38 Gramercy Park

A residential square learns to receive guests

Before it became a literary address, No. 38 belonged to a corner already accustomed to arrivals. The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s history of the eastern blockfront records Oscar Stebbins’s purchase of the vacant land in 1852, the construction of speculative residences, and their combination in 1853 as Sanderson’s Family Hotel. The hotel occupied a larger stretch of the row than the later building known as No. 38; neighboring apartment houses eventually replaced parts of that earlier ensemble.

That distinction matters. The history of the corner is a history of buildings joined, altered, and replaced, rather than one untouched house carrying a single date. Later accounts associate No. 38 with the Sanderson hotel and give it origins around 1853. Henson Architecture’s study describes the eventual property as three buildings brought together.

Read the windows

An undated photograph preserved in Henson Architecture’s project archive gives the earlier elevation a more intimate scale. Paired round-arched windows sit beneath prominent moldings; delicate iron balconies interrupt the heavy masonry. Above them, the cornice throws a deep shadow. These are the expressive details of the Italianate taste, turning repeated rooms into a carefully composed street front.

The photograph rewards close looking. The openings establish a steady vertical rhythm, while the balconies pull the eye across the wall. Long before the building acquired its last red-brick exterior, its identity depended on the relationship between window, ornament, and street. The original architect has not been securely established.

A different kind of old-fashioned

In the early 1920s, according to Henson Architecture, a hotelier united the three buildings and covered them in stucco and timber. The result was a Neo-Tudor exterior, a striking departure from the brownstone treatment visible in the earlier photograph.

The surviving tax photograph makes the change plain. Dark strips frame pale wall surfaces; decorative timberwork gathers beneath the roof. At street level, the corner still meets the sidewalk directly, but above it the building speaks a different architectural language. The elongated side wall reveals how much accommodation lay behind the comparatively narrow Park-facing front.

A hotel within the neighborhood

This was the setting of the Parkwood Hotel, the name attached to No. 38 in the story of John Steinbeck’s first New York years. His recollection of the place offers something façade photographs cannot: the cost of a room, the climb to reach it, and the uneasy feeling of being young and nearly broke in a city that seemed to belong to everyone else.

A small apartment, a large interior world

The building’s later life continued at the scale of individual rooms. A retrospective property description dates its conversion to a cooperative to 1986 and records thirty-six apartments. The hotel had become a collection of permanent homes, still within the compact, five-story envelope familiar from the street.

Among the later residents was singer and composer Rufus Wainwright. A 2012 Observer report on his home, drawing on a New York Times visit, described a studio of roughly 450 square feet, bought in 2002 and shared with his husband, Jörn Weisbrodt. Wainwright had returned to it after a period in a larger Chelsea apartment. The room’s appeal clearly exceeded its dimensions.

Wallpaper, music, and the art of staying in

Photographs published when the apartment was offered for sale in 2021 show a deliberately theatrical interior: scenic Zuber wallpaper, a richly colored sofa, a fireplace, and a desk beside the windows. A sleeping alcove and a small kitchen complete the domestic arrangement. The eye travels through imagined landscapes on the walls even where the actual view is close and urban.

6sqft’s account of the 2021 listing describes the apartment as a place where Wainwright worked on albums and his opera Prima Donna. That association belongs to a much later creative life than Steinbeck’s, but it gives the building’s story a pleasing continuity. An unassuming room beside the Park could serve as both shelter and workplace; its importance was measured by the life conducted inside it.

Next door: six homes and a view of the trees

No. 37 followed its own residential course. The city’s January 2024 property notice records six residential units at that address, distinct from the thirty-six-apartment cooperative at No. 38. A later penthouse listing describes a duplex on the upper floors, with a terrace, a substantial living space, and a work area beneath the staircase.

The contrast brings the neighboring buildings into focus. No. 38’s small former hotel rooms could become intensely personal studios; No. 37’s upper floors could be combined into a larger home. Both addresses accommodated changing ways of living and working before the redevelopment joined their sites.

When repair was no longer enough

By 2007 the cooperative’s exterior needed major work. The architect’s account of the project says inspection found the façade beyond salvage. Scott Henson Architect, now Henson Architecture, developed a replacement informed by archival photographs and nearby buildings.

The reconstruction exchanged the Tudor treatment for deep red brick, unusually narrow mortar joints, and a copper cornice. It was completed in 2008. The achievement lay in making a coherent street elevation from a property assembled out of separate structures. It recalled the earlier building’s architectural vocabulary through newly made work.

Copper against brick

In the photographs, the projecting bays are especially effective. Copper catches the changing light on angled faces, while the brick wall behind supplies a quiet, continuous field. Window surrounds, small ledges, and the broad cornice restore a sense of depth to the long elevation. The building looks substantial without losing the scale of its individual windows.

The project received a Gramercy Neighborhood Associates Award for Excellence in 2011 and a Brick Industry Association Gold Award in 2012. Those honors belong to the reconstruction, not to an untouched nineteenth-century façade. That difference is central to understanding the final building: its familiar historical appearance was itself a recent chapter in a long history of alteration.