80 Irving Place

The doorway makes an unusually intimate introduction to a substantial house. A short flight of steps leads to a sheltered porch; above it, a delicate iron balcony projects from the wall. On the side street, a tall oriel window brings another projecting form into the otherwise flat façade. The house addresses both streets without repeating the same composition on each.

When the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Gramercy Park Historic District in 1966, it specifically noted No. 80’s iron railings, balconies and round-arched windows. The report dated the house to 1853–1854. That combination of masonry and fine metalwork places it firmly in the mid-nineteenth-century neighborhood, a short walk from the Italianate houses facing the Park itself.

Garmey identifies the original owner as William Samuel Johnson, the lawyer and Park Trustee who had earlier built the house now known as 19 Gramercy Park South. The 1853–54 commission at No. 80 also included a carriage house at 127 East 19th Street, extending the household’s property along the side street.

Looking east from this corner, the architecture continues along the stretch of East 19th Street known as the “Block Beautiful.” Its houses, former stables and later alterations make the transition between the open space of the Park and the smaller domestic spaces of the adjoining streets.

Dr. James Rushmore Wood moved here with his family in 1865. A testimonial dated May 24, 1866, in a contemporary catalogue of artificial limbs gives his address as 80 Irving Place and identifies him as a Bellevue surgeon and professor—a small piece of printed evidence tying a major medical career to this particular doorway.

Wood helped build Bellevue’s reputation as a teaching hospital. The hospital’s own history credits him with promoting clinical lectures and championing the establishment of Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1861. NYU’s medical archives record his professorship in operative surgery and surgical pathology from 1861 to 1868, followed by his years as professor emeritus.

Teaching also depended on objects. Bellevue’s pathology building, opened in 1857, housed the Wood Museum’s collection of anatomical specimens. The museum made material gathered through a surgeon’s work available for study by succeeding classes of physicians. Wood died at the Irving Place house in 1882.

The retired actress Agnes Ethel Tracy later lived at No. 80 with her niece. In 1895, she opened the house for six lectures on colonial history by Jane Meade Welch. She also supported younger performers and the Actors’ Fund, maintaining a connection with the stage after her own performing career had ended.

Ethel had been a leading actress in Augustin Daly’s company. A contemporary New York theater guide records her title role in Agnes, the Victorien Sardou play presented at the Union Square Theatre in 1872. The theater stood only a few blocks south of the house she would later occupy.

After her death in 1903, the house became associated with the Ingraham family. Phoenix Ingraham entertained the Hobby Club here in 1915, displaying his collection of Thackeray letters, drawings and first editions. By the Depression, the building had become a rooming house; later uses included apartments and professional offices.

Medicine returned in a different form in the early 1970s, when the building housed the Women’s Medical Center. A contemporary feminist newspaper from August 1972 lists the center at 80 Irving Place. Its presence belongs to the history of women’s health services in New York during a period of profound change.

The house was reconverted to a private residence in 1987. The following year, Working Girl used its exterior for Katharine Parker’s home. The distinction matters: the film’s interior rooms were shot at 66 Morton Street in the West Village. No. 80 supplied the memorable arrival at the door.

Today the most public part of this private house remains its exterior. The ironwork is worth a closer look: leaves, rails, slender uprights and the balcony over the entrance make a remarkably intricate edge between the sidewalk and the building.