60 Gramercy Park North

Before Roth’s building, several smaller properties occupied this part of the Park’s north side. Sanborn’s 1903 insurance map shows 105, 107 and 109 East 21st Street just east of Calvary Church and its rectory. Behind them were separate properties facing East 22nd Street. Narrow lots, rear extensions and small yards filled what would become the much larger apartment-house site.

Some of the older buildings were already being used for apartments. A 1915 New-York Tribune directory advertised rooms at 105 East 21st Street. No. 109 was the home of Susanna Shaw Minturn and members of her family.

Emery Roth came to the United States from Hungary as a boy and worked at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition before establishing his career in New York. No. 60 was completed during the period when he was designing such major apartment buildings as the Beresford, San Remo and El Dorado.

At No. 60, relatively plain brick walls rise to increasingly elaborate upper floors. Terraces step back beneath red-tiled gables, tall arches and sculpted terra-cotta ornament. Renaissance-inspired terra-cotta window surrounds and cast-iron loggias add detail farther down the façade.

The design combines Italian Renaissance and Spanish motifs. The Landmarks Preservation Commission cited No. 60 in its 1992 report on Lundy’s Restaurant as an example of Churrigueresque, a richly ornamented form of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture.

The rooftop tower has a practical purpose: it conceals the building’s water tank. Carter Horsley’s account, drawing on Roth’s biographer Steven Ruttenbaum, describes its sculpted eagles and three elongated arches. Roth turned a utilitarian enclosure into the building’s most recognizable skyline feature.

The property consists of two sixteen-story residential blocks, with penthouses above: one faces Gramercy Park North and the other East 22nd Street. A circular lobby, or rotunda, connects them at ground level through the garden court.

According to Ruttenbaum, the buildings originally contained 162 apartments, ranging from single rooms to larger suites. Additional rooms for domestic staff were provided on the first floor of the East 22nd Street building.

The 1943 photograph shows the Park façade before the trees grew high enough to obscure much of it. The tower, decorative panels and stepped terraces are all clearly visible.

Despite its architectural distinction, No. 60 is outside the Gramercy Park Historic District. The district’s northern boundary, established in 1966, runs along Gramercy Park North.

When The New Yorker visited in October 1928, Marcia Davenport, then still Marcia Clarke, praised the spacious rooms, useful closets, kitchens and sunlight. She preferred the larger dining rooms to the smaller dining alcoves. Advertised rents ranged from $1,600 for one room with a kitchen and bath to $5,600 for seven rooms and three baths.

A restaurant and optional maid and valet services were promised. The gardens received a less enthusiastic review: Davenport thought the rhododendrons needed encouragement.

A ten-room duplex

An undated rental brochure in Columbia’s Avery Library offers a detailed look inside one of the larger apartments. Marketed by Clement E. Merowit & Co., the ten-room duplex occupied parts of the ninth and tenth floors.

The floor plan places the main living rooms upstairs: a living room measuring 27 feet by 23 feet 6 inches, a dining room with a rounded end, a library and an octagonal playroom. A terrace measured 21 feet 6 inches by 44 feet. Three principal bedrooms and a maid’s room occupied the floor below.

Brochure photographs show a formal dining room, decorative ceiling treatments and a beamed living room. Separate passenger and service elevators provided access to the apartment. Merowit’s company also developed the nearby apartment building at 44 Gramercy Park North, completed in 1930.

The painter, lithographer and photographer Ralston Crawford used 60 Gramercy Park as his address in six Whitney Museum exhibition catalogues: 1953, 1958, 1961, 1963, 1965 and 1967. Those entries document his connection to the building over a fourteen-year span.

Crawford is best known for paintings of American industry. He simplified factories, grain elevators and other structures into sharply defined geometric forms, an approach associated with Precisionism.

His career also took him far beyond New York. The Smithsonian’s biography describes his work at Walt Disney’s studio, voyages on merchant ships and response to the 1946 atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. During World War II, he worked in camouflage and later prepared visual material for the Army Air Forces’ weather division.

New Orleans became another important subject. Crawford photographed its musicians and cemeteries, and exhibited paintings including New Orleans No. 2 in 1953 and New Orleans, Number 11 in 1961. After his death in 1978, he was buried in New Orleans with a jazz funeral.

The circular lobby is one of the building’s most elaborate interiors. A Wurts Bros. photograph from 1941 shows chairs and a bench around its edge, patterned windows facing the garden court and a richly decorated ceiling.

By the time Françoise Bollack Architects began its restoration, freestanding mailboxes crowded the room, layers of glossy paint covered the original plaster finishes, and the leaded glass in the steel windows had become fragile.

The restoration, completed in 2007, moved the mailboxes to the perimeter and concealed air-conditioning equipment. Tests and mock-ups guided the restoration of the finishes and colors. The architects studied period fixtures before designing new brass and hammered-glass lights.

EverGreene Painting Studios carried out the decorative painting. The completed work brought the ceiling ornament, gilded shells and plaster details back into view, while opening up the center of the rotunda.

Cooperative life and the courtyards

After more than half a century as a rental property, the building became a cooperative in the mid-1980s.

Today, the building has two landscaped central courtyards, full-time doormen and a resident manager. The gardens give the through-block plan a quieter interior setting, away from the two street fronts.

The building’s terraces have long served as outdoor living spaces. In the 1941 photograph of Mrs. Glover’s Penthouse B, potted plants, a reclining chair and a table are arranged above the Park.

From the sidewalk, the red tiles and arched tower are the most visible parts of this rooftop world. The terrace photographs reveal what lies behind them: gardens, places to sit and broad views across Gramercy Park.