45 Gramercy Park North

From 4 Gramercy Park West to 131 East 21st Street

The Harper publishing family had deep roots on Gramercy Park. James Harper (1795–1869), eldest of the four brothers who founded Harper & Brothers and mayor of New York in 1844–1845, moved into 4 Gramercy Park West in 1847 and lived there until his death, where his mayor’s lamps still flank the front stoop.

A generation later, Henry Sleeper Harper (1864–1944)—grandson of James’s younger brother and partner Joseph Wesley Harper—settled on the north side of the square. After graduating from Columbia College in 1888, he entered the family publishing house on Franklin Square and served as one of its incorporators when Harper & Brothers became a corporation in 1896. Acquiring the four-story Italianate brownstone at 131 East 21st Street (photographed in 1895 when it was the residence of merchant J. Henry Lane and his wife, Isabella), Harper and his wife, Myra Raymond Harper, made their home in the low-rise row just east of Lexington Avenue.

Buying the house next door: December 1911

The scale of the block began to change at the corner. In 1910, the mansion of financier Henry W. Poor—created by Stanford White from the paired 1852 brownstones of Cyrus W. Field and David Dudley Field—was demolished for Herbert Lucas’s twelve-story cooperative at One Lexington Avenue, completed in September 1911.

Three months later, Harper bought himself an architectural buffer: the entire four-story brownstone immediately east of his own. “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, pointing directly to the wave of apartment construction around Gramercy Park.

Harper’s instinct for conservation reached well beyond East 21st Street: a dedicated outdoorsman, he served as secretary and trustee of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, working to defend New York’s northern forests from commercial timbering. On Gramercy Park, the December 21, 1911 deed from Mary Morison conveyed No. 133 to Myra Raymond Harper (“Myra R, wife Henry S Harper”) for an assessed valuation of $43,000, explicitly carrying “with rights & privileges to Gramercy Park.” Combined with 136 and 138 East 22nd Street directly behind his home and the former Henry W. Poor carriage stable on East 22nd Street, Harper now controlled 55 feet along Gramercy Park North and 50 feet on East 22nd Street.

When Bing & Bing assembled the 78-foot site for 45 Gramercy Park North fifteen years later, the Harpers’ two properties at Nos. 131 and 133 were joined with the 23-foot brownstone lot immediately to the west at 129 East 21st Street—long the home of real-estate investor and banking executive James D. Lynch (1848–1917) and the Lynch family. The assemblage stopped just east of No. 127, where Edward Ringwood Hewitt’s narrow five-story townhouse survived and still stands next door as 48 Gramercy Park North.

Aboard the Titanic with Hammad Hassab and Sun Yat Sen

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.

Aboard the Carpathia and an earlier iceberg on the Grand Banks

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.”

Hiring the architect of One Lexington Avenue

Myra Raymond Harper died in November 1923, and the following July Harper married Anne W. Hopson. By 1926, as the brownstone rows of Gramercy Park North were giving way to tall apartment houses, Harper decided to leave the square—and in a notable architectural irony, he hired Herbert Lucas, the very architect whose twelve-story cooperative at One Lexington Avenue had prompted his defensive purchase of No. 133 in 1911, to combine two townhouses at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 38th Street into his new residence.

The last of the brownstone row

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.

From three brownstones to one apartment house

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.

George and Henry Boehm: from the Forward Building to Gramercy Park

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.

Ten thousand dollars above Sutter’s bakery

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."