36 Gramercy Park East

An empty lot on a private park

The east side of the Park was slow to fill in. In 1852 a speculator named Oscar Stebbins bought the vacant blockfront and put up a row of houses; the following year they were joined together as Sanderson’s Family Hotel. When The Gramercy rose at No. 34 in 1883, part of the old hotel came down to make room for it.

By August 1908 the lot beside No. 34 was empty. The New York Times, in a report later quoted by historian Tom Miller, welcomed its sale: the new building would remove an open plot the paper called “an eyesore” to the Park’s residents and property owners.

The seller was L. Rodney Berg. The buyer intended a fireproof apartment house, with half the apartments to be sold on a cooperative plan. John E. Olsen, head of the Gramercy Park Construction Company, went on to develop and build No. 36. Within a year, the promoters proposed selling every apartment, not half.

A Texas architect on Gramercy Park

Olsen commissioned James Riely Gordon, who was born in Winchester, Virginia, in 1863 and moved to San Antonio at eleven. Gordon learned his trade through railroad engineering, architectural offices and work for the federal government, rather than a school of architecture. He made his reputation with Texas courthouses, including the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio and the richly carved Ellis County Courthouse at Waxahachie. He also designed the Texas Building for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and the territorial capitol of Arizona.

Soon after 1900, Gordon established himself in New York. Gordon continued designing courthouses in the East and served thirteen terms as president of the New York Society of Architects. His drawings are at the University of Texas at Austin, where the people restoring No. 36 would go looking for them a century later.

On this compact lot, he arranged two tall wings around a deep entrance court. From the Park, they look like a pair of towers.

Marble on paper, clay on the wall

The specifications changed as the project developed. In October 1909, with the Park-facing wall “now about finished,” the Real Estate Record and Guide was still describing the building as it appeared on the drawings: 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.” The marble never arrived. Architectural historian Christopher Gray’s research into Gordon’s drawings found that terra cotta took its place on the lower floors, and that the entrance-hall floor changed from Tennessee marble to patterned tile. The estimated cost was $400,000.

Even a building with armored guards had a budget.

The terra cotta came from the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company, which also supplied the cladding of the Woolworth Building. Glazed white, the material could be molded into shields, faces and foliage, and its resistance to fire was a major selling point. The same 1909 account promised a reception hall sixteen feet by twenty-eight and fourteen feet high, “treated in Gothic, using Italian marbles with deep sculptured frieze.”

Who would pay the bills?

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

Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the seated Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, lived here. His name appears on the plaque beside the entrance.

An archival record adds to the plaque’s account. The American Numismatic Society’s catalogue lists French’s correspondence at his studio, 125 West 11th Street, and letters from his wife, Mary Adams French, at 36 Gramercy Park in 1931, the year of his death.

French divided his life between New York and Chesterwood, his home and studio in the Berkshires. Work on the Lincoln commission began in 1914; the memorial was dedicated in 1922. The National Park Service’s account describes how he studied photographs, eyewitness accounts and casts of Lincoln’s hands while developing the figure. The Piccirilli brothers’ New York workshop translated his design into marble.

His beginnings were rather less monumental. As Chesterwood’s account relates, the young French carved wood, gypsum and even turnips. May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s artist sister, encouraged him with modeling clay and tools. He had tried MIT first, but chemistry, algebra and physics had not gone well.

“Jack Barrymore,” at home

Barrymore married Katherine Corri Harris in September 1910, and the couple made their home at No. 36. His first feature film, An American Citizen, was released in January 1914. He was then known as a light comedian and matinee idol.

The Folger Shakespeare Library holds a letter from him to the actress Viola Allen, dated around 1916. He was accepting her invitation to take part in the testimonial for the drama critic William Winter held that March. He signed it “Jack Barrymore.” At the bottom he wrote “36 Gramercy Pk.”

By 1917 Barrymore had moved to West 4th Street. There, as Village Preservation recounts, he created a rooftop garden with a cottage, a reflecting pool and cedar trees, placing an extraordinary load on the roof below.

His major Shakespearean successes followed: Richard III in 1920 and Hamlet in 1922, which ran for 101 performances. The Folger preserves detailed notes on that Hamlet, recording his pauses, shifts of pace and sudden changes of intensity.

Another name beside the door

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.

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

A house that kept changing

In 1917, penthouse additions changed the top of the building. They were set back out of sight from the street, but they cost the roofline most of its original knights—stylized figures with shields, one at each corner, linked by a balustrade.

The Federal Writers’ Project’s 1939 New York City Guide admired the building as “a veritable gallery of decorative detail,” singling out its Gothic motifs, bay windows and balustrades, as well as the armored knights at the entrance.

The cooperative lasted until 1946, when bankruptcy brought a sale and a change to rental ownership. The original twenty-four apartments were eventually divided into fifty-three. In November 1971, as Tom Miller recounts from contemporary Times coverage, tenants took to the sidewalk with picket signs to protest conditions in apartments renting for $500 to $800 a month.

Under Mann Realty Associates, renovations in the 2000s included work on the lobby and elevators and the recombination of some apartments. A facade easement to the National Architectural Trust added another layer of protection for the exterior. In January 2009, The Real Deal reported the condominium offering at what it described as the Park’s last rental building. The plan covered fifty-three apartments.

Asked about the conversion at the time, GPBA’s Arlene Harrison told The Real Deal: “We feel it can only be a positive for our community.”

The building that was left out

When the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Gramercy Park Historic District on September 20, 1966, the boundary stopped at the northern property line of No. 34. No. 36 stood just outside it. The designation report does not explain why.

The Commission held its hearing on No. 36 on November 12, 1985. Twenty witnesses spoke in favor, and letters of support came in. Designation followed on July 12, 1988: an extension of the district consisting of this one building. The report recognized the facade as Gordon’s response to the challenge of designing a tall building, and found that No. 36 continued the district’s architectural and historical traditions.

Keeping all that ornament in place is a considerable job. The glazed terra cotta was assembled in individual pieces, forming faces, foliage, shields and projecting creatures. Many stand well out from the walls, exposed to rain, frost and decades of New York weather.

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.