19 Gramercy Park South

Trustee William Samuel Johnson builds at 86 Irving Place (1845)

The house is forty years older than its Gilded Age fame. In 1845, attorney and Whig politician William Samuel Johnson (1795–1883)—grandson of the William Samuel Johnson who signed the United States Constitution and served as the first president of Columbia College, and nephew of President John Quincy Adams—erected a four-story red-brick residence at the southeast corner of Gramercy Park South and Irving Place, then numbered 86 Irving Place. Built in compliance with Samuel B. Ruggles’s 1831 trust covenant requiring substantial brick or stone dwellings at least three stories high around the perimeter of the square, the house rose with a three-bay northern façade overlooking the Park and a broad five-bay western elevation along Irving Place.

Johnson was intimately involved with the private garden outside his windows: elected in 1844 as one of the first Trustees of Gramercy Park chosen to succeed Ruggles’s original five, he served until 1854 during the formative decade when the Trustees planted the newly fenced grounds, hired gardener James Virtue to set out a thousand privet shrubs along the iron railings, and debated installing a central fountain.

Colonel Horace Brooks adds the Second Empire mansard roof (1860s)

In the 1850s, ownership passed to Colonel (later Brigadier General) Horace Brooks (1814–1894)—a West Point–trained U.S. Army artillery officer and veteran of the Seminole, Mexican-American, and Civil Wars—and his wife, Mary Emerson Brooks. Immediately south of the house along Irving Place, Brooks erected a two-story brick carriage stable at 84 Irving Place, and in the late 1860s he transformed the silhouette of the corner mansion itself: adding a fifth story crowned by a steep French Second Empire slate mansard roof with round-arched dormer windows and ornamental iron cresting, a wrap-around cast-iron balcony spanning the parlor floor, and a balustraded brownstone entrance portico on Irving Place.

As New Yorker writer Brendan Gill observed in a classic 1979 essay on the house, the mellow red brickwork, green louvered shutters, and black mansard roof of No. 19 seemed to grow organically out of the Park’s foliage—not merely a mansion standing beside Gramercy Park, but one that appeared to have risen directly from it.

Stuyvesant Fish, railroad president and Park Trustee

For thirty-six-year-old Stuyvesant Fish (1851–1923), the year 1887 marked a dual milestone. The son of Hamilton Fish—Governor of New York, United States Senator, and Secretary of State under President Ulysses S. Grant—and a direct descendant of Dutch colonial director-general Peter Stuyvesant, he was elected president of the Illinois Central Railroad in May 1887, a post he held for nearly two decades. That same year, he and his wife, Marion Graves Anthon Fish (1853–1915)—daughter of Staten Island attorney William Henry Anthon and universally known as “Mamie”—purchased the corner mansion and stable on Irving Place from the Brooks family. They spent more than $120,000 on the purchase and sweeping alterations. In 1893, Stuyvesant Fish was elected a Trustee of Gramercy Park, making him the second Park Trustee to call the corner house home.

Fish remained a Trustee until his death in 1923 and served as President of the Trustees from 1906 to 1923. George Zabriskie’s memorial, entered in the Trustees’ minutes on June 4, 1923, recorded the neighborhood service that continued long after the family had moved uptown.

86 Irving Place becomes 19 Gramercy Park South

Mamie Fish’s first stroke of genius at her new residence required neither mason nor carpenter. Although the mansion’s northern windows looked directly into the trees of the square and its lot carried full deeded rights to Gramercy Park, its front entrance sat on the western flank at 86 Irving Place. Refusing to settle for a side-street number when the Park lay outside her parlor windows, Mamie rechristened the house 19 Gramercy Park South. The doorway stayed on Irving Place, but the house’s social identity was transformed forever.

Sidney V. Stratton, Stanford White, and the top-floor ballroom

Immediately after acquiring the house in 1887, Stuyvesant and Mamie Fish commissioned a sweeping remodeling to turn the mid-century dwelling into a showcase for Gilded Age entertaining—installing a white marble staircase, classical reception salons, an elevator, and a mirrored fifth-floor ballroom beneath the mansard roof. Period building filings credit the 1887–1888 architectural alterations to Sidney V. Stratton (1845–1921)—a fellow neighborhood resident at 136 East 19th Street who had collaborated with McKim, Mead & White on the Seventh Regiment Armory—while family and neighborhood tradition long associated the ballroom and interior embellishments with the Fishes’ close friend Stanford White. In Brendan Gill’s account, White, living across the Park at the northwest corner of East 21st Street and Lexington Avenue, was forever running over to add hospitable touches, including the handsome fireplace in the ground-floor oak room overlooking the garden. He was also transforming The Players at 16 Gramercy Park South for Edwin Booth in 1888.

“Fifty-minute dinners” and the reign of the “fun-maker”

Inside 19 Gramercy Park South, Mamie Fish broke the stuffy, three-hour ceremonial mold of Mrs. William Backhouse Astor’s “Four Hundred.” Celebrated across New York and Newport—and profiled in Jennifer Wright’s 2025 biography Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time—as society’s reigning “fun-maker,” Mamie prized speed, theatricality, and needle-sharp wit over solemn protocol. Assisted first by social arbiter Ward McAllister and later by her irrepressible court jester Harry Lehr, she instituted the famous “fifty-minute dinner”: a multi-course feast served at lightning pace by footmen in Colonial livery so guests could rise from the table before conversation grew dull and ascend to the fifth-floor ballroom for dancing, vaudeville turns, and surprise spectacles. Her taste for theatrical surprises also extended to a formal sit-down dinner for her dogs and her friends’ dogs.

Garmey adds spun-sugar centerpieces to the picture of Mamie’s elaborate dinners. He also retells a less decorous episode involving the boxy electric car she introduced to the Park: in his account, she ran over the same pedestrian three times. It is one of the startling anecdotes that followed a hostess whose parties already supplied New York with so much conversation.

“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 laboratory where Mamie perfected her art. After a decade of entertaining here, she succumbed to what Brendan Gill called folie de bâtir and commissioned Stanford White to build a new limestone palace at 25 East 78th Street, at Madison Avenue. By the turn of the century, the Fishes had moved uptown, while continuing to summer at Crossways in Newport and Glenclyffe in the Hudson Highlands. The family—and, after Stuyvesant Fish’s death in 1923, his estate—retained ownership of 19 Gramercy Park South for nearly six decades in all.

The move uptown did nothing to quiet Mamie’s appetite for a new diversion. Before the First World War, she joined forces with Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury, the pioneering literary and theatrical agent who lived with interior designer Elsie de Wolfe at the Washington Irving House on Irving Place and East 17th Street. With a circle of fellow society matrons, they backed Irene and Vernon Castle’s dance academy, Castle House, opposite the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. There the husband-and-wife team taught New York’s social elite the Castle Walk, the Lame Duck, the Innovation, and the Half and Half. Dancing even slipped between courses at private dinner parties—a fashion well suited to a hostess who had never wanted her guests sitting solemnly at the table all evening. After each dance, etiquette directed partners to sit together at the table.

The 1909 studio annex at 20 Gramercy Park South and Ludwig Bemelmans

The Fishes continued to own No. 19, renting the mansion to prominent families until its conversion into studio flats. In 1909, a builder leased the property from the Fish family, demolished Horace Brooks’s old two-story mansard-roofed carriage stable at 84 Irving Place, and erected a red-brick studio-apartment building on its footprint. Designed by architects Shape & Bready to match the cornice line and brick warmth of the corner mansion, the new building was known interchangeably as 84 Irving Place and 20 Gramercy Park South. Openings through the south wall of No. 19 at several levels linked the two properties and allowed the old mansion to be divided into additional studio apartments.

For the next three and a half decades, both 19 and 20 Gramercy Park South were leased as studio and duplex apartments to writers, artists, and theatrical figures. Their tenants included Gilded Age portraitist Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942), who maintained a New York studio apartment in the combined complex while dividing her time between Gramercy Park and her summer studio, Green Alley, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In the late 1930s, Austrian-born writer and illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans (1898–1962)—having moved from the nearby Hotel Irving at No. 26—occupied most of the fifth floor at No. 20 with his wife Madeleine and daughter Barbara. It was while living on Gramercy Park that Bemelmans wrote and painted Madeline (1939). Barbara later recalled that their landlord declined to renew the family’s lease because he wanted the rooms for a private screening room; she believed Sonnenberg inspired Mr. Sunshine, the landlord in her father’s 1950 picture book Sunshine: A Story About the City of New York.

Benjamin and Hilda Sonnenberg unite thirty-seven rooms (1931–1945)

It was Hilda Caplan Sonnenberg (1902–1979) who brought the family to No. 19. As Brendan Gill later recounted, in 1931, when thirty-year-old public-relations strategist Benjamin Sonnenberg (1901–1978) and his wife were living in a small apartment across the Park at 60 Gramercy Park North, Hilda was caught in a sudden rainstorm and dashed into No. 19’s tall, paneled vestibule for shelter. Discovering that the lower two floors were vacant and full of cobwebs while the upper floors were divided into small flats, she inquired on the spot whether the duplex could be rented. The Sonnenbergs moved into the lower two floors in 1931 and expanded floor by floor as their collections grew. In 1945, Sonnenberg purchased both No. 19 and the adjoining studio building at No. 20 from the Fish estate. Leaving the red-brick facade and Horace Brooks’s Second Empire mansard roof with its painted cast-iron cresting intact, he converted the annex into guest bedrooms, libraries, and quarters for a live-in staff of six. He restored the Fish house’s nineteenth-century interiors and opened a maze of small fifth-floor rooms into a grand ballroom and private motion-picture theater, joining the two buildings into a single thirty-seven-room mansion.

“Always live better than your clients”

Born near Brest-Litovsk in 1901 and brought to New York’s Lower East Side as a child, Benjamin Sonnenberg began his career covering Greenwich Village and working for the Joint Distribution Committee before founding Publicity Consultants. His clients included CBS, Lever Brothers, Pan American World Airways, Philip Morris, Pepperidge Farm, and Samuel Goldwyn. In bespoke British suits, bowler hats, and a luxuriant walrus mustache, he lived by the maxim “Always live better than your clients.” Yet his thirty-seven-room home never felt like an institutional palace. “The house prances, it has a certain lilt to it,” Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times in 1978, noting the advantage of a house the Sonnenbergs could shape rather than a rigid uptown Beaux-Arts mansion. Through the tall, paneled vestibule and black-lacquered door lay a broad, low-ceilinged, oyster-white front hall. Entering it felt, as Brendan Gill observed, like being ushered into “some delightful snug cave of a country house, spacious and opulent and yet taking care to be more comfortable than opulent.” To the left was an intimate oak-paneled den where the Sonnenbergs dined when alone. Its wood floor retained a comfortable creak, deeply embrasured ground-level windows looked into Gramercy Park, and a fireplace traditionally attributed to Stanford White carried, in Gill’s recollection, the bittersweet scent of woodsmoke even in midsummer.

The path to those rooms had begun at Ellis Island. In 1910, nine-year-old Ben arrived from Russia with his mother and two sisters, joining a father who had spent five years working at a clothing stand on Grand Street to pay for their passage. On the Lower East Side, Lillian Wald became his lifelong mentor at the Henry Street Settlement House. He discovered art and theater there, lived at the settlement during his high school years, and won a scholarship to Columbia.

A European field assignment for a relief agency in 1922 introduced him to first-class hotels, Savile Row tailoring, and the elaborate domestic service of English country houses. Back in New York, he married Hilda Caplan in 1924; they had met at a Henry Street dance when he was sixteen. As he built his public-relations practice around corporate leaders and stage and screen stars, he dressed the part he had chosen for himself: four-button suits, detachable starched collars, bowlers and boaters, and walking sticks. The Edwardian wardrobe gave a new profession an air of old-world permanence.

Gramercy Park appealed to him as a little of that London-square serenity in New York. The first-floor duplex in 1931 was only as much as the Sonnenbergs could initially afford; taking over the whole property became his ambition. As the rooms were reunited, he restored the white-marble center-hall staircase and oak-paneled parlor. Over four decades of roaming England, he brought home furniture as well as pictures, adding Welsh dressers to the hunt tables and Chippendale pieces.

From the front hall, a heavy-balustraded staircase rose through walls hung with hundreds of Old Master and modern drawings, with a particular emphasis on sketches of artists and writers. The collection included works by Ingres, Tiepolo, Goya, Seurat, Degas, Picasso, Matisse, Augustus John, and John Singer Sargent, alongside English Georgian furniture, silver, and antique brass. The stairs reached a second-floor landing larger than most Manhattan living rooms, where a Regency wine table held glass decanters and brass candelabras before a fireplace. Off this landing opened the hushed William and Mary Room, lined with elaborate seventeenth-century oak paneling salvaged from the English country house Cassiobury, eighteenth-century gilt mirrors, and early Georgian marble-topped tables. A sculpted head by Alberto Giacometti stood beside an Impressionist seascape, Elizabethan portraits, and antique vases.

Garmey’s inventory adds Walter Sickert to the artists represented and Chippendale and Queen Anne furniture and Irish hunt tables to the rooms’ furnishings. The brass accumulated over four decades required a member of the staff devoted full-time to polishing it.

Screening-room nights and saving a Gramercy landmark

The house was shaped by two pairs of knowing eyes. While Benjamin hunted on 57th Street, in London, and in Paris—filling the bedrooms with nineteen antique brass and iron beds—Hilda bought much of the gleaming brass on the Lower East Side. “I would shop on Allen Street while Ben would go to 57th Street,” she recalled in a passage quoted by Goldberger. In 1951, she brought a pair of hollow glass blocks home from a French factory and placed them as ashtrays amid the antiques on the coffee table in her husband’s paneled library. At the top of the house, windows looked over the Park’s canopy from the ornate red-and-white ballroom, with a 35-millimeter projection booth concealed behind one wall. At the household’s height, dinners, teas, and screenings for up to a hundred guests took place two or three times a week, making No. 19, in Goldberger’s estimation, “probably visited by more New Yorkers than any other single private house in the city.” In his April 1950 New Yorker profile “A House on Gramercy Park,” Geoffrey T. Hellman described cocktails and dinner downstairs, a film in the ballroom, and midnight roast-beef sandwiches and highballs in the drawing room overlooking the Park. Hilda sometimes preferred a neighborhood movie with an old friend to the gathering at home.

The top-floor cinema seated fifty. Samuel Goldwyn sent films for private previews, bringing Sonnenberg’s professional connections into the house’s evening entertainment. Outside, Garmey remembered another carefully chosen pairing: a tan Rolls-Royce and Sonnenberg’s matching tan overcoat.

Klein describes gatherings ranging from twenty to two hundred people, drawing guests from the arts, politics, business, and society. Across those very different worlds, the Sonnenbergs carried the Park’s tradition of the private salon into the middle of the twentieth century.

Sonnenberg’s devotion to Gramercy Park extended well beyond his own front door. In 1969, when the landmarked 1859 Quaker Meeting House nearby at 28 Gramercy Park South faced an uncertain future after a developer’s thirty-story tower plan was blocked, Sonnenberg personally organized and led the consortium of Gramercy Park neighbors that purchased the meetinghouse from the Friends—preserving the building until Brotherhood Synagogue acquired and restored it in 1975.

The 1979 Sotheby Parke Bernet auction and later stewards

Benjamin Sonnenberg died on September 6, 1978, at seventy-seven. Two days later, a passerby outside No. 19 spotted the Sonnenbergs’ butler, Arthur Horn, on the stoop with polish and cloth, scrubbing the huge brass door knocker as usual. “It is what he would have wanted,” Horn said. “We want to keep the house going the way it always was.” Yet Sonnenberg had no wish to leave a static monument behind. In Goldberger’s theatrical metaphor, the collection was a set assembled for one lifetime, and Sonnenberg preferred that the stagehands strike it when he was gone. His will directed that the house be sold and its contents dispersed. Before the rooms were dismantled, Steven Tucker photographed them for Alistair Cooke; the photographs are now preserved at the New-York Historical Society. In a five-day sale from June 5 to June 9, 1979, Sotheby Parke Bernet auctioned more than 1,700 lots for nearly $5 million. The dispersal was chronicled by Brendan Gill in The New Yorker, Robert Hughes in Time, and Ben Sonnenberg Jr. in his 1991 memoir Lost Property.

The thirty-seven-room house was placed on the market at an asking price of $2 million. In 1979 it was purchased for $1.8 million by Baron Dr. Walter Langer von Langendorff (1905–1989), the Austrian-born chemist and philanthropist who founded Evyan Perfumes, creator of the classic fragrance White Shoulders, and his wife, Baroness Evelyn Westall. The sale began its next chapter on Irving Place. Following Baron von Langendorff’s death in 1989, the mansion passed through two subsequent private ownerships in 1995 and 2000, remaining one of Manhattan’s rare intact private palaces.

Restoring a corner landmark painted by John Sloan

Protected since September 20, 1966, within the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission’s Gramercy Park Historic District (and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980), 19–20 Gramercy Park South underwent major exterior masonry, brownstone, shutter, and slate-mansard restorations in 2003–2004 and 2014, documented by the Gramercy Park Block Association.

More than a century after Ashcan School master John Sloan set up his easel inside the Park in 1912 to paint Spring, Gramercy Park—capturing a nursemaid and child on a sunny path while the red-brick walls and black slate mansard roof of 19 Gramercy Park South glow through the spring leaves behind them—the house that William Samuel Johnson built, Mamie Fish staged, and Benjamin Sonnenberg filled with art still anchors the southwest gateway of the square.

Read the Block Association’s restoration record →