81 Irving Place

For more than seventy-five years, the northwest corner of Irving Place and East 19th Street belonged to the low-slung brick rowhouses that defined nineteenth-century Gramercy. In 1852, merchant Richard S. Fellowes and his wife, Emma Fellowes, lived in the corner townhouse at 81 Irving Place. As commercial life and apartment living gradually transformed the blocks south of Gramercy Park in the early twentieth century, the old patrician residence was subdivided into a rooming house.

The earlier No. 81 also belonged to the remembered neighborhood of writer Gladys Brooks. Garmey places her girlhood here, before the old houses gave way to Pelham’s apartment building. Her recollections preserve the domestic scale of Irving Place beneath the later layers of balconies and terra cotta.

In 1929, developer Louis Cowan assembled the corner property at No. 81 together with the two adjoining rowhouses to its north at 83 and 85 Irving Place. Cowan had recently traveled through Italy, bringing home architectural examples that influenced the new building’s design. He commissioned George F. Pelham—one of interwar Manhattan's most prolific apartment-house architects—to translate that vision into a sixteen-story urban tower, naming it the Gramercy Square Apartments to link the corner directly to the historic enclave a block to the north.

The five-sided terra-cotta balconies are the building’s signature gesture. Projecting boldly from the dark brown brick elevation, each balcony rests on deep corbel brackets carved into grimacing masks and crouching beasts, while the balustrade panels frame circular relief medallions populated by coiled dragons, winged griffins, and monkeys. Though compact in scale against a sixteen-story wall, their rhythmic placement draws the eye upward from story to story across both street fronts.

At the lower stories, Pelham lavished the attention typically reserved for a single ceremonial portal across individual ground-floor windows. Polychrome arches of alternating brick and pale stone spring above carved tympanum lunettes filled with eagles and mythological beasts, supported on slender barley-twist colonnettes crowned with miniature crouching gargoyles.

Even the utilitarian service passage on East 19th Street is treated as a piece of sculpture. Beside its wrought-iron gate, a broad terra-cotta capital compresses a row of squat, medieval-style figures in pointed caps and hats—hunched shoulder-to-shoulder as if physically bearing the masonry lintel on their backs. Elsewhere across the brick walls, heraldic shields, inset rondels, and diaper-patterned brickwork shift the scale of ornament from block-long silhouette to intimate street-level craft.

High above the main cornice line, zoning setbacks carve out deep private terraces and a stepped profile. At the summit, Pelham enclosed the building's utilitarian rooftop water tank inside an ornate brick-and-terra-cotta pavilion, turning an everyday mechanical necessity into an Italianate crown against the sky.

Completed just as the Great Depression took hold of New York, the Gramercy Square Apartments offered casement-windowed suites and setback terraces close to Gramercy Park and the Fourteenth Street theater district. Its residents included performers and writers. In 1933, performer and writer Gypsy Rose Lee moved into the building during a career that encompassed burlesque and Broadway revues. Her later writing included the mystery The G-String Murders and the memoir Gypsy.

Five years later, in 1938, the British painter, novelist, and Vorticist founder Wyndham Lewis took up residence at 81 Irving Place during an extended prewar stay in Manhattan. In November 1939, playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder followed, adding another major literary figure to a street long associated with Washington Irving and O. Henry.

Wilder arrived at the height of his acclaim—Our Town had won the Pulitzer Prize the previous year, and he was soon at work on The Skin of Our Teeth. Writing from 81 Irving Place to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on November 18, 1939, after five days in his new New York home, Wilder reported his delight with his new Gramercy quarters and the daily rhythm of life on Irving Place.

When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Gramercy Park Historic District in 1966, it drew the southern boundary to take in the northwest corner of Irving Place and East 19th Street. Pelham’s apartment house joined the nineteenth-century rowhouses and institutions surrounding the Park within the district’s boundaries.

According to its residents’ handbook, in 1982 the building converted to cooperative ownership under the Irving Tenants Corp., and it is configured today with 102 apartments.

For someone walking the neighborhood today, 81 Irving Place rewards two distinct ways of looking. From across Irving Place, the building reads as a vertical composition of stepped setbacks, projecting balconies, and rooftop loggia; up close along East 19th Street, it dissolves into twisted columns, mythical beasts, and the crowded comedy of its carved capitals.