Gramercy Park Hotel

Stanford White’s house

Before the hotel, there were three houses on East 21st Street. Behind one of their conventional fronts, Stanford White assembled an interior as extravagant as any of the buildings he designed.

White rented here from 1892, later moving into the larger house at the Lexington Avenue corner. Italian mantels, painted ceilings, Spanish doorways, and red Verona marble columns filled the rooms. A picture gallery extended behind the house, with a music room beneath it. The photographs in the 1907 sale catalogue preserve a world that disappeared before the hotel was built.

After White’s death in 1906, crowds descended on the house for a three-day auction. Police managed the crush at the door. William Randolph Hearst bought ceilings; the Metropolitan Museum acquired a Venetian chest. The Princeton Club, preparing to move in, bought furnishings that would remain in the rooms.

The house went on to serve the Princeton Club, an officers’ club, and wartime community organizations. By 1924 it belonged to the YWCA, and the corner was about to change again.

An apartment hotel beside the Park

In 1924 Alexander and Leo Bing, the brothers behind Bing & Bing, assembled the corner for a residential hotel. Architect Robert T. Lyons designed a sixteen-story building facing the Park.

New Yorkers were embracing apartment hotels: places where a private suite came with maid service, a restaurant downstairs, and the freedom to leave household management to someone else.

The Gramercy’s brown brick and limestone base gave it a restrained Renaissance Revival exterior. Inside, it offered a new way to live at one of the city’s most established addresses.

The hotel opened in September 1925, advertised under its street address, 52 Gramercy Park North. Its early notices promised rooms “single or en suite,” hotel maid service, and a restaurant with room service. By the following spring, guests were dining in a roof garden above the city.

The little map in the hotel’s house magazine placed the Park at the heart of the visitor’s New York: a quiet square with the rest of Manhattan close at hand. The Spring 1938 cover set a photograph of the hotel beneath an ornate masthead, with a top-hatted cyclist beside it.

Apartment hotels also benefited from a quirk of the building laws. Without individual kitchens, they could rise beyond restrictions that applied to ordinary apartment houses. The arrangement helped this new building type flourish across New York in the 1920s.

At Gramercy, the tall brick hotel stood beside the Park’s older houses and across Lexington Avenue from the ornate apartment building at One Lexington. The contrast became part of the familiar view from the square.

The hotel grows

The hotel expanded westward in 1929–30. Thompson & Churchill designed the sixteen-story annex, extending its frontage along the Park.

A land agreement with the Russell Sage Foundation preserved a low strip between the properties. Decades later, the annex would begin a separate life as the residences at 50 Gramercy Park North.

An address to live in

The Gramercy was a home almost from its first winter. The Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop, John Gardner Murray, and his wife took a suite in January 1926. His successor later chose the same apartment.

A wedding in the suite

On May 20, 1926, Humphrey Bogart married actress Helen Menken in her suite. Both were working on Broadway. Menken’s parents were deaf, and she asked the Rev. John Kent of St. Ann’s Church for the Deaf to conduct the ceremony.

Bogart had carried their marriage license for four years before they finally used it. The marriage was brief, but the wedding gave the newly opened hotel an early place in theatrical history.

The Weissberg hotel

Charles Schwefel, a former Bing & Bing purchasing agent, managed the hotel for New York Life and bought it in 1949. Herbert Weissberg followed in 1958, beginning the family association that would define its best-known decades.

The Weissbergs’ tenure included an interruption after the family company entered bankruptcy in 1967. They returned in the mid-1970s, as the hotel’s reputation among musicians was taking shape.

Paul Shaffer lived at the Gramercy for eleven years. He remembered musty carpets, worn furniture, longtime European visitors, and elderly residents who had moved in decades earlier. He loved it. Pinky, one of the bellmen, worked here for fifty-one years, beginning in 1945.

Herbert’s grandson Max Weissberg remembered candles in cherry-colored glasses, mirrors behind the bar, and a favorite seat reserved for his grandfather. His description of the atmosphere—“halfway between Casablanca and the Titanic”—caught both the affection and the precariousness of the family hotel.

In 1977, Lynn Goldsmith photographed Hunter S. Thompson stretched out on a sofa at the Gramercy.

Operations passed out of the family in 2002. Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen bought the hotel the following year, and it closed for renovation in the winter of 2004–05. The old furnishings were sold in the lobby; neighbors carried pieces of the familiar rooms home.

Some members of the Weissberg family remained as tenants until 2017. Douglas Keeve’s documentary Hotel Gramercy Park and Max Weissberg’s later book tell the story from inside a building that was both a business and a family home.

“Whenever you come over there will be a hot grog steaming in my kitchenette for you.”

— S. J. Perelman, inviting a friend to his new home at the Gramercy, 1972

A writer’s room

S. J. Perelman moved into the Gramercy in December 1972 and stayed for the rest of his life. He liked being between his old Greenwich Village haunts and Midtown, with the Players, the Mercantile Library, and favorite restaurants within walking distance.

Prudence Crowther’s portrait of his rooms describes a kitchenette, a hot plate, a counter oven, and a rubber fried egg brought back from Japan. From his window, Perelman could see enough of the pretty parts of New York to remind him of London.

Hotel life supplied material. One morning, Crowther recalled, he walked into his sitting room in his shorts to find a couple with suitcases insisting it was theirs. The desk suggested they had taken the wrong key. Perelman pointed out that the keys were about six feet beyond a guest’s reach.

He died here in October 1979.

Bowie, 1973 and 1974

David Bowie arrived in New York by sea in January 1973 and checked into the Gramercy with his friend Geoff MacCormack. The visit led toward his February performances at Radio City Music Hall. At nearby Max’s Kansas City, he caught a bill that included a young Bruce Springsteen.

Bowie returned to the hotel for an aftershow party in November 1974, photographed by Joe Stevens. The Gramercy was one of several New York hotels he used, but the images of him here became part of its enduring rock-and-roll identity.

1994: the beds were the booths

In April 1994, a contemporary art fair moved into the guest rooms. Dealers Colin de Land, Pat Hearn, Matthew Marks, and Paul Morris had devised the idea over takeout Chinese food: an affordable, informal fair for a younger generation of galleries.

The art market was emerging from a recession. A hotel offered a ready-made alternative to an expensive exhibition hall, with bedrooms that could become galleries for a weekend.

Thirty-seven exhibitors occupied three upper floors. Art appeared on beds, in bathrooms, and wherever else a room allowed. Out-of-town dealers slept in the spaces where they sold. The corridors filled with collectors, artists, and visitors moving from door to door.

“The Gramercy brought morale up. It gave people a sense that things could change.”

— Dealer Vincent Fremont, remembering the fair

Tracey Emin arrived from London with her new dealer, Jay Jopling, and her appliquéd blanket Hotel International. After an all-night party she was still asleep when the fair opened. Visitors came into the room and met her in bed. She later called it an accidental performance.

The crowds tested the hotel’s elevators. When they failed, visitors climbed the stairs. Dealer Jack Hanley remembered the slow lifts more fondly: they produced unexpected encounters with people attending a flower show on the roof.

The fair returned, and the setting continued to shape the art. Hotel furniture stayed in place; bathrooms became exhibition spaces. The intimacy of visiting a room was part of the attraction.

Mark Dion ran a lemonade stand in 1996. Nam June Paik put television screens in a bathtub the following year. These were exhibitions made in conversation with the hotel’s everyday objects and improvised spaces.

In 1999 the fair moved a few blocks north to the 69th Regiment Armory and adopted the name The Armory Show, honoring the landmark exhibition held there in 1913. Two years later it moved to the Hudson River piers.

Schrager invited Julian Schnabel to imagine the interiors. Working with HS2 Architecture, the painter brought the sensibility of an artist’s rooms to a hotel: custom carpets, heavy furniture, richly colored surfaces, and objects chosen for their presence.

Designer Tim Girvin, visiting soon after the reopening, described hammered metal, enormous chandeliers, cypress ceiling panels, and the smell of burning wood. The rooms were theatrical, tactile, and unmistakably personal.

Critics disagreed sharply about the result. Some found the interiors overwhelming; others admired their boldness. Schnabel’s hotel had become a subject of design debate as well as a place to stay.

Outside, the rebuilt bronze canopy followed the shape of the old one. Even a radical reinvention retained a familiar outline at the entrance.

The bar

The hotel’s house magazine pictured a cocktail room in the 1930s. Half a century later, the downstairs bar was cherished for its dark wood, leather, candles, and resistance to fashion.

Guidebooks celebrated its worn, old-fashioned atmosphere. The attraction lay as much in the company as in the room: musicians, writers, retired residents, and neighborhood regulars sharing the same dim light.

Max Weissberg remembered elderly sisters drinking martinis, librettist Ira Gasman with his rhyming dictionary, and Lou Reed ordering carrot juice. Paul Shaffer recalled sitting at the out-of-tune upright piano while Ronnie Spector sang her hits. An ordinary hotel bar could suddenly become an extraordinary room.

The bar changed hands and appearance in the early 2000s, then disappeared into the larger renovation. In 2006 the Rose Bar and Jade Bar opened, bringing a different style of nightlife to the same address.

The dining rooms

The dining rooms served another side of hotel life. Surviving menus record holiday dinners, children’s meals, and long afternoons at the table. The Thanksgiving menu shown here belongs to that quieter tradition of hospitality.

After the rebuilding, the restaurant space was initially intended for Alan Yau’s Park Chinois. That project did not open, and Yuji Wakiya brought his own restaurant to the hotel in 2007.

Wakiya

Wakiya’s dining room made a dramatic entrance: a red carpet, red curtains, and glossy dark surfaces. The chef interpreted Chinese cooking through a Japanese sensibility. Reviews were mixed, and the restaurant’s stay was brief. By 2009, the room was ready for another transformation.

Maialino

Danny Meyer’s Maialino opened in November 2009. Its Roman trattoria spirit brought a warmer, more informal mood to the hotel’s ground floor. Meyer had initially declined Schrager’s invitation; when he eventually accepted, Union Square Hospitality Group also took on the hotel’s wider food-and-beverage operations.

Chef Nick Anderer’s menu centered on Roman dishes, including the roast suckling pig that gave the restaurant its name. Rockwell Group designed a dining room with reclaimed oak paneling and checked table skirts. There was breakfast at the front, a lively bar, and long meals overlooking the Park.