24 Gramercy Park South

James Couper Lord’s 1861 carriage house at 129 East 19th Street

Before the present twelve-story building rose in 1908–1909, its forty-nine-foot frontage on the south side of the square was occupied by two mid-nineteenth-century residences numbered 24 and 25 Gramercy Park South. The eastern lot at old No. 24 ran 179 feet through the block to 129 East 19th Street. Acquired in 1855 from financier Charles Moran by iron merchant and philanthropist James Couper Lord (1825–1869)—grandson of New York and Erie Railroad president Eleazar Lord—the property gained an enduring architectural gem in 1861 when Lord erected a two-story Gothic Revival brick carriage house at the rear of his garden at 129 East 19th Street.

Caroline Pryor Pine’s 1929 recollections, quoted by Garmey, connect this stretch of the row through three sisters and their families: Surrogate Sylvanus Miller at No. 24, Mrs. Samuel Mitchill at No. 25, and Morris Ketchum at No. 26. Her account dates Nos. 25 and 26 to 1849–50, names the East 19th Street contractor Mr. Hennessy, and describes their Nova Scotia stone. Mrs. Mitchill gave a foot of her own lot’s width to the neighboring house at No. 26.

Converted from a private stable into an artist’s studio dwelling at the turn of the twentieth century, the little 1861 Gothic house at 129 East 19th Street was purchased by the founders of 24 Gramercy Park South in 1908 specifically to protect the new twelve-story cooperative’s southern light and air across the rear courtyard. In August 1909, the cooperative leased the former carriage house to its own architect and co-founder, Herbert Lucas, who established his architectural offices there directly behind the tall apartment house he had just completed. Singled out by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1966 as one of the most picturesque structures in the neighborhood, the 1861 carriage house still stands on East 19th Street’s “Block Beautiful.”

Thomas and Mary Edison at 25 Gramercy Park South (1882–1884)

Born at No. 25 in 1856, Caroline Pryor Pine later married the Park’s historian, John B. Pine. Her memoir remembers the house being let furnished to Samuel F. B. Morse’s widow as well as to Edison, before its sale to Albert Gallatin.

Immediately to the west, the earlier townhouse at 25 Gramercy Park South became the Manhattan residence of thirty-five-year-old inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) at the turning point of the electrical age. In a lease preserved in the Thomas A. Edison Papers, Edison rented the furnished house at 25 Gramercy Park on September 23, 1882, from attorney James Williamson Pryor and Caroline Pryor for $4,800 a year—moving his family into the city just nineteen days after his Pearl Street generating station began supplying the world’s first commercial incandescent electric power to lower Manhattan.

Edison’s first wife, Mary Stilwell Edison (1855–1884), had longed for the social life of New York after years of isolation near the laboratories of Menlo Park, New Jersey. When a reporter for the New York World visited the family at 25 Gramercy Park in the spring of 1884 for a feature titled “In the Wizard’s Home,” he found a marble-tiled entrance hall and three spacious parlors thrown open en suite with Turkish carpets and crimson velvet armchairs—along with a delightful domestic irony: because Edison’s underground direct-current mains had not yet reached Gramercy Park, “with all Mr. Edison’s success with electricity their home is still lighted with gas,” much to Mrs. Edison’s frustration. Sadly, Mary Edison’s health was already failing; the family returned to Menlo Park for the summer, where she died in August 1884 at twenty-nine.

Richard Watson Gilder’s “composite building proposition”

The Gilders’ artistic life in the neighborhood began long before the cooperative. For the first fifteen years of their marriage, beginning in 1874, Richard and Helena lived in “the Studio” on East 15th Street, a former stable converted into living quarters behind the Union Square home of Samuel B. Ruggles. Helena, a painter and the sister of future National Arts Club founder Charles de Kay, helped make it a welcoming meeting place for artists and writers who did not always agree with one another.

There and in their later homes, the Gilders received Walt Whitman when polite society shunned him, along with William Dean Howells from nearby East 17th Street, Henry James, who lived on East 25th Street in 1875, and Mark Twain. In 1877 they joined Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White in founding the Society of American Artists to challenge the conservative National Academy of Design.

Two decades after the Edisons’ stay, the two brownstones at Nos. 24 and 25 became the canvas for one of Manhattan’s landmark experiments in cooperative living. In August 1908, poet and Century Magazine editor-in-chief Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909) wrote an enthusiastic letter to his friend John B. Pine—attorney, Columbia University trustee, and future author of The Story of Gramercy Park, 1831–1921: “For the first time, I am favorably inclined towards a composite building proposition.” Gilder described a plan for a twelve-story cooperative on the south side of the Park a few doors east of John Bigelow’s house at No. 21, noting that “that delightful fellow, Mr. Francis Wilson, is in it,” that he himself intended to take a duplex spanning the fifth and sixth floors, and that the founders were holding a share open until Pine could join them.

Incorporated in Albany in October 1908 with $150,000 in capital—and heralded by The New York Times as a house where “art, literature, and the drama will be happily mingled”—the cooperative was organized by six initial incorporators soon joined by Pine: Richard Watson Gilder (who served as founding president), his son Rodman Gilder, actor Francis Wilson, artist Jules Guérin, architect Herbert Lucas, and leather executive Charles H. Lee, who conveyed the assembled forty-nine-foot site. Under the financial structure detailed by the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide on October 23, 1909, the seven proprietary owners occupied their own custom suites while the remaining eleven apartments were leased by managing agents Pease & Elliman to “congenial tenants,” whose rents paid the building’s taxes, mortgage interest, and operating expenses. Looking back on the venture in the Record and Guide in February 1917, Lucas wrote that Gramercy Park had “seemed an ideal place to work out the principles of the community apartment dwelling.” With The Players and the National Arts Club a short walk away, the plan extended the neighborhood’s artistic sociability to a single address.

A Colonial Revival townhouse in the air

Trained in the office of McKim, Mead & White and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, architect Herbert Lucas (1870–1953)—working with general contractor the Thompson-Starrett Company—designed 24 Gramercy Park South in a refined Colonial Revival vocabulary calculated to harmonize with the surrounding 1850s brownstones. Above a two-story rusticated Indiana limestone base, the twelve-story shaft rises in warm red brick laid in Flemish bond, animated by delicate wrought-iron Juliet balconies that step upward toward a modillioned roof cornice. At the sidewalk, four unfluted limestone Doric columns carry a balustraded balcony above a recessed entrance framed by sidelights and an elliptical fanlight transom.

Inside, Lucas rejected conventional flat corridors in favor of double-height duplex “townhouses in the air.” Entertaining rooms—parlor, library, and dining room—occupied the lower level of each duplex, connected by an interior Georgian staircase to the bedrooms above. Outfitted in crisp white Colonial millwork, solid mahogany doors, and wood-burning fireplaces faced in Roman brick or matte-green Grueby art tiles, the building was nearly 100 percent leased before the plaster was dry.

The Gilders and a literary household

For Richard Watson Gilder and his wife, painter and Art Students League co-founder Helena de Kay Gilder (1846–1916), the fifth-and-sixth-floor duplex at 24 Gramercy Park South was the culmination of more than thirty years at the center of New York’s artistic and civic life. Having presided since 1874 over the famous “Friday Evening” salons at their converted carriage house studio at 103 East 15th Street and later on East 8th Street—while Gilder edited The Century Magazine and chaired the landmark 1894 New York Tenement House Commission—the couple climbed the stairs into their unfinished Gramercy duplex on Easter Sunday in April 1909.

The family brought a substantial piece of their former East 8th Street home with them: a fireplace and overmantel designed by Stanford White. Garmey recorded the ensemble in the Gilder apartment, a familiar interior carried into Herbert Lucas’s new building.

Gilder carried that crowded literary world into The Century Magazine, which he led from 1881 until his death in 1909. Its February 1885 issue brought together work from Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, James’s The Bostonians, and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; in 1891 it remembered Herman Melville in verse after his death on East 26th Street. As a co-founder of the American Copyright League, Gilder also helped send his associate editor Robert Underwood Johnson to Washington for three years of work toward the International Copyright Act of 1891.

His editorial tastes had their limits. In 1892 he rejected twenty-one-year-old Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, written while Crane lived in the former Art Students’ League building on East 23rd Street. By 1904, however, he was urging a reluctant Johnson to publish Gramercy-bred Edith Wharton’s fiction about divorce before her growing fame put her beyond the magazine’s reach.

Sadly, Richard Watson Gilder enjoyed his Park views for only seven months; stricken with angina that autumn, he was carried to the West 10th Street home of his close friend, architectural historian Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, where he died on November 18, 1909. Helena de Kay Gilder continued to live at 24 Gramercy Park South until her death in May 1916, and their daughter Rosamond Gilder (1891–1986) remained a resident through the 1930s—editing her father’s letters, serving for twenty-four years as drama critic and editor-in-chief of Theatre Arts Monthly, directing the Federal Theatre Project’s Bureau of Research and Publication, and co-founding the International Theatre Institute. Co-founder Rodman Gilder (1877–1953)—immortalized as a two-year-old boy alongside his parents in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s 1879 bronze relief now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art—went on to author the classic 1936 history The Battery and help Lucas launch a second Gramercy cooperative across the square at One Lexington Avenue in 1910.

Rosamond remained in the duplex her father had commissioned until her death in 1986.

Francis Wilson—“The man who tried to free the actor”

Upstairs, co-founder Francis Wilson (1854–1935) brought the wit and camaraderie of the Broadway stage—and of his beloved club, The Players, eight doors west at 16 Gramercy Park South—into his book-lined duplex. Famous across America since 1886 for his comedic role as the lovable thief Cadeaux in the operetta Erminie, Wilson was an ardent bibliophile and biographer of Joseph Jefferson and Eugene Field; his 1924 memoir, Francis Wilson’s Life of Himself, features a photograph of the actor reading in his library at 24 Gramercy Park beneath Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the Earl of Guilford, a bronze reduction of Edmond Quinn’s statue of Edwin Booth as Hamlet across the street in Gramercy Park, and red sandstone blocks set beside the mantelpiece from Sir Walter Scott’s library at Abbotsford in Scotland.

It was while living at 24 Gramercy Park South that Wilson took on the greatest role of his life. In May 1913, he was elected founding president of Actors’ Equity Association, leading American stage performers through the historic thirty-day Broadway strike of August–September 1919 that compelled theatrical producers to recognize the union and abolish unpaid rehearsal exploitation. Wilson lived at 24 Gramercy Park South until his death on October 7, 1935, at eighty-one, and was buried under the self-chosen epitaph: “Here lies the man who tried to free the actor.”

Jules Guérin, master of the city beautiful

Completing the trio of artistic co-founders was St. Louis–born architectural renderer and muralist Jules Guérin (1866–1946). A pupil of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris, Guérin was America’s most celebrated practitioner of atmospheric bird’s-eye architectural perspective. In the very months that 24 Gramercy Park South was rising in 1908–1909, Guérin was executing his luminous watercolor plates for Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett’s landmark Plan of Chicago (1909).

Living at 24 Gramercy Park South while keeping a painting studio nearby on East 23rd Street, Guérin was appointed director of color for San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition—orchestrating the entire pastel palette of the fairgrounds—and was chosen by architect Henry Bacon to paint the two sixty-foot allegorical canvas murals, Emancipation and Reunion, that crown the interior chambers of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

A second career begun at sixty

In early 1927, a new household moved into the Gilder family’s apartment at 24 Gramercy Park South: fifty-nine-year-old classical scholar Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) and her companion, former student, and lifelong partner Doris Fielding Reid (1895–1973). Educated at Bryn Mawr College and the universities of Leipzig and Munich—where she had been the first woman admitted to classical lectures—Hamilton had served for twenty-six years as founding headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore before retiring in 1922 and settling with Reid around Gramercy Park.

In the quiet rooms of 24 Gramercy Park South, with Francis Wilson and Jules Guérin still among her neighbors and Theatre Arts editor Rosamond Gilder encouraging her to write essays on Greek tragedy, Hamilton embarked at the age of sixty on the literary career that made her a household name. Urged on by W. W. Norton editor Elling Aannestad, she published her first book, The Greek Way, in May 1930 at the age of sixty-two. An immediate critical and popular triumph, it was followed from 24 Gramercy Park South by The Roman Way (1932), The Prophets of Israel (1936), Three Greek Plays (1937), and her enduring classic Mythology (1942), which has introduced generations of readers to the gods and heroes of antiquity.

Two professional lives overlooking the trees

While Hamilton translated Aeschylus and Euripides at her desk and chatted with the shopkeepers along Third Avenue, Doris Fielding Reid forged a trailblazing financial career of her own—joining the Boston investment-counseling firm of Loomis, Sayles & Company in October 1929 and rising to become one of the firm’s senior executives, all while raising her young nephew Dorian Fielding Reid in the apartment. In 1943, when Loomis, Sayles appointed Reid to head its Washington, D.C., office, the couple relocated from 24 Gramercy Park South to the capital. In August 1957, just days before her ninetieth birthday, Hamilton traveled to Greece to stand in the ancient Odeon of Herodes Atticus beneath the Acropolis as King Paul made her an honorary citizen of Athens.

William Muschenheim’s Bauhaus-era apartment

Behind Herbert Lucas’s Colonial Revival brickwork, the double-height duplexes of 24 Gramercy Park South proved remarkably hospitable to the avant-garde. During the 1930s, architect William Muschenheim (1902–1990)—who also resided at Lucas’s sister building at One Lexington Avenue—transformed his duplex at No. 24 into a showcase of European modernism. Trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1925 to 1929 in Vienna as a master student and assistant to pioneering modernist Peter Behrens (for whom he designed the color schemes at the 1927 Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart), Muschenheim had returned to New York to design the sleek marine-modernist bathhouses and boardwalk pavilions at Jones Beach State Park and, in 1939, the first New York exhibition space for Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting on East 54th Street.

Architectural drawings, photographs, and furnishing invoices preserved in the William Muschenheim Papers at Columbia University’s Avery Library document how he reimagined his Gramercy duplex: pairing Lucas’s generous prewar room volumes and open fireplaces with cantilevered tubular-steel Thonet chairs, Venetian blinds, monochromatic carpets, bold architectural color planes, and minimalist chrome wall brackets and indirect lighting fixtures by modernist designer Kurt Versen.

McKim, Mead & White’s 1936 duplex alterations

Even as Muschenheim introduced European modernism to his apartment, other shareholders called on classicists to adapt their duplexes for a new generation. A portfolio of twenty-three architectural drawings, sketches, and specifications dated 1936 in the McKim, Mead & White collection at the New-York Historical Society—returning to the firm where Herbert Lucas himself had trained—records custom library, stair, and pantry alterations inside 24 Gramercy Park South, demonstrating how seamlessly Lucas’s 1909 structural envelope accommodated evolving tastes across the decades.

Setting the template for One Lexington Avenue

The immediate success of 24 Gramercy Park South established Herbert Lucas as one of Manhattan’s foremost designers of cooperative apartment houses. In December 1909, when Lucas was commissioned to design a fifteen-story cooperative at Park Avenue and East 61st Street, the Record and Guide introduced him as “the architect who designed a very successful house of that kind which was recently erected in Gramercy Park.” Five months later, in May 1910, when a syndicate including Rodman Gilder acquired the Stanford White–remodeled Henry W. Poor mansion at the corner of Gramercy Park North and Lexington Avenue, they hired Lucas to design twelve-story One Lexington Avenue—creating a pair of Colonial Revival bookends across the eastern end of the square.

Preservation and restoration in the Historic District

When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Gramercy Park Historic District on September 20, 1966 (followed by listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980), the report singled out how early twentieth-century cooperatives such as 24 Gramercy Park South achieved “harmonious unity with the older brownstones” through their shared palette of red brick, limestone, and classical ironwork.

Between 2005 and 2015, the cooperative undertook a comprehensive exterior restoration led by Steven Kratchman Architect—repointing the Flemish-bond brick façade, installing a Landmarks-approved barrier-free accessibility lift within the front areaway in 2008, and removing, refinishing, and invisibly raising the historic wrought-iron Juliet balcony railings to meet modern safety codes while preserving every scroll of Lucas’s 1909 design.