45 Gramercy Park North

The Harpers had been on the Park before. James Harper, the eldest of the four brothers behind Harper & Brothers and mayor of New York in 1844–45, moved to No. 4 on the west side of the Park in 1847 and lived there until his death in 1869. The mayor's lamps still stand at the foot of his steps.

Henry Sleeper Harper was the grandson of James's brother Joseph Wesley Harper. After graduating from Columbia in 1888, he joined the family firm and became one of its incorporators when Harper & Brothers formed a corporation in 1896. His own house, at 131 East 21st Street, stood around the Park from his great-uncle's former home, in the row east of Lexington Avenue.

The change began at the corner. In 1910, the former home of Cyrus Field and, later, Henry W. Poor changed hands for redevelopment. Herbert Lucas’s twelve-story cooperative, One Lexington Avenue, opened on the site in September 1911.

Three months later, Harper bought himself a buffer: the entire house next door. "Henry Sleeper Harper bought from the Morison estate 133 East 21st st, a 4-sty dwelling, on a lot 20.8x98.9, in order to protect his residence at No. 131, adjoining," the Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide reported on December 9, 1911. The paper noted the "considerable building activity in the Gramercy Park section during the last year" and named the new cooperative at the corner.

Harper’s interest in preservation extended beyond his own doorstep. The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks listed him as its secretary and a trustee in 1903; a 1912 account of his life singled out his work to protect the Adirondack forests from encroachment.

The purchase gave Harper 55 feet on East 21st Street. He already owned 136 and 138 East 22nd Street, which backed onto his lots. Together with a stable he had bought earlier that year from the Henry W. Poor estate, these properties gave him 50 feet on East 22nd Street as well. "It is understood," the Record and Guide added, "that no improvement of the combined sites is contemplated at the present time."

The deed was dated December 21 and recorded a week later. Mary Morison conveyed the house to "Myra R, wife Henry S Harper," of 131 East 21st Street. It was assessed at $43,000, and it passed, in the shorthand of the conveyance lists, "with rights & privileges to Gramercy Park." Rights in the Park were part of the conveyance.

The site of Bing & Bing’s 1926–27 building brought together three houses: Nos. 129, 131 and 133 East 21st Street. The Harpers’ two lots supplied 55 feet of the present 78-foot frontage; the remaining 23 feet came from the adjoining brownstone lot at No. 129, immediately to the west. That was a Lynch family address in nineteenth-century records, and the 1900 biographical directory still lists James D. Lynch there. The new building’s site stopped short of No. 127, Edward Ringwood Hewitt’s narrow townhouse. It remained a separate property and still stands beside No. 45 as 48 Gramercy Park North.

The following spring the Harpers were on their way home from a tour of Europe and Asia. With them was Hammad Hassab, a dragoman, or interpreter and guide, with Thomas Cook & Son at Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo; Harper had asked him to come along on the trip. In Paris they had bought a Pekingese called Sun Yat Sen. The party boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg on April 10, 1912, the Harpers in cabin D-33 and Hassab in D-49.

Lifeboat No. 3 was among the first to leave the ship. Lowered at about one o'clock in the morning, it carried some thirty-two people, though it could have held sixty-five. The Harpers, Hassab and the dog were aboard. More than fifteen hundred people on the ship did not survive.

At least twelve dogs sailed on the Titanic. Only three are known to have survived: two Pomeranians and Sun Yat Sen, the Pekingese belonging to Myra and Henry Sleeper Harper. The Harpers’ home was identified in contemporary New York coverage as 131 East 21st Street, on part of the site now occupied by 45 Gramercy Park North.

Historian J. Joseph Edgette quotes Harper’s explanation for taking Sun Yat Sen into lifeboat No. 3: “There seemed to be lots of room, and nobody made any objection.”

Myra Harper died in November 1923. The following July, Harper married Anne W. Hopson. In 1926, as the old Gramercy Park frontage was giving way to apartments, he hired Herbert Lucas to turn two houses at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 38th Street into a single home. In an ironic turn, Lucas was the architect of One Lexington Avenue, the twelve-story cooperative whose arrival had helped prompt Harper to buy his neighbor’s house fifteen years earlier. Lucas completed the work in 1927.

The apartment house that replaced the Harper houses on the Park rose during those same two years, 1926 and 1927. Harper’s defensive purchase of 1911 had become part of the new building’s footprint.

A Brown Brothers photograph from April 1925 records the block just before this change. The old row of houses still lines the north side of the Park. Nos. 129–137 would give way to the apartment buildings at Nos. 45 and 44; No. 127, now 48 Gramercy Park North, survived. Farther west, work was under way on the Gramercy Park Hotel.

Harper had left the family firm some years after joining it. He returned to Harper & Brothers in 1928 as a director and remained one until he died, on March 1, 1944, at his home on East 38th Street. He was 79. The New York Times called him "the last member of his family to be connected with" the firm. He is buried at Woodlawn.

The nineteenth-century brownstones gave individual families their own doors onto the Park. Apartment houses brought many more households to the same frontage, and by the middle of the 1920s they were remaking the north side. Herbert Lucas’s twelve-story cooperative at One Lexington Avenue had opened in 1911, prompting Harper to buy the house next door to protect his own. Bing & Bing, the firm of the brothers Leo and Alexander Bing, had already opened the Gramercy Park Hotel across Lexington Avenue in 1925. In November 1926, The New Yorker described the neighborhood’s transformation with a mixture of attention and regret. The old houses were giving way to buildings that rose well above the trees.

Bing & Bing built No. 45 in 1926–27 on the combined sites of Nos. 129, 131 and 133 East 21st Street. Where three houses had stood, one entrance would serve an apartment building. Its advertisement of September 7, 1927 offered new apartments ready for immediate occupancy, some with roof terraces. Unlike the cooperative Lucas had organized at the corner, No. 45 was advertised to tenants. They could apply on the premises or at the Bing & Bing office on West 40th Street.

The design came from G. A. & H. Boehm. George A. Boehm, born in Boston in 1874, graduated from Columbia in 1897 and spent two years traveling in Europe. His brother Henry, five years younger and born in Austria, also studied at Columbia. They practiced together from about 1912 until 1927.

George Boehm's best-known building was already standing on the Lower East Side: the ten-story home of the Jewish Daily Forward at 173–175 East Broadway, completed in 1912 and now a city landmark. Together the brothers designed the Louis H. Chalif Normal School of Dancing on West 57th Street, completed in 1916 and also a landmark, and the Peck & Peck building at 587 Fifth Avenue. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's account of the firm closes its list of works with "an apartment house (1926-27) at 45 Gramercy Park North."

It was one of the partnership's last buildings. Afterward George designed the Tallman's Island sewage treatment works in Queens and led the Westchester County Society of Architects, and Henry was working in the specifications department of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1955. Both died in 1959.

The Boehms gave No. 45 a lighter face than the red brick of Herbert Lucas’s One Lexington Avenue. Its buff brick and limestone would also distinguish it from the darker Tudor-style building that rose beside it at No. 44 in 1929–30. The Boehms concentrated No. 45’s ornament at its limestone entrance. Herbert Lucas had given One Lexington Avenue a columned doorway and arched windows; here, two carved figures flank a central urn above the door, with the building’s number set into the stone beneath them.

The paired figures, urn, shells and garlands are best understood as classical, Renaissance-inspired architectural ornament, rather than depictions of particular historical or mythological characters. The composition draws on the sculptural decoration of European palaces and grand houses, giving a modern apartment building an entrance with an air of age and formality. Here, during the apartment boom of the 1920s, many households could share the kind of elaborate doorway once associated with a single grand residence.

Above the doorway, cornices and setbacks divide the much taller façade into stages. The architectural writer Carter Horsley calls attention to the colonnaded enclosure around the rooftop water tank. The columns turn a piece of working equipment into a feature of the skyline, visible from across the Park.

P. L. Sperr photographed the changed north side on July 7, 1928, looking northeast from the south side of Gramercy Park. Summer foliage fills the foreground, with Lexington Avenue and the buildings toward Gramercy Park East beyond.

No. 45 rises behind One Lexington Avenue, its colonnaded rooftop enclosure visible above the neighboring roofline. The photograph catches the building soon after completion, before No. 44 rose to its east in 1929–30.

Decades later, another publisher made his home at the address. Born in 1923, Edwin "Ed" Fancher served with the ski troops of the 10th Mountain Division in Italy before returning home to study at The New School. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1949 and a master's in psychology in 1951. While standing in line to register for classes, he met Dan Wolf.

In 1955 Fancher, Wolf and Norman Mailer founded The Village Voice, and John Wilcock is often counted as a fourth founder; the first issue was dated October 26. They began in a small former apartment at 22 Greenwich Avenue. Wilcock remembered the office above Sutter’s bakery, with a bed and shower still at the back. As publisher, Fancher managed circulation, distribution and advertising while continuing his clinical training and seeing patients in the evenings. "Dan Wolf and I were crazy," he said later. "Anybody with any sense would know that you couldn't start a newspaper in New York with $10,000." The paper they started is remembered as the country's first alternative newsweekly.

Keeping the paper alive required less visible work. In the Voice’s archives, letters and ledgers record Fancher juggling creditors and payroll. On May 29, 1959, he wrote to Norman Mailer to explain that operating expenses made it impossible to pay the interest the paper owed him. Mailer had stopped writing for the Voice but remained a shareholder. The newspaper began to turn a profit a few years later.

Fancher sold his shares to Carter Burden in 1970 and left the paper in 1974, when it passed to Clay Felker of New York magazine. He continued working as a psychoanalyst, served as president of the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and did not retire until he was ninety. He saw a connection between his two professions. "Psychoanalysis attempts to free people from inhibition," he said, "in much the same way that the Village Voice was an attempt to free journalism from inhibition."