8 Gramercy Park South

An unexpected arrival

All Souls arrived at Fourth Avenue and East 20th Street with a congregation, an ambitious minister, and a patron willing to take a chance on an unfamiliar architect. The minister was Henry Whitney Bellows. The patron was the merchant Moses H. Grinnell. The architect, Jacob Wrey Mould, had recently come from England.

Grinnell championed Mould when the church’s trustees were considering a more conventional proposal. He was, Bellows later observed, bewitched by the architect. Mould rewarded that confidence with a building that New Yorkers could scarcely ignore: bands of red brick and pale stone, round arches, an enormous circular window, and a dome rising above the roof.

Dedicated on Christmas Day in 1855, the church drew on northern Italian architecture, particularly the cathedral at Monza. Color was built into its masonry. The alternating courses continued around arches and across the walls, giving a familiar church form an insistent, almost graphic rhythm. New Yorkers supplied the nickname that has outlived the building: the Church of the Holy Zebra.

Behind the striped walls

Around the corner, at 104 East 20th Street, Mould designed a rectory nearly as memorable as the church. A great projecting bay gathered paired windows beneath a rounded arch. Circular openings, a small balcony, and a steep gable gave the narrow house an extraordinary variety of shapes. The church’s dome appeared immediately beside it.

For the Bellows family, this was a home as well as an architectural experiment. His daughter Anna remembered lofty rooms and a complicated arrangement of passages. What delighted a child did not necessarily please the adult responsible for the household. Henderson preserved Anna’s verdict: “I thought the complicated and somewhat mysterious and inconvenient parsonage delightful,” followed by the decisive qualification, “but my mother did not.”

Eliza Bellows managed a house that was open to much more than parish business. The family’s hospitality brought educational and charitable work into domestic rooms. The rectory’s unusual façade concealed a place where people gathered to discuss what the city—and soon the nation—needed.

The work beyond the pulpit

When the Civil War began in 1861, Bellows helped create the United States Sanitary Commission and became its president. Its purpose was urgently practical: improve conditions for Union soldiers, organize supplies, and support care for the sick and wounded. Disease and inadequate camp sanitation could be as dangerous as battle.

The All Souls Historical Society’s account places the women of the congregation at the center of this effort. Sarah Bedell Cooper and Louisa Lee Schuyler helped mobilize support; the Woman’s Central Association of Relief became a major auxiliary. Clothing, food, blankets, nursing, and fundraising required sustained organization on a scale far beyond the parish.

Bellows’s public work gives this lost house a place in a national story. It also explains why the decision to forgo a tower mattered. A congregation that had struggled to pay for an adventurous building chose to put its remaining architectural ambition in the service of people far from Gramercy Park.

Flowers carried into the city

Among the organizations associated with the house was the New York Flower Mission, which brought fresh flowers to hospitals. An 1877 illustration shows visitors moving between beds in a women’s ward, carrying small gifts from the world outside. The picture records the kind of work the mission undertook, rather than a scene inside the rectory.

Henderson found the church house active when she visited in the 1910s. The church itself looked worn, its stone deteriorating and its gates shut on an ordinary weekday. Yet visitors admitted through the former parsonage encountered a hospitable custodian who guided them inside. The public face was tired; the life within continued.

That distinction is easy to lose in the story of a demolished building. All Souls was an architectural curiosity, but the rectory also mattered because of what happened in its rooms: meetings, teaching, relief work, and the patient business of maintaining a congregation.

The apartment house at the corner

The present apartment house dates to about 1940. Where the church had announced itself through contrasting masonry and a dome, the new building used a continuous skin of red-brown brick, a flat roofline, and repeated windows. Six stories established a modest scale beside the taller commercial buildings on the avenue.

Its most expressive features are the windows that turn the corners. They break the weight of the brickwork and make the junction of two façades a place for light. Fire escapes give the walls a second, finer pattern. Along the ground floor, storefronts address the avenue while the residential entrance faces East 20th Street toward Gramercy Park.

The building’s form records a change in purpose. A large congregation and a minister’s household had occupied the earlier ensemble. The replacement brought many separate households to the site. Current city records list 55 homes, and Stonehenge’s description of the property identifies studios and one- and two-bedroom apartments, including homes with sunken living rooms and crown moldings.

Those interior details belong to the apartment’s own history of domestic comfort. A few steps down can give a living room a sense of separation without requiring a wall. The broad corner windows make the street and its changing light part of the room.

A father’s work

One of the most lasting connections between No. 8 and Gramercy Park began with the building’s superintendent. Alberto Flores worked here for thirty-four years. His son Amando began helping him, and through that work came to know the neighborhood and the garden across the street.

In the GPBA’s 2016 interview, Amando traced the connection directly to his father’s job. In the early 1990s, he covered for the Park attendant during vacations and undertook maintenance work. By the middle of the decade, the Trustees had hired him as the Park’s gardener.

Gardening was already familiar. Growing up in Puebla, Mexico, Amando had begun working with roses at fifteen. The opportunity at Gramercy brought that early experience into a new setting, with further horticultural study supported by the Trustees.

The work that makes a place

Over the following decades, Amando’s responsibilities grew with the garden. Flowers, shrubs, trees, lawns, paths, and watering systems all needed attention. The Park’s apparent ease depended on work repeated through the seasons: watching, tending, repairing, and learning what each part of the garden required.

The GPBA’s portrait of Amando follows that life from Puebla to Gramercy. Here, the building’s role is simple and consequential. Alberto’s long service at No. 8 gave his son a way into the neighborhood. Amando made that connection his life’s work.

There is no institutional line joining the Flower Mission of the old rectory to the gardener of today. But the two stories bring the history of this corner into focus. Its importance has repeatedly rested with people doing useful work, often away from public attention. Behind the apartment house’s familiar brick walls lies a history of service that reaches well beyond the address.