36 Gramercy Park East

An empty lot on a private park

The eastern blockfront of Gramercy Park between East 20th and East 21st Streets was first developed in 1852, when speculator Oscar S. Stebbins erected a row of townhouses that were united the following year as Sanderson’s Family Hotel (later the Gramercy Park House). When The Gramercy rose at the corner of East 20th Street (No. 34) in 1882–1883, the southern end of the old hotel came down to make room for it.

By August 1908, the adjoining 83-foot frontage immediately north of No. 34 had been cleared. Welcoming the sale of the parcel by L. Rodney Berg on August 12, 1908, The New York Times noted that the new twelve-story apartment house would replace a vacant plot that had become “an eyesore” to the Park’s residents and property owners. Developer and builder John E. Olsen, head of the Gramercy Park Construction Company, initially planned to sell half the apartments on a cooperative basis, but within a year the promoters decided to offer every apartment in the building for shareholder ownership.

A Texas courthouse architect on Gramercy Park

To design the building, Olsen commissioned architect James Riely Gordon (1863–1937). Born in Winchester, Virginia, and raised in San Antonio, Texas, from the age of eleven, Gordon trained through railroad engineering, architectural apprenticeships, and federal building supervision. In the 1890s he won national renown for his Romanesque Revival county courthouses across Texas—including the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio and the richly sculpted Ellis County Courthouse in Waxahachie—as well as the Texas Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the Arizona Territorial Capitol in Phoenix.

Relocating his practice to New York around 1902, Gordon designed courthouses in the Northeast and served thirteen terms as president of the New York Society of Architects. On the 83-by-125-foot lot at 36 Gramercy Park East, he organized the twelve-story facade into two symmetrical wings flanking a deep central entrance court—giving the apartment house the silhouette of twin Gothic towers rising above the Park.

Marble on paper, white terra cotta on the wall

As the steel frame rose in 1909, the material specifications evolved. In October 1909, with the Park-facing wall nearly enclosed, the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide still described the exterior as drawn on Gordon’s early plans: a high basement of light granite, “the first three stories of white marble, and the rest in white glazed Atlantic terra cotta with plate glass windows.”

As Gordon’s surviving architectural drawings at the University of Texas at Austin confirm, the three stories of marble gave way to budget realities: white glazed architectural terra cotta was used from the second story to the roofline, and the entrance-hall floor was executed in patterned tile rather than Tennessee marble. Supplied by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company—which soon afterward clad Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building—the fireproof white clay blocks were molded into pointed arches, traceried spandrels, heraldic shields, grotesque beasts, and foliate bands. Inside the Gothic portal, a reception hall measuring sixteen by twenty-eight feet with a fourteen-foot ceiling was finished in Italian marble beneath a deeply sculpted frieze. The total cost of the building was estimated at $400,000.

Among the smaller figures Garmey singled out were four grinning, cowled monks and shield-bearing cherubs beneath the window groups. The armored entrance guards are only the largest members of a much more crowded sculptural company.

Selling every apartment: the 1909 financial plan

In October 1909, while work continued inside, the Record and Guide explained the financial plan. Many early cooperatives sold some apartments and kept others as rentals; the rent helped pay the building’s expenses. No. 36’s promoters proposed selling them all.

Each purchaser would acquire stock associated with an apartment and pay a proportionate share of taxes and annual expenses. The agents, De Walltears & Hull, said the arrangement required an investment “smaller by one-half” than the usual plan and fixed each owner’s yearly cost “precisely as he would do if the owner of a single-family private dwelling.” Above all, an owner would not have to make up the shortfall on an unsold or empty apartment: “There will be no additional assessment to him if one or more of the remaining apartments are vacant or unsold.” It was a reassuring promise to put in front of anyone contemplating ownership with strangers.

The quoted purchase prices ranged from $8,900 to $12,000. Apartments could also be rented, at $2,350 to $3,168 a year, while sales proceeded.

“It has been usual in co-operative ventures to sell only one-half of the apartments and to rent the balance. With respect to this house, however, the plan differs in that all the apartments will be sold.”

Record and Guide, October 23, 1909

In November 1911 the same journal, surveying the Park, pronounced the Gramercy Park Club House “one of the most striking structures of its kind.” Its photograph of Nos. 34 and 36 appeared under the caption “The oldest apartment and one of the newest.”

The neighbor who gave Lincoln his familiar face

Sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931), creator of The Minute Man in Concord and the monumental seated Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., made his New York residence at 36 Gramercy Park East with his wife, memoirist Mary Adams French (1859–1939). Dividing their year between their summer home and studio at Chesterwood in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a Greenwich Village sculpture studio at 125 West 11th Street, and their apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, the Frenches were fixtures of the neighborhood through the final years of the sculptor’s life.

Encouraged in his youth in Concord by Louisa May Alcott’s artist sister, May Alcott—who lent him modeling clay and tools after he spent a brief, unhappy year studying chemistry and algebra at MIT—French received the commission for the Lincoln Memorial statue in 1914. Studying life masks, Mathew Brady photographs, and plaster casts of Lincoln’s hands, he modeled the nineteen-foot figure that the Piccirilli brothers carved in Georgia marble for the memorial’s dedication in May 1922.

“Jack Barrymore,” at home on the Park

In September 1910, just as the Gramercy Park Club House was welcoming its first residents, twenty-eight-year-old stage actor John Barrymore (1882–1942) married society actress Katherine Corri Harris, and the couple set up housekeeping at 36 Gramercy Park East. Then celebrated on Broadway as a dashing light comedian and matinee idol, Barrymore made his feature film debut in An American Citizen (1914) during his years on the square.

Writing from his apartment around February–March 1916 to actress Viola Allen to accept a role in the Shakespearean masque honoring drama critic William Winter, he signed the note “Jack Barrymore” above the address “36 Gramercy Pk.” By 1917, following the breakup of his marriage, Barrymore moved to an attic studio at 132 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, soon embarking on the landmark stage triumphs—Richard III (1920) and his 101-performance run as Hamlet (1922)—that crowned him the foremost classical actor of his generation.

A showman beside the door: Alfred T. Ringling

The building’s historical plaque also names Alfred Ringling, one of the five brothers behind the Ringling circus. Alf T. Ringling led the band in their early shows and later turned to publicity. His 1900 Life Story of the Ringling Brothers tells the family’s story with a showman’s enthusiasm. His own summary of the enterprise was shorter: “We had a little money and a lot of gall,” he said, “and made good.” He died at his New Jersey estate in October 1919.

Ringling brought music indoors as well. An account of the brothers’ instruments in The American Organist identifies Alfred’s Gramercy Park apartment with a seventeen-stop Hutchings pipe organ.

Between the Lincoln Memorial, Hamlet and the circus, the residents of No. 36 reached an unusually wide audience.

Garmey’s later neighbors include Sidney Homer, the bond analyst and financial historian, and writer Roger Rosenblatt. Homer came from a musical household: his father was the composer Sidney Homer and his mother the Metropolitan Opera contralto Louise Homer. Rosenblatt would turn memories of growing up on Gramercy Park into essays and, later, his memoir The Boy Detective.

Piece by piece

From a boom lift, surveyors tapped each terra-cotta unit with a soft-headed mason’s hammer. The sound told them what could stay, what needed resetting and what had to be replaced. Each piece received a number that followed it through removal, repair or replication and reassembly. The side walls were surveyed from neighboring roofs; the light court, from hanging scaffolding.

The $2.5 million project dealt with roughly 3,750 ornamental units across a facade of 15,393 square feet. About 1,500 were reproduced and another 1,500—roughly 40 percent of the total—removed and reset with new stainless-steel anchors. More than 60 percent of the cornice band survived, but the badly deteriorated rooftop soldiers required replicas, and all six of the winged grotesques, which project five feet from the wall, were replaced.

CTA Architects sent a member of the team to Gordon’s archive in Texas and found original shop drawings, terra-cotta pattern drawings, sketches and blueprints. Choosing a glaze to match the surviving pieces took four weeks of reviewing samples; mortar color, brick and joints also needed approval. At the roof, the Landmarks Commission asked for a visually unobtrusive railing. The solution used wire rope.

Behind the ornament, repairs strengthened and waterproofed the building. At the rear, a previous owner had covered the decorative pressed-metal bays with residential aluminum siding; the team uncovered and replicated them, and they can now be seen from parts of Third Avenue. Total Structural Concepts, the general contractor, and Robert Silman Associates, the structural engineers, worked with CTA on the project.

Old clay, new tools

Boston Valley Terra Cotta produced the replacements. It describes two ways of recording the original work. Removed samples—including the gargoyles—went through its in-house 3D scanner. Photographs taken at the building supplied another set of measurements.

This second process, photogrammetry, converts overlapping photographs into measurable forms. Boston Valley used it to make assembly drawings of the bay-window cladding. Its dimensioned study of a shield and its flanking figures records the sort of ornament that is easy to admire from the sidewalk and much harder to reproduce accurately.

The measurements mattered: replacement pieces had to fit alongside the originals that remained on the building.