4 Gramercy Park West

When Harper moved here, Samuel B. Ruggles’s new residential square was still taking shape. The five townhouses on the Park’s western side were built between 1844 and 1850, when the streets and houses around the planted enclosure were beginning to make Ruggles’s plans tangible.

No. 4 is generally dated to about 1846. Together with No. 3, it presents the orderly brick front, tall windows and substantial doorway of a Greek Revival townhouse. Then the ironwork takes over: arches, scrolls and a canopy extending across both façades. The Landmarks Preservation Commission attributes the paired porches to Alexander Jackson Davis, one of the nineteenth century’s leading American architects.

The porches face east. By later afternoon they offer a shaded place to sit and watch the Park—a practical pleasure beneath all that ornament. The shared design makes the houses look closely related, though their occupants would take them in different directions.

A small piece of City Hall

The two freestanding lamps belong to No. 4. They recall the old custom of distinguishing a mayor’s home with lanterns, traditionally explained as a way to find him after dark. Accounts trace the practice back to the Dutch burgomasters; by Harper’s time it was a ceremonial distinction.

Harper had already left office when he moved in. The lamps outlasted his administration by a considerable margin. John B. Pine’s 1921 history of the Park noted them still standing as emblems of his civic position. During the recent renovation, Ball & Ball restored the gas lamps themselves.

The Harper family held on to the house after James’s death. In 1879, Stanford White redesigned a room on the parlor floor for Harper’s son and daughter-in-law. Mahogany, oak and leather gave it a much darker, richer character than the pale entrance outside might lead one to expect.

This is the room variously described as the dining room or salon in accounts of the house. Its carved woodwork and elaborate ceiling would become a central concern of the recent restoration. The original cut-glass Tiffany chandelier was gone; later occupants had painted the wood white.

The family’s ownership ended in 1923. The house eventually became seven apartments; poor plumbing damaged its structure. Returning it to a single home would require work well beyond choosing wallpaper.

Next door, another story

At No. 3, lawyer Benjamin Franklin Lee and his family had occupied the neighboring house. After Lee’s death in 1907, it became a training school for the YWCA, preparing women for executive work in the association. The Netherland Club followed, then apartments.

That is one pleasure of looking at the two houses together. The continuous porch suggests a single composition; behind it were separate households, institutions and ambitions. Berenice Abbott’s 1935 photograph catches them after decades of change, still unmistakably a pair.

Stephen and Allison Sullens bought No. 4 in 2017. The New York Post reported an off-market sale of $23.09 million. Longtime clients of SPAN Architecture, they were interested in American music history as well as the building itself. Karen Marie Stonely and Peter Pelsinski led a renovation that would take seven years, including the disruption of the pandemic.

The work proceeded around surviving historic material. According to Stonely’s account in Tatler, the house was never gutted. Its original staircase remained in place, connecting the floors as it had for generations. The goal was to recover the rooms while making them useful for a family.

Carlton House Restoration worked on White’s salon. Its woodwork once again has the depth and warmth that layers of pale paint had obscured. SPAN’s photographs of the finished house show how the restored room sits within a broader mixture of old and new.

A dent in the music-room floor, thought to have come from a fallen chandelier, was kept. So was a slight creak in the staircase, Architectural Digest reported. A house this old is entitled to make itself heard.

The Sullenses’ interest in music extends beyond the Dylan photograph. They established the Harper House Music Foundation, founded in March 2024, to support musicians, their work and the preservation of their legacies.

The foundation’s work includes support for artists’ wellbeing and projects that bring music to audiences. Its involvement in the Hudson River Music Festival connects it to the tradition of Pete and Toshi Seeger’s gatherings along the river. The name on the house now belongs to an enterprise concerned with the people making music today.

For the rest of us, the pleasure remains at sidewalk level. The lamps, the porch and the white doorway are all there to be noticed. Once you know what happened behind them, it becomes rather harder to hurry past.