60 Gramercy Park North

Before No. 60, this stretch of the north side was divided into narrower properties. Sanborn’s 1903 insurance map shows the earlier buildings at 105, 107 and 109 East 21st Street, east of Calvary Church and its rectory. Separate properties also lined 22nd Street behind them. The little rear extensions and irregular yards on the map belong to a different scale of city life from the building that occupies the site today.

At No. 109 lived Robert Shaw Minturn, a lawyer whose office was at 11 Broadway. The 1900 biographical directory gives the distinction plainly: business downtown, residence on the Park. That precise old street address is useful. It keeps the people who lived in the earlier house from being accidentally promoted into residents of Roth’s later apartment building.

Mildred Minturn also gave 109 East 21st Street as her address. Bryn Mawr’s alumnae reports list her on the governing board of New York’s Consumers’ League. Her interests reached well beyond a comfortable house: in 1906 she published an English translation, with her own introduction, of Jean Jaurès’s Studies in Socialism. A quiet Gramercy address could accommodate decidedly active ideas.

Apartment living had already arrived before the tower. A 1915 New-York Tribune directory offered three rooms and a bath at 105 East 21st Street for $1,000 to $1,500. The change was therefore gradual: the small properties were already adapting to new households before they gave way to Roth’s much larger undertaking.

The building’s depth is less obvious from the Park. Roth designed two residential blocks, one facing Gramercy Park North and the other 22nd Street, connected at ground level through the middle of the site. A rotunda gives that long passage a room of its own. Gardens and courts bring relief between the two street fronts.

This helps explain why the address contains so many different kinds of outlook. “Facing Gramercy Park North” means looking south when one looks toward the Park; the street name is the position around the square, not the direction of the view. Rear apartments belonged to a different arrangement of street, courtyard and light.

A Wurts Bros. photograph from 1943 makes the front composition particularly legible. The tower, the paired ornamental strips and the successive terraces remain visible above the trees. With the Park kept open in front of it, No. 60 has room to be seen as a complete building.

Columbia’s Avery Library preserves an undated rental brochure that lets us walk through one of the large apartments on paper. Offered by Clement E. Merowit & Co., the ten-room duplex occupies parts of the ninth and tenth floors. Its date is uncertain, so it should not be mistaken for a documented opening-day plan.

The tenth floor contains the entertaining rooms: a living room labeled 27 feet by 23 feet 6 inches, a dining room with a rounded end, a library and an octagonal play room. The terrace is labeled 21 feet 6 inches by 44 feet. Below are three principal bedrooms and a maid’s room. In this apartment, one went downstairs to bed.

The accompanying photographs show how fully the rooms were dressed: substantial dining furniture, a richly treated ceiling and a beamed living room. The plan’s separate passenger and service elevators make the household’s working arrangements just as visible as its pleasures.

One later name emerges from museum records rather than real-estate advertisements. The Whitney Museum’s 1961 annual exhibition catalogue lists Ralston Crawford at 60 Gramercy Park North. Its 1967 catalogue gives the same address. These contemporary listings establish a firm connection across the decade without requiring a guess about which apartment he occupied.

Crawford was a painter, lithographer and photographer whose work often reduced the modern world to strong shapes and sharply defined planes. Factories, grain elevators and other industrial structures supplied subjects for the paintings associated with Precisionism. Roth’s decorative tower and Crawford’s austere industrial forms make an intriguing architectural pairing at the same address.

His range extended much further. The Smithsonian records early work in Walt Disney’s studio, journeys by sea, and repeated visits to New Orleans to photograph its musical life. In 1946 he witnessed the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll and made paintings in response. The itinerary behind a name in an apartment-house directory could cover a remarkable amount of the twentieth century.

The Whitney entries offer two small glimpses of what he was showing while he used the Gramercy address: New Orleans, Number 11 in 1961 and Torn Signs in 1967. They take the story from the building’s ornament to an artist’s very different way of looking.

Inside, years of practical changes had obscured the original effect. By the time Françoise Bollack Architects undertook the lobby restoration completed in 2007, freestanding mailboxes crowded the rotunda, layers of glossy paint covered the travertine plaster, and the leaded glass in the steel windows had become fragile.

Tests and mock-ups guided the recovery of finishes and colors. Mailboxes moved to the perimeter, and air-conditioning elements were concealed. New brass and hammered-glass lights were developed through models and full working mock-ups after the architects studied period fixtures.

The result can be read in the photographs: daylight through patterned glass, the broad sweep of the ceiling, and ornament that has regained its depth. Even the shells above the arches participate in the effect. The circular space once again feels like a room where one might pause, rather than simply a place to collect the mail.