31 Gramercy Park South

The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission dates No. 31 to 1852, describing it as an altered Italianate house. That brief description is a useful starting point: a house from the years when Gramercy’s residential character was taking shape, still recognizable beneath the changes of later generations.

Look up from the green entrance canopy. The façade rises in a close rhythm of windows, with projecting window hoods and a pronounced cornice giving depth to a relatively narrow front. Above the smaller openings, broad upper windows change the rhythm. The result is a building that rewards looking twice: orderly at a glance, more complicated as the eye travels upward.

Its strength is proportion. The window surrounds catch the light; the cornice makes a firm ending against the sky. Beside the broader meeting house to the west and the much larger apartment building toward Third Avenue, No. 31 keeps the scale of an individual house. Trees soften the view without quite hiding that contrast.

The surviving records do not identify the original architect. Nor do they establish the dates of every change to the façade. The house can still tell us something precise: Gramercy’s old residential fabric survived by accommodating new uses, sometimes within walls that gave little away to a passerby.

A mortgage recorded in May 1894 makes the connection between the building’s two addresses unusually clear. James Slater mortgaged No. 148 East 20th Street, also known as No. 31 Gramercy Park. The property measured 25 by 109 feet, and the record expressly included rights in the Park or square.

That small clause matters. The Park was more than the view from the front windows; the house’s connection to it appeared in the financial description of the property. The address belonged simultaneously to the city’s street grid and to Gramercy’s particular arrangement of houses around a private garden.

By 1899, the doorway also led into municipal business. In Department of Correction notices dated December 4, 1899, Commissioner Francis J. Lantry directed prospective contractors to the department at 148 East 20th Street. Specifications and contract forms could be obtained at the office. A house address had become a place where the machinery of city government operated.

Lantry belongs in this story as an officeholder, not as a documented resident. The distinction helps us picture the building honestly: public work behind a domestic front, with the department’s address appearing in official notices read far beyond the neighborhood.

In November 1900, a few lines in the real-estate sales column proposed a very different future. The Record and Guide reported that Slater had sold the four-story dwelling to Jacob L. Lissner, who intended to put up an eight-story apartment building. On a 25-foot frontage, that would have been a substantial change in scale.

The notice reads with the confidence of a city accustomed to rebuilding itself. Yet an announced project is only one possible future. The altered nineteenth-century house recognized by Landmarks is what survives today; the eight-story scheme did not become the building now standing here. The sources consulted do not explain why.

Three years after the announcement, Sanborn’s 1903 insurance map supplies a wonderfully specific answer to a different question: what was happening inside? Immediately east of the Religious Society of Friends’ meeting house, the narrow parcel numbered 148 is labeled as Department of Corrections offices.

The map records the ordinary complexity of the block. Meeting house, government office, dwellings, apartment buildings, and Third Avenue businesses sit close together. No. 31 was part of that working neighborhood, not simply a private house overlooking greenery. The office label also identifies an administrative use; it is not evidence that the building served as a jail.

By the summer of 1919, the language used to describe the property had changed. A sale reported on August 16 called No. 31 a five-story studio apartment structure. Brokers Innes & Center had arranged its sale from the Murchison Realty Company to the Rouglandes Realty Corporation.

The brief announcement catches the house after another transformation. The four-story dwelling of the 1900 sales column had become a five-story building offered as studio apartments. The exact sequence of alterations between those descriptions remains to be established; the 1919 notice is evidence of the result, not a dated construction history.

“Studio” is an enticing word in Gramercy, where artists’ rooms and clubs form such a visible part of neighborhood memory. Here it should be allowed to mean what the record actually says. It describes the apartments being sold. It does not, by itself, prove that a particular painter, writer, or performer lived in them.

What it does reveal is a change in the way the house could be inhabited. A property once recorded as a single dwelling was being marketed as multiple apartments, retaining the attraction of a Park address while serving a different residential market. The façade’s altered openings belong to that longer story of adaptation, even where their individual dates remain uncertain.

On September 20, 1966, the city designated the Gramercy Park Historic District. For No. 31, the designation report is unusually concrete: the boundary follows the eastern property line of 31 Gramercy Park, identified again as 148 East 20th Street.

An administrative line on paper has a physical counterpart on the block. Stand in front of the house and the difference in scale toward Third Avenue is immediately apparent. No. 31 belongs to the protected grouping around the Park, while its eastern edge marks the limit of the original district at this point.

The designation report valued the neighborhood as an ensemble: buildings of differing periods held together by scale, materials, and the presence of the Park. A modest house could matter as much to that experience as a grander institution. No. 31 supplies one of the transitions that make the whole streetscape legible.

Protection did not return the building to an imagined first day in 1852. Its alterations were already part of its history. The task became caring for a place that had accumulated uses, keeping its contribution to the street while allowing people to continue living inside.

By 2009, the building was recorded as a cooperative. A later New York court decision, quoting Department of Finance records, identifies it as an eleven-apartment walk-up cooperative at Block 875, Lot 48. That is a public-record snapshot of the house’s residential organization, not a date for its conversion.

In 2013, attention turned upward. Community Board 6’s March minutes describe a top-floor tenant’s proposal for roof access through a new bulkhead, with an associated roof deck and planting. The board voted to raise no objection. At the Landmarks hearing, the Historic Districts Council’s testimony questioned the visibility and treatment of the proposed rooftop addition.

The Commission’s March 19 calendar records the hearing as closed, with no action taken. It should not be read as evidence that the proposal was approved or constructed. What survives in the record is the discussion itself: how to make an old house useful to its occupants while keeping a quiet roofline above the street.

No. 31’s history is carried by changes of this size as well as by the dramatic eight-story proposal of 1900. A mortgage clause, an office address, an apartment advertisement, a district boundary, a roof application: each shows someone finding a new use or meaning for the same narrow piece of the city.

From the sidewalk, the house remains easy to pass. Pause beneath its cornice and the story opens outward—to municipal offices, real-estate ambitions, and successive generations of apartment life. The small building has kept its place by doing more than one job.