19 Gramercy Park South

A House That Rose out of the Park

The house is older than its fame. In 1845, William Samuel Johnson, a New York lawyer and grandson of the William Samuel Johnson who signed the Constitution and served as the first president of Columbia College, built a brick house on the corner lot where Irving Place meets the Park. He was building under Samuel Ruggles's rules. The 1831 deed that created Gramercy Park restricted construction within forty feet of the front of the surrounding lots to brick or stone dwellings at least three stories high. Johnson’s house was one of the early results.

Johnson was more than a lot owner. He was one of the first Trustees chosen to replace Ruggles's original five, and he served from 1844 to 1854, the years in which the Trustees planted the newly fenced Park, hired a man with the happy name of James Virtue to set out a thousand privets inside the fence, and argued over a fountain. No. 19 has been bound up with the running of the Park from the beginning.

The original house had four stories. Its next owner, Horace Brooks, built a stable beside it on Irving Place and later added a fifth story beneath the black mansard roof that still crowns it. By the time the Fishes arrived in 1887, Gramercy Park had become one of the most fashionable addresses in the city, and No. 19 was ready to become less a private residence than a stage for arrival, surprise, and a steady stream of guests.

In his 1979 New Yorker piece on the house, Brendan Gill described No. 19 as a house whose brickwork and mansard roof seemed to grow from the Park's foliage. It is hard to imagine a better description of the place: not simply a grand house beside Gramercy Park, but one that seems to have risen from it.

The House as Stage

Following the Fishes’ purchase in 1887, the house was remodeled for entertaining. Its marble staircase and top-floor ballroom are widely attributed to Stanford White, although some architectural histories credit Sidney V. Stratton.

White’s work is also part of the story of The Players at No. 16, a few doors along the Park.

Mamie had no patience for a house that merely looked impressive. It had to perform, and she knew how to direct it. She became known as a "fun-maker," direct, outspoken, and quick-witted, a hostess who preferred wit to ceremony and movement to monotony. Her "fifty-minute dinners" challenged the era's long, formal meals: enough time for a good dinner, but not enough time for the evening to go stale.

“Make yourselves at home … and believe me, there is no one who wishes you were there more than I do.”

A quip attributed to Mamie Fish

Gramercy Park was the opening act. Around the turn of the century, the Fishes moved uptown to a new Stanford White mansion at 25 East 78th Street, completed in 1900, and it was there, and at Crossways in Newport, that Mamie's entertaining reached its full and notorious scale. But the habits were formed here: the short dinner, the sharp tongue, the conviction that a party should move.

Thirty-Seven Rooms

Sonnenberg was born in Brest-Litovsk in 1901 and brought to the Lower East Side as a boy. He grew up to be one of the best-known publicists of his era, the man that companies like CBS and Lever Brothers hired when they wanted to be admired rather than merely known, and he understood, as Mamie had, that a house could do work no press release could. He filled No. 19 with portraits, drawings, and an enormous collection of antique brass, kept a butler and a staff to match, and gave parties at which cabinet secretaries, publishers, actors, and his own clients found themselves seated together. "Always live better than your clients" was his rule; it became the title of his biography. The house was his masterpiece of public relations, and everyone who climbed the staircase knew it.

In his 1950 profile, Geoffrey T. Hellman described the evening’s progression: dinner downstairs, an elevator ride to a private screening upstairs, then roast-beef sandwiches and highballs in the second-floor living room. The cinema seated fifty on red plush divans and armchairs. Hilda sometimes preferred a movie with a friend to her husband’s parties.