3 Gramercy Park West

Look up into the ironwork

The houses’ orderly fronts belong to the Greek Revival tradition. The porch is far less restrained. Slender supports rise into shallow arches. Scrolls, leaflike forms, circles and geometric borders fill the openings. Along the roofline, ornamental crests lift the eye above the canopy. The repeated cast elements create a screen through which light and the view of the Park can pass.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission attributes the paired porches to Alexander Jackson Davis. The distinction matters: the attribution concerns the porches, rather than proving that Davis designed every part of both houses. In the 1934 survey drawing, architect Albert E. Flanagan set the two façades between enlarged studies of the ironwork. He even recorded the canopy’s copper roof on wooden boards supported by curved iron members. The apparent delicacy rests on a carefully assembled structure.

The shared porch can encourage mistaken identities. The publisher and former mayor James Harper lived at No. 4, the Harper House. Its Stanford White interiors and its association with Bob Dylan’s album-cover photograph also belong to that neighboring address. No. 3 has a separate ownership history and a different set of rooms behind its door.

For roughly four decades, No. 3 was associated with Benjamin Franklin Lee and his family. Architectural historian Tom Miller dates Lee’s purchase to 1866. Lee was a New York lawyer; Columbia’s 1883–84 Law School catalogue identifies his specialty with unusual precision: professor of real estate and equity jurisprudence. It lists his office at 20 Nassau Street and his home at 3 Gramercy Park.

Lee married Mary Ray King in 1871. Their children were James Gore King, Franklin Lawrence, Eliot and Caroline King Lee. Miller’s account follows Caroline’s introduction to society in the winter of 1894, when receptions and teas brought callers to the house. Mary died in 1897; her funeral was held at nearby Calvary Church.

The address appears in the next generation’s professional records as well. New York Law School’s alumni catalogue lists Franklin Lawrence Lee, a Yale graduate and member of its law class of 1899, at 3 Gramercy Park. These directories give the house a less ceremonial identity: a family address repeatedly supplied to the institutions in which its occupants studied and worked.

Benjamin died on March 3, 1907, aged sixty-eight. His Century Association memorial remembered a lawyer and teacher. Five years later, the property records named Eliot Lee as executor in the sale of the house. Between those two events, the rooms had already taken on a very different use.

In September 1912, the Netherland Club bought the house from Benjamin Lee’s estate. The Record and Guide reported the transaction at $52,000. The deed was dated September 5 and recorded September 12; the seller was Eliot Lee, acting as executor.

The terse entry is a remarkably useful portrait of the property. It describes a four-story-and-basement brick dwelling, a two-story extension, a lot 26 feet 3 inches wide and 110 feet deep, and rights to Gramercy Park. The extension was already there by 1912; the record does not tell us when it was built. The property was still recognizably a townhouse as it passed into institutional ownership.

The club, incorporated in 1903, had previously occupied 47 East 25th Street. Its members used a social organization to maintain Dutch connections in New York. Gramercy placed it among other institutions that had found new uses for private houses, including The Players and The National Arts Club.

An address for Dutch New York

A notice in the Dutch periodical Neerlandia in 1925 gives a glimpse of the club’s role. Visitors planning to attend the following year’s New Amsterdam tercentenary were directed to its secretary, H. Crommelin, at 3 Gramercy Park West. The house served as a point of contact across the Atlantic.

The notice also reported remarks by the Dutch envoy, A. B. D. de Graeff, at the club’s annual dinner that May. He urged compatriots to keep in touch and eat together at least monthly, learning what was happening at home. The practical act of sharing a table helped sustain a community abroad.

No. 3 remained the club’s home until 1939, when it moved to Holland House at 10 Rockefeller Plaza. The move took it from an adapted townhouse to the new Midtown complex. The visits of Princess Juliana and Queen Wilhelmina during the Second World War belong to that later address.

Eugene Schoen divides the house

The architect Eugene Schoen owned No. 3 when it was converted into apartments in 1939. The Landmarks Preservation Commission records the project in its study of Schoen’s work. His practice ranged from furniture and interiors to buildings; his designs included the RKO Roxy Theatre at Rockefeller Center. He had also undertaken the conversion of 14 West 10th Street in 1938.

At Gramercy, subdivision changed the unit of daily life. A house that had accommodated a family, a school and a club became several households behind one entrance. The common porch and ordered front survived the change in use.

A visitor in 1952

The house is also associated with the death of actor John Garfield. On May 21, 1952, he died of a heart attack, aged thirty-nine, while staying at the apartment of actress Iris Whitney. Histories of No. 3 identify this as the address. Garfield was a visitor, rather than an established resident of the building.

He had come to films through New York’s Group Theatre and made his name in Four Daughters and Body and Soul. By the time of his death, the Hollywood blacklist had sharply restricted his career. The circumstances have attracted much retelling; the essential connection to this house is a brief, tragic visit to another actor’s home.