Annual Artists Exhibition,” Opening Night (February 3, 2026); Gingold Theatrical Group Project Shaw 2026 season records; and WORDTheatre Author–Actor Series archives.
Photo credits for this page
- Thomas Nast, Founders’ Night illustration (1901). Reproduced in Michael Gerbino, “Our Hamlet, Our Home,” Artwork at The Players, December 2020.
- Contemporary interior photograph of The Players: Original photograph.
- Hero photograph: The Players’ entrance and loggia at 16 Gramercy Park South. Original photograph (ARCH_1851_LR.jpg).
- The reading room, Grill Room, and second-floor hall of The Players (1905): Photographs by Byron Company, published in Gustav Kobbé, Famous Actors and Their Homes (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1905).
- Edwin Booth as Hamlet (c. 1870): Photograph by J. Gurney & Son, New York; Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-ds-04503).
- Pencil drawing of The Players at 16 Gramercy Park South (1947): Drawn by Josephine Barry; Museum of the City of New York (75.43.85).
- John Singer Sargent, Edwin Booth (1890, oil on canvas): Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas (2013.7).
- Bartender Connelly behind the bar at The Players (1935): Photograph by Wurts Bros.; Museum of the City of New York (X2010.7.2.6542 / MNY325108).
- A game of billiards in the Grill Room at The Players: Museum of the City of New York (MN117062).
- The Players at 16 Gramercy Park South (1893): Moses King, ed., King’s Handbook of New York City, 2nd ed. (Boston: Moses King, 1893), page 554; British Library.
- Dedication of the Edwin Booth Memorial in Gramercy Park (November 13, 1918): Howard Kyle, The History of the Edwin Booth Memorial (New York: The Players, 1918); Harvard College Library.