22 Gramercy Park South

A measured front

The house stands on the south side of the Park, east of Irving Place, among the narrow frontages that make this stretch of the square feel unusually close to nineteenth-century New York. Its three-bay brick elevation rises above a brownstone basement. A tall stoop leads to a recessed entrance, while the windows keep an even rhythm across the front.

The design belongs to the Greek Revival tradition: broad, rectilinear openings, a substantial doorway, and an orderly wall of brick. Look upward, however, and the restraint gives way to a more elaborate finish. Large brackets support the projecting cornice, with small horizontal openings worked into its decorative band. Here the ornament associated with the Italianate taste meets the older discipline of the townhouse beneath it.

The roof before the studio years

A photograph in the Museum of the City of New York, catalogued about 1900, shows two dormers rising above that cornice. The small attic openings and the dormers made the roof a useful occupied zone rather than a simple cap to the building. Compare the image with the modern façade: the roofline has changed, but the sequence of tall windows, brick piers, and brownstone entrance remains immediately recognizable.

Tom Miller’s history of the house places its construction about 1847. An 1854 advertisement cited in that account already gives No. 22 as the workplace of a woman seeking another domestic position. The address was a functioning household well before the later dates sometimes repeated in property listings.

The architect of the original house has not been securely identified. Its interest lies as much in the handling of familiar forms as in a designer’s name: the emphatic door surround, the slim expanse of brick between the windows, and the unusually animated line where the wall meets the sky.

A family with a national reach

The Field name had already become part of Gramercy’s history. Cyrus W. Field helped carry the telegraph across the Atlantic; his brother David Dudley Field pursued a different kind of connection, seeking to bring order to the law through written codes. Another brother, Stephen J. Field, sat on the United States Supreme Court. The youngest of these four, the Reverend Henry Martyn Field, was a minister, editor, and widely travelled author.

No. 22 is remembered as Henry’s house and became David’s home in his later years. The distinction matters: the family’s earlier residences on the opposite side of the Park belong to a separate architectural story. By the time David was living here, the square had become both a setting for his public reputation and a refuge from it.

The lawyer’s library

A letter dated May 20, 1891, preserved at Bowdoin College, carries the address “22, Gramercy Park.” Writing to the Reverend Rowland B. Howard, Field regrets that his health prevents him from attending meetings in Boston and Rome. The brief note joins this domestic address to the wider peace movement: international concerns remained on his desk even when travel had become difficult.

His lasting achievement was the campaign to simplify legal procedure. The New York Code of Civil Procedure of 1848 became associated with his name, and his work reached well beyond the state. At home, books remained part of his daily surroundings. Contemporary notices describe a valuable law library at No. 22, the working collection of a man who had not entirely put his profession aside.

The last return

Henry’s 1898 biography of his brother preserves a scene that gives these rooms a human scale. Returning from Europe in April 1894, David arrived ahead of Henry, who had gone to meet the ship. Henry followed him home and found him by a blazing fire. David greeted him with an embrace. They went upstairs to the library and talked about the winter’s travels.

The reunion was brief. David fell ill with pneumonia and died in the early morning of April 13, at eighty-nine. Henry’s recollection dwells on the shock of seeing a vigorous traveller become gravely ill within hours, and on the consolation that he had reached home.

The newspaper tributes collected after his death record an address suddenly known to the country as a place of mourning. For a moment, the quiet house on the south side of the Park became the final setting of a legal career that had helped change how Americans approached their courts.

Rooms arranged around looking

The surviving parlor photograph makes clear how much there was to see. Framed pictures crowd the wall above a marble mantel. A round table occupies the foreground, a chandelier hangs overhead, and classical columns frame a view into the next room. The alignment of doors draws the eye deep into the house. The objects are plentiful, but the architecture gives them order.

The museum’s studio photograph offers another atmosphere. Daylight enters through a broad skylight and a bank of windows at the far end. Pictures, shelves, upholstered seats, a fireplace, and rugs share the space. The inscription on the original identifies it as the studio in a second-story extension at Mrs. John A. Vanderpoel’s residence; it is not evidence that this photographed room occupied the front attic.

Seen together, the two views show a house arranged for close attention. Painting, collecting, conversation, and domestic comfort occupy the same visual field. The photographs reveal the texture of a working artist’s home without requiring us to imagine activities the camera did not record.

A practical language of color

Vanderpoel’s most arresting publication is Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color, published in 1902. Its ambition was deliberately broad. In her preface, she addressed people whose work depended on color beyond the painter’s studio: decorators, designers, florists, dressmakers, and others who needed an understanding they could put to use.

Her method could be startlingly simple. Study an object, identify its colors, and translate their proportions into a grid of one hundred squares. The finished page has the immediacy of a small abstract composition, but the arrangement is also an analysis. Amount matters alongside hue: a trace of black has a different role from a broad field of rose.

Plate LXXVII examines an antique Persian rug through fifty-five parts old rose, forty parts old yellow, and five parts black. Vanderpoel explains that the fine black outlines help the other colors work together. The accompanying grid makes the relationship visible at a glance. It is a lesson in noticing how something is made before deciding how it might be used.

The book predates the firm documentary evidence of her residence here, so it should not be described as a work known to have been written at No. 22. It nevertheless offers a compelling way to understand the eye that assembled the photographed rooms: attentive to objects, to relationships, and to the effects of one color beside another.

A long transformation

A major new project began in the early 2000s. The published court record of the renovation identifies Michael Haverland as the architect, with an initial agreement in 2002 and a construction period running from 2004 to 2012. The scope included the façades, building systems, planning, and interiors.

The New York State condominium offering record supplies a precise milestone: the plan for 22 Gramercy Park Condominium was accepted on September 29, 2008. The change placed the house within a new legal and residential arrangement, following its earlier lives as a private home, furnished rooms, and apartments.

What survives in the view

The present interiors belong to that extensive modern intervention. They should not be confused with the columned parlor and crowded studio preserved in the archival photographs. Nor should the handsome ironwork at the entrance be used as proof of an untouched nineteenth-century composition: the balcony and stoop railings visible in modern views include later work.

The street still offers a clear architectural conversation between old forms and later decisions. The tall brownstone entrance retains its weight against the brick. Above it, repeated window openings bring order to the elevation, and the projecting cornice gives the house its distinctive finish. The trees temper the view just as strongly as the neighboring walls define it.

Stand across the street and No. 22 is part of a continuous urban scene. Look into its history and the house separates into a succession of rooms: a legal library, a furnished suite, a parlor hung with pictures, a bright studio, and contemporary homes. Its place beside the Park has outlasted each arrangement. Caring for that place means preserving the architecture we can still see and keeping an accurate account of the lives and interiors that have passed.