2 Gramercy Park West

A city built around a garden

The first distinction of No. 2 was something it shared. The house and its neighbor at No. 1 were built as a pair, facing the western end of Gramercy Park. Their red brick, brownstone trim, tall parlor windows, and iron balconies gave this edge of the square a more ornamental character than the Greek Revival houses farther along the row.

Samuel B. Ruggles’s plan for Gramercy Park had begun in 1831. By the late 1840s, the idea was becoming a neighborhood: substantial private houses arranged around an enclosed garden whose care was the responsibility of the surrounding lot owners. At No. 2, the Park was both an outlook and a reason to build.

The house before the Pinchots

Originally, a high stoop carried visitors to the principal entrance above an English basement. The formal rooms looked through exceptionally tall windows toward the Park. Their balconies extended the architecture outward, setting delicate ironwork against brick and stone. The low forecourt fence marked another transition between the public pavement and private rooms.

Colonel Richard French’s family occupied No. 2 by 1860; his widow sold it in 1884. In January 1887, a property report announced a new purchaser: Mrs. David Dudley Field, Jr., had sold the house to James W. Pinchot. Its most consequential family association was beginning.

New York and Grey Towers

James Pinchot had made his fortune in the wallpaper trade. His wife, Mary Eno Pinchot, came from a family closely associated with New York real estate. Their children—Gifford, Antoinette, and Amos—grew up with the advantages of wealth, travel, and connections. James also encouraged an unusual ambition in his eldest son: a professional life devoted to forests.

The Gramercy house belonged to a family life divided between the city and the country. The Pinchots had recently completed Grey Towers in Milford, Pennsylvania, a substantial house designed by Richard Morris Hunt. No. 2 was their New York address, rather than the sole setting of their lives. That distinction helps explain the succession of people who occupied it.

A winter before Biltmore

In the winter of 1888, Susan Elizabeth Fish LeRoy rented the Pinchot house for herself and her grandchildren. Among them was fifteen-year-old Edith Dresser, who would later marry George Vanderbilt and become the mistress of Biltmore. Here she was one of five siblings brought together under their grandmother’s care after the deaths of their parents.

The arrangement placed Edith within a familiar social circle: she and her sisters knew Antoinette, or Nettie, Pinchot from dancing classes in Newport. Denise Kiernan’s history of Biltmore opens with this winter at No. 2. Before the vast North Carolina estate entered Edith’s life, there was a brick house in New York, a family gathered for the season, and the Park beyond the parlor windows.

John Muir tells a story

In June 1893, John Muir wrote to his wife, Louie, about a crowded visit to the East Coast. New York’s editors and writers had filled his days with invitations. One dinner took him to the Pinchots’ house on Gramercy Park, where, he recalled, he had “dined in grand style.” He identified his host’s son by the work that already distinguished him: forestry.

At this dinner, as at others during the visit, Muir told the story of a minister’s dog and a dangerous passage across a glacier. His letter catches the attraction of the tale—the crevasses, the animal’s fear, its joy at reaching safety. Far from the ice, in a New York dining room, the wilderness became immediate through a storyteller’s voice.

A profession for the forests

Gifford Pinchot had studied forestry in Europe after graduating from Yale. He then developed a forest-management program for George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore estate, work that helped establish his national reputation. His career carried a practical conviction: forests required knowledge, planning, and care if they were to serve future generations.

In 1898 he became chief of the federal Division of Forestry; in 1905 he became the first chief of the United States Forest Service. Those appointments were part of a larger effort to make conservation a public responsibility. In 1900, Gifford and Henry S. Graves established the Yale Forest School with support from the Pinchot family and other founding gifts. Grey Towers became a summer training ground for its students.

These achievements were national in scale, but No. 2 gives them a domestic setting. The Pinchots’ New York home was one of the places where the people of the conservation movement met. Muir’s letter preserves an actual evening here, with a meal, a story, and a young profession still taking shape.

From St. Thomas’s to Gramercy Park

On April 6, 1896, former President Benjamin Harrison married Mary Scott Lord Dimmick at St. Thomas’s Church. After the ceremony, the bridal party traveled by carriage to the Pinchots’ house. Refreshments were served, and the newlyweds changed into traveling clothes before leaving for Indianapolis.

It was a wedding reception in the intimate, practical sense: a private house received the couple between church and train. Newspaper coverage carried this brief Gramercy interlude far beyond New York. The ceremony belonged to St. Thomas’s; the gathering afterward belonged to No. 2.

A house for company

Mary Pinchot’s gatherings included a lecture-recital on Passion music by W. J. Henderson and the Bach Singers in February 1900. Former Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle and his wife leased the house in 1903.

A house enters fiction

The address also found a place in literature. In F. Hopkinson Smith’s Caleb West, Master Diver, published in 1898, it became the home of Mrs. Leroy. Arthur Bartlett Maurice later identified the real building in his guide to the New York of the novelists. In the story, Caleb’s wife finds refuge there after leaving her home near the Race Rock lighthouse.

For readers who recognized Gramercy Park, the setting carried associations of security, established households, and respectable rooms. Smith brought that familiar urban world into a novel whose action also turned on dangerous work at sea. The house had acquired another kind of resident: one who existed on the page.

Business crosses the threshold

A dressmaking business entered No. 2 with a new tenant in 1907, provoking objections from neighbors. Work and domestic life were beginning to share the old mansion.

A more substantial change followed in 1917. The property was sold out of the estate of Mary E. Pinchot. Early reporting raised the possibility of an apartment-house improvement. By April, a more specific proposal had emerged: the existing house would become studio apartments for owner Ronald C. Lee.

A new life inside the old walls

The first announcement named Grosvenor Atterbury as the architect preparing plans. A later alteration filing that spring named Aymar Embury and listed a new mezzanine, work to the front and interior walls, partitions, and an elevator. Together, the records show a conversion that developed through more than one architectural proposal.

The stoop was removed and the entrance lowered. Enlarged upper windows gave the house its distinctive new profile. The paired façades of Nos. 1 and 2 now differed markedly, while the lower floors retained the proportions of an Italianate residence.

By March 1918, the converted apartments were being rented. Several households could now occupy a property previously arranged for one family. Viewed from the Park, the broad upper windows remain the clearest sign of that transition.

Another change above the cornice

In July 1922, another filing proposed a penthouse for No. 2. Ronald C. Lee remained the owner, and Aymar Embury II was again the architect. The estimated cost was $5,000. This was a further layer in the building’s adaptation, distinct from the earlier studio conversion.

The proposal continued Lee’s effort to find more space within the old property. The studio conversion and proposed penthouse belonged to the same practical question: how much new life could an existing house accommodate?

The scale of neighborhood care

In 1945, Lee’s house won a neighborhood prize for its front yard, with ivy, privet, and window boxes along the balcony. Its public face was being cared for as a garden as well as a building.

When the Gramercy Park Historic District was designated on September 20, 1966, No. 2 was included among the houses on the western side of the square. Their value lay partly in their relationship to one another: similar widths, repeated window lines, brick surfaces, and a domestic scale beside the Park. The altered house belonged to that ensemble as surely as its more symmetrical neighbor.

James Turrell and the light within

The house’s association with artists eventually acquired a particularly fitting name. James Turrell, known for works that make viewers conscious of light and perception, owned an apartment here. Its sale was reported in March 2016.

Photographs published at the time show a full-floor residence with a large skylight, fireplaces, exposed brick, and access to a private rear garden. These are records of a later domestic interior, rather than a reconstruction of the Pinchots’ rooms. They add another view of the house: away from the formal park-facing façade, light enters from above and rooms open toward greenery behind the building.

Reading the house from the street

No. 2 remains a residential building. Its history is most readily encountered from the sidewalk: the fence, the balcony, the tall lower windows, and the dramatically different upper floor. Seen together, those features explain how the house changed without surrendering its place in the row.

The comparison with No. 1 is especially revealing. Two houses began together; their later lives pulled their architecture in different directions. At No. 2, a family mansion became a building of apartments, and a façade designed for one household came to frame many private worlds. The Park is still outside the windows.