44 Gramercy Park North

A twenty-six-year-old builder breaks ground after the Crash

Before apartment towers arrived on this stretch of East 21st Street, the sixty-foot frontage at 135, 137, and 139 East 21st Street held three mid-nineteenth-century rowhouses—including the earlier house at No. 44 where an eighteen-year-old Hart Crane lived with his mother in 1917 while publishing his first poems in New York. In the autumn of 1929, twenty-six-year-old developer Clement E. Merowit, president of the Merowit Construction Corporation, assembled the three lots for his most ambitious project yet. Three years earlier, Merowit had built the Tudor-styled Windsor Arms on West Ninth Street, declaring that there was “no logical reason why a building designed for family residence, even if it is a tall apartment, cannot present certain architectural attractions.” On November 23, 1929—just four weeks after the Wall Street Crash—the New York Evening Post reported that Merowit had broken ground at 44 Gramercy Park North for a sixteen-story-and-penthouse apartment house.

Garmey gives a more intimate scale to Crane’s stay: during the summer of 1917, the poet shared two rooms at 135 East 21st Street with his mother and grandmother. The address belongs to the earlier house beneath today’s apartment building, during the period when his first poems were finding publishers.

Customized from the blueprints

Merowit marketed the eighty-three apartments—most ranging from two to five rooms with wood-burning fireplaces, sunken or step-up dining galleries “equivalent in size to an extra room,” and deeded key privileges to Gramercy Park across the street—by inviting early tenants to customize their layouts during construction. An advertisement in The New Yorker on February 15, 1930, touted “terraces—open fireplaces—dining galleries—modern kitchens, fully equipped with fans, silent refrigeration,” signing off simply as “A Merowit Building.”

The upper floors were snapped up first. Bachelor and polo player Aldo R. Balsam leased the entire eleventh floor from the architectural plans in November 1929. On January 9, 1930, The New York Sun reported that Helen M. Holsclaw had leased a custom duplex spanning the twelfth and thirteenth floors and retained Warren & Wetmore to design its interiors; in May, John Hanrahan leased the eight-room penthouse with its four landscaped terraces. When the doors opened on October 1, 1930, every apartment in the building was rented.

The New Yorker’s quiet kingmaker in the penthouse

Tucked into the back pages of that very same October 11, 1930 issue of The New Yorker was an official postal statement of ownership listing “J. Hanrahan, 44 Gramercy Park, No.” among the magazine’s principal stockholders. A brilliant publishing promotion executive, John Hanrahan (1886–1961) had been brought in by Harold Ross and Raoul Fleischmann in the spring of 1925 when the fledgling weekly was bleeding cash and on the verge of folding. Paid partly in stock, Hanrahan engineered the circulation and advertising recovery that saved The New Yorker, accumulating a ten-percent stake documented by Fortune in 1934 while presiding over his four-terrace Gramercy penthouse and later launching the theater magazine Stage.

A Tudor great hall above the Park

While Schwartz & Gross designed the building’s exterior envelope, the dramatic residence on the twelfth floor—above the ten-story eastern setback—became a showpiece of English manor interiors. Commissioned in January 1930 by original lessee Helen M. Holsclaw from Whitney Warren and Charles D. Wetmore (the celebrated Beaux-Arts firm behind Grand Central Terminal, the New York Yacht Club, and the Biltmore, Commodore, and Ambassador hotels), the apartment transformed a Manhattan setback floor into a baronial country house.

In August 1936, when the duplex was the home of Mr. and Mrs. J. Berens Waters, House & Garden profiled the nine-room residence, marveling at its thirty-foot-long living hall rising to a double-height carved timber ceiling, its upstairs tap-room library with interior mullioned windows looking down into the great hall, its linenfold oak-paneled refectory dining room, and its twenty-eight-foot brick terrace overlooking the treetops of Gramercy Park.

Stained glass, carved stone, and Jacobean plaster

Every room carried authentic Tudor and Gothic craftsmanship: fourteen leaded windows inset with painted stained-glass heraldic roundels, ashlar-scored stone walls, an overhanging oak minstrel gallery, Jacobean strapwork plaster ceilings in the dining room and bedrooms, and a monumental limestone chimneypiece carved with medieval figures standing beneath trefoil Gothic arches—preserved intact across nearly a century of life in the building.

From the Yukon River to Gramercy Park

From its opening in October 1930, No. 44 attracted residents whose lives reached far beyond Manhattan. Among the charter tenants were the Rev. Dr. John Wight Chapman (1858–1939) and his wife, May Seeley Chapman. Arriving in Anvik on Alaska’s lower Yukon River in 1887, Chapman had founded Christ Church Mission and spent forty-three years documenting the language and oral traditions of the Deg Xinag (Athabaskan) people—publishing Ten’a Texts and Tales from Anvik, Alaska (1914), recording indigenous songs on wax cylinders, and operating one of interior Alaska’s earliest wireless stations before retiring to 44 Gramercy Park North in 1930, where he lived until his death in November 1939.

Another missionary leader and humanitarian on the upper floors in the late 1930s was the Rev. Dr. Lewis Birge Chamberlain (1864–1939), longtime recording secretary of the American Bible Society who, alongside Helen Keller, co-founded and served as general secretary of the John Milton Society for the Blind.

Cartoons, Sing Sing screenplays, and Fifth Avenue retail

Marcia Davenport’s prediction that the soundproofed apartments would suit writers and artists proved prophetic. Early resident Clive Weed (1884–1936), trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Anshutz and in Paris, was one of the era’s foremost political cartoonists—drawing for the New York Tribune, The Masses, Judge, The Nation, and The New Yorker, and creating the portrait of Lenin that illustrated John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919).

On the fifteenth floor lived Anna David, known in national political life as Anna Damon (1898–1944), a charter member of the American Communist Party who served from 1934 as acting national secretary of the International Labor Defense, organizing legal defense campaigns for the Scottsboro Boys and labor prisoners.

At mid-century, the building was home to playwright and screenwriter Jonathan Finn (1884–1971) and his wife, Sadie Borgenicht Finn (1896–1962). Collaborating with reform-minded Sing Sing prison warden Lewis E. Lawes, Finn co-authored the basis for the hit 1932 Warner Bros. film Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing (starring Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis) and the 1937 Broadway prison drama Chalked Out, and wrote the stories for two 1939 Humphrey Bogart crime films, You Can’t Get Away with Murder and Invisible Stripes. Sadie, an executive in her family’s Jack Borgenicht children’s-dress company, helped pioneer art therapy for patients at Hillside Hospital; after her death in 1962, Jonathan stepped into her role at the dress firm while continuing to write until his death at No. 44 in June 1971.

In January 1941, newlyweds John C. Wood (1900–1981) and Anne Robeson Truesdale established their home in the building; after serving as an officer in World War II, Wood returned to become president of the landmark Fifth Avenue department store B. Altman & Co. In 1962, following his diplomatic posting as American consul in Saigon, Foreign Service officer Daniel J. Meloy (1924–2013) moved into No. 44 and went on to serve as deputy executive director of the Japan Society.

Flight from Vienna

One of the most moving appearances of 44 Gramercy Park North in the historical record lies in the wartime refugee papers of Austrian Expressionist painter and printmaker Egon Vitalis Biel (1902–1969). Born in Vienna, where he kept a studio on the Kohlmarkt and exhibited with the modernist Hagenbund, Biel and his wife, Hertha, fled Austria for France following the 1938 Anschluss. When the outbreak of the Second World War brought internment in French camps, the couple urgently needed an American financial sponsor to secure visas across the Atlantic.

Nance Merowit pledges her shares in No. 44

On March 22, 1940, Nance Merowit of Greenwich Village—former wife of the building’s developer, Clement E. Merowit—executed a formal affidavit of support for the Biels before U.S. immigration authorities. As proof of her financial standing to guarantee that the couple would never become public charges, she pledged her fifty-percent shareholding in the corporation owning 44 Gramercy Park North—citing its $675,000 city tax assessment, its $1,005,000 appraised value above a $575,000 first mortgage, and her $275 monthly alimony—while promising the artist and his wife room, board, and five dollars a week in pocket money.

Backed by that Gramercy guarantee, Egon and Hertha Biel reached New York safely by the spring of 1942. Working in America under the name Eugene Biel-Bienne, he later taught at Fordham University, directed a French-American cultural institute, and joined the fine arts faculty at Vanderbilt University in 1959—a career made possible in part by the equity of a Tudor apartment house on Gramercy Park.

From rental house to cooperative (1972)

Built and operated for four decades as a premier rental building, 44 Gramercy Park North transitioned to cooperative ownership on September 18, 1972, when title was transferred to Gramercy Owners, Ltd. Through combinations of smaller apartments over the years, the original eighty-three residences were configured into seventy-nine shareholder homes.

Filming at the Tudor archway

In 2022, Schwartz & Gross’s Gothic limestone archway acquired a fictional resident when creator Darren Star chose 44 Gramercy Park North as the home of Manhattan real-estate broker Michael Lawson (played by Neil Patrick Harris) in the Netflix series Uncoupled. As production designer Ray Kluga explained to Frederic magazine, Star—whose favorite New York neighborhood was Gramercy Park—wanted a prewar building with unmistakable historic patina to contrast with the sleek glass condominiums his character sold professionally. While the interior apartment scenes were filmed on a soundstage, location cameras captured the cast coming and going beneath the carved Tudor doorway overlooking the Park.

At the federal level, however, the broader Gramercy Park Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places in January 1980 encompasses the entire blockfront, recognizing how 44 Gramercy Park North’s leaded casements, diamond-patterned brickwork, and Tudor gables anchor the northern horizon of the square.