Gramercy Park Block Association
Gramercy Stories

45 Gramercy Park North

From the Harpers to The Village Voice

In 1911, Henry Sleeper Harper bought the house next door to his own on the north side of Gramercy Park. His reason was wonderfully direct: he wanted to protect his home. New apartment houses were already changing the neighborhood, and the purchase gave him a little more control over his corner of it.

The protection did not last forever. The old houses eventually gave way to the apartment building now known as 45 Gramercy Park North. Built by Bing & Bing in 1926–27, it would acquire a publishing connection of its own when Edwin Fancher, a founder of The Village Voice, made his home here.

Between those two publishing worlds lies a story of a Titanic escape, carved limestone, spacious apartments and the changing ways New Yorkers have lived beside the Park.

The entrance to 45 Gramercy Park North, with an urn and two carved figures above the doorway.
A limestone doorway, paired carved figures and the number 45 greet the Park. Photograph published by Compass.

The house next door

Before this was an apartment-house address, it was a row of houses on East 21st Street. Henry Sleeper Harper, a member of the Harper publishing family, lived at No. 131. In December 1911, the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide reported that he had bought the adjoining four-story house at No. 133 from the Morison estate.

The report placed the purchase squarely in the neighborhood’s building boom. It mentioned the new cooperative at One Lexington Avenue and said that Harper had no immediate plans to develop his combined property. With the additional house, he controlled 55 feet of frontage on East 21st Street. He also held property behind it on East 22nd Street, including a stable.

The conveyance recorded later that month named his wife, Myra R. Harper, as the purchaser of No. 133. Among the rights that passed with the property were rights in Gramercy Park. Even in the terse language of a real-estate record, the Park was part of what made the address valuable.

Today’s No. 45 occupies the East 21st Street frontage associated with addresses 129–133. The Harper episode belongs to the houses that preceded the present building: a glimpse of the north side just before its scale changed.

A 1911 newspaper report of Henry Sleeper Harper buying the house beside his home on East 21st Street.
In December 1911, the Record and Guide explained why Harper had bought the house next door: to protect his own residence. Select the clipping to read the full page.

A passage on the Titanic

Four months after that purchase, the Harpers’ names were caught up in an event far beyond Gramercy Park. Henry and Myra traveled home from Europe aboard the Titanic in April 1912. Accompanying them were Hammad Hassab, whom they had engaged during their travels, and their Pekingese, Sun Yat Sen.

When the ship struck an iceberg, the Harpers, Hassab and the dog escaped in lifeboat No. 3. They were among the survivors rescued by the Carpathia. Contemporary New York coverage identified Harper with his home at 131 East 21st Street, linking the disaster directly to this stretch of the Park.

It is an extraordinary episode in the history of the site. The building that stands here today came later, but the older address preserves a connection between an intimate neighborhood story and one of the most widely remembered nights of the twentieth century.

An apartment house for a changing Park

By the middle of the 1920s, apartment living was remaking the north side of Gramercy Park. In November 1926, The New Yorker described the neighborhood’s transformation with a mixture of attention and regret as larger buildings displaced the older houses.

No. 45 emerged from that moment. Developed by Bing & Bing and designed by George A. and Henry Boehm, the building dates to 1926–27. Its buff brick and limestone give it a different character from the darker Tudor-style building that later rose beside it at No. 44.

The Boehms brought a varied architectural background to the commission. George had graduated from Columbia in 1897; the brothers’ partnership ran from 1912 to 1927. Among their other collaborations was the Louis H. Chalif Normal School of Dancing on West 57th Street, completed in 1916.

At No. 45, the most memorable flourish is at the entrance. Two carved figures flank a central urn above the doorway, with the building’s number set into the stone beneath them. The composition brings a Renaissance vocabulary down to the level of the sidewalk: ornament to notice on an ordinary walk around the Park.

Higher up, cornices and setbacks break the rise of the facade. Architectural writer Carter Horsley calls attention to the rooftop water tank’s colonnaded enclosure, a reminder that even a building’s practical equipment could be given an architectural finish.

The buff-brick facade of 45 Gramercy Park North, rising above the trees beside neighboring apartment houses.
Bing & Bing’s apartment house rose in 1926–27, during the transformation of the Park’s north side. Photograph: CityRealty.

Life above the trees

The attraction was more than a handsome entrance. An apartment here offered the conveniences of a modern building with the Park immediately below.

A 1934 New Yorker survey described eight-room, three-bath apartments on the eighth through eleventh floors, praising their cross-ventilation and views. It quoted asking rents of $3,100 to $3,400, with a penthouse offered at $4,300. The selling points were space, air and an outlook over the trees.

A published floor plan for apartment 7B offers another way to read that tradition of living. A formal entrance gallery leads into separate living and dining rooms, while a pantry and service rooms record a household organized around both entertaining and domestic work. It is one apartment’s plan, but it makes the building’s generous proportions tangible.

The interiors have continued to evolve. In a 2017 renovation, Matiz Architecture & Design reworked a two-bedroom apartment with an opened kitchen, custom millwork and central air conditioning. Like so many prewar homes, No. 45 accommodates new habits within an older architectural framework.

Horsley records a sale of the building to Alvin and Lester Dworman in 1959. Today it is a cooperative of roughly forty apartments, carrying forward its original residential purpose through successive generations of owners and residents.

A modern apartment at 45 Gramercy Park North with an open kitchen, dining area and fireplace.
A later apartment interior at No. 45, photographed for a real-estate listing. The rooms continue to change within the building’s 1920s shell. Photograph: CityRealty.

The Fanchers and The Village Voice

The building’s later publishing connection belonged to a very different New York from the world of the Harpers. In 1955, psychologist Edwin “Ed” Fancher joined Dan Wolf and Norman Mailer in founding The Village Voice. The paper became an influential home for independent journalism, criticism and the downtown arts.

Fancher and his wife, Vivian Kramer Fancher, later lived in apartment 14B at No. 45. Vivian was a counselor and writer; the apartment was also a family home, remembered for birthdays and holiday gatherings. The public life of a newspaper founder sat alongside the ordinary pleasures of a household overlooking the Park.

Fancher’s two careers were closely interwoven. He helped establish and sustain a newspaper while continuing his work as a psychologist. In remembrances after his death, longtime Voice writer Lucian K. Truscott IV recalled a founder whose influence extended well beyond a name on the masthead.

Fancher died in September 2023 at the age of 100. The following June, a memorial at the National Arts Club brought his story back to another familiar address on Gramercy Park.

The Harpers’ houses and the Fanchers’ apartment belonged to different buildings and different eras. Their connection is the place itself: the north side of the Park, where the city’s publishing history has repeatedly found a home.

The building at a glance
Address
45 Gramercy Park North; 129–133 East 21st Street
Built
1926–27
Developer
Bing & Bing
Architects
George A. & Henry Boehm
Character
Renaissance-inspired apartment house with buff brick, limestone and a sculptural entrance
Present use
Residential cooperative
Historic district
Outside the boundary of the Gramercy Park Historic District
Documents & further reading

Part of Gramercy Stories, the Block Association’s series on the buildings and landmarks of our neighborhood.

Photo credits for this page
  • Entrance: photograph published in Compass’s Gramercy neighborhood guide. Photographer not identified; original photograph retained.
  • Building exterior and later apartment interior: photographs published by CityRealty. Photographers not identified; original photographs retained.
  • Harper purchase notice: Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, December 9, 1911, p. 866, Columbia University Libraries. Public-domain page excerpt; the full page is linked from the image.