Gramercy Park Hotel
A New York story of writers, musicians, art, and life beside the Park.
A century beside the Park
A Broadway wedding in Humphrey Bogart and Helen Menken’s suite. A ten-year-old John F. Kennedy coming downstairs to play in the Park. Debbie Harry on the roof, Bob Dylan in the bar, and art dealers turning bedrooms into galleries for the first Armory Show. Since opening its doors in September 1925, the Gramercy Park Hotel has occupied a singular place in New York’s cultural life.
Designed by Robert T. Lyons for developer brothers Leo and Alexander Bing on the site of Stanford White’s and Robert G. Ingersoll’s nineteenth-century townhouses, the hotel began as an elegant residential address overlooking the square. Across a century of reinvention—from forty-five years of Weissberg family stewardship to Ian Schrager and Julian Schnabel’s art-filled makeover and Danny Meyer’s beloved Maialino—it has served as a home for writers, a base camp for rock-and-roll, and the neighborhood’s liveliest living room. Now, MCR and MORSE Development are preparing 2 Lexington Avenue for its next chapter.
The making of a 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.
The townhouse row had filled out in 1846–47. No. 117 became the home of agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll. At No. 119, formerly No. 80, George Frederick and Lucretia Jones—Edith Wharton’s parents—lived before 1858, before their daughter’s birth. Stanford White later rented that house before moving to No. 121 at the corner.
The row continued west to the 1849 “palazzo” of diarist George Templeton Strong and his wife, Ellen, daughter of Samuel B. Ruggles. Their house at 74, later 113 East 21st Street was a wedding gift: Strong’s father paid for the four-story building, while Ruggles supplied its brownstone front and Ellen’s western bay window. Running water, fitted bathrooms, gaslight, and central heating made it a thoroughly modern home for its day. The story of the Strongs’ home and first housewarming belongs to the earlier neighborhood recalled in the profile of 50 Gramercy Park North.
No. 121 belonged to merchant Alexander M. Lawrence, a President of the Trustees of Gramercy Park. Garmey describes the rear ballroom added for Lawrence’s collection of 171 Old Master paintings and a dining solarium, spaces that gave White an unusually generous setting for his own alterations.
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.
The collecting began long before these rooms were complete. After marrying Bessie Springs Smith in February 1884, White spent a six-month European honeymoon acquiring Renaissance tapestries, paintings, oriental rugs, and antique furniture. Klein’s account of his Gramercy interiors adds gilded lions, tiger-skin rugs, painted Baroque wooden ceilings, and black-and-gold Spanish-tiled doorways. The red marble columns rose ten feet on either side of the first-floor entrance hall; skylights, new windows, and glass-walled alcoves opened up the old townhouse.
White was just as particular about how people would occupy those rooms. Instead of lining the walls with furniture in the usual Victorian manner, he brought sofas and armchairs into the middle of the living space. Paintings stood on easels or leaned casually against walls, with chairs positioned to give each picture its best view.
White leased and redesigned the larger corner house in 1898–1900. Garmey follows a 150-foot parlor vista from a drawing room hung in red Genoese velvet through the dining room to the music room. Live trout swam in a marble fountain with a Silenus figure, while Robert Winthrop Chanler’s silver giraffes appeared in the music-room decoration.
The entrance hall extended across the house’s width and displayed a sixteenth-century Loire tapestry with a falconry scene against a mille-fleurs, or flower-filled, ground. Garmey records 436 tiles in the lobby and a skylit picture gallery at the top of the house. A fire in 1905 damaged the elaborate interior before White’s death the following year.
Following White’s murder at Madison Square Garden in June 1906, crowds descended on his Gramercy corner house in April 1907 for a three-day estate auction that realized more than $125,000. Police had to manage the crush at the door as William Randolph Hearst bid on painted ceilings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a sixteenth-century Venetian chest, and the incoming tenant—the Princeton Club of New York—purchased chandeliers and furnishings to keep in the rooms.
During the Princeton Club’s tenure at 121 East 21st Street, tragedy struck the sidewalk outside: in January 1911, muckraking novelist David Graham Phillips, who lived across the Park at the National Arts Club, was fatally shot outside the clubhouse doors as he picked up his mail. In 1918 the house became an officers’ club and later served wartime service organizations and the YWCA, which sold the corner property in 1924.
A closer lookIngersoll’s house and memorialAn orator’s home, and the memorial that followed
Immediately west of White’s house, at 117 East 21st Street, stood the longtime Gramercy residence of nineteenth-century freethinker Courtlandt Palmer—founder of the Nineteenth Century Club, who hosted Walt Whitman in its parlor—and of the celebrated orator Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, known as the Great Agnostic. Ingersoll spent his final years at No. 117, receiving visitors from around the country in his front parlor beside the Park.
When the house came down in 1924, the New York Times remembered a man who preferred to sit in his easy chair and wait for the world to come to him.
The new hotel commemorated Ingersoll with a bronze tablet unveiled in November 1925. A library dedicated to him opened on an upper floor. The inscription honored his courage: “He knew no fear except the fear of doing wrong.”
The address soon acquired an irony Ingersoll might have enjoyed. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church moved into the hotel, and church committees later met above the plaque honoring the man who had spent his career challenging organized religion.
The original tablet was damaged and replaced in 1988. The replacement eventually left the hotel and entered the collection of the Robert G. Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York.
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.
Its furnishings came from W. & J. Sloane, its linens from B. Altman, and its silver from Gorham. Not everything was new: Garmey records three black-marble fireplaces from Alexander Lawrence’s house reused in three hotel suites, small pieces of the earlier residence carried into the sixteen-story building.
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 nineteenth-century houses and across Lexington Avenue from the cooperative apartment house at One Lexington Avenue. Crucially, because the hotel rose on three Park-front lots established under Samuel B. Ruggles’s 1831 trust deed, the property carried privileges to Gramercy Park itself—making the Gramercy Park Hotel the only hotel in New York whose residents and guests could step across the street into the private square.
The hotel grows
In 1929–1930, the hotel expanded westward along East 21st Street. Following a late-1928 land agreement with the neighboring Russell Sage Foundation that preserved a shared interior courtyard for daylight and air, architects Thompson & Churchill designed the towering brick annex—connected to the 1925 hotel by a six-story link—that extended the hotel’s frontage along the Park. Seventy-five years later, that annex would begin an independent life as the cooperative residences at 50 Gramercy Park North.
Before the hotel, in the records
- The 1907 sale catalogue of Stanford White’s house · Crocker’s photographs
- The American Architect, March 30, 1907 · eight plates of the house
- The Times, May 17, 1924 · the site is assembled
- “Famous Ingersoll House Torn Down,” December 14, 1924
- Time, November 23, 1925 · the tablet is unveiled
- LPC on apartment hotels (Barbizon report)
Rooms, residents, and everyday life
An address to live in
The Gramercy was a permanent home almost from its first winter. In January 1926, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, John Gardner Murray, and his wife took a suite in the building—conveniently located two blocks south of the church’s national headquarters at Church Missions House on Fourth Avenue—and his successor, Bishop James DeWolf Perry, later chose the very same apartment.
A wedding in the suite
On May 20, 1926, a twenty-six-year-old Humphrey Bogart married Broadway star Helen Menken in her fourth-floor suite overlooking the Park. Because Menken’s parents were deaf, she asked the Rev. John Kent of St. Ann’s Church for the Deaf to conduct the ceremony in sign language as well as spoken words. Bogart had carried their marriage license in his pocket for four years before they finally used it; though the marriage lasted only eighteen months, the suite wedding gave the newly opened hotel its first burst of theatrical headlines.
Residents and regular guests
From its earliest seasons, the hotel drew an extraordinary cross-section of American life. In 1927, Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy housed their burgeoning family on the second floor for several months before moving to Riverdale, sending ten-year-old John F. Kennedy and his siblings across the street to play inside Gramercy Park. Around the same time, a young James Cagney and his wife, Frances Vernon, lived in the hotel while working on the Broadway stage, and Yankees slugger Babe Ruth became a familiar presence in the bar and dining room.
In the 1930s, Viennese psychologist Alfred Adler made a suite his American home and held Friday-evening seminars there, attended by a young Abraham Maslow. Psychoanalyst Otto Rank penned letters on hotel stationery, and playwright Susan Glaspell stayed while her Pulitzer Prize–winning drama Alison’s House was in rehearsal. During the winter of 1943–1944, critics Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy lived in a hotel apartment with their young son, Reuel, treating the residential hotel as an effortless winter home.
Other lives intersected here briefly or behind the scenes. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer breakfasted in the dining room with writer Fulton Oursler in 1949, the same year future novelist Eugenia Price made a large front room her home. And before he became the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history, a teenage Floyd Patterson worked at the Gramercy helping the hotel’s interior decorator.
The everyday hotel
Behind the famous names was an everyday neighborhood hotel of permanent residents, visiting families, and familiar staff. Its public rooms offered places to read, dine, or spend an evening without leaving the block, and surviving holiday menus—like the May 8, 1955 Mother’s Day dinner offering everything from seafood cocktail and roast prime ribs to strawberry shortcake—preserve a quieter tradition of Sunday family dinners beside the Park.
A closer lookA hotel for meetingsThe organizations that gathered here
The hotel’s meeting rooms gathered an unusually broad slice of New York. Psychoanalysts, religious broadcasters, magazine editors, and Bell Laboratories staff all met here. A summer theater company performed in connection with the rooftop café in 1937.
Even the Duodecimal Society of America, devoted to counting in twelves, held its annual meetings at the Gramercy. Long before the art fair occupied the guest rooms, the hotel was accustomed to people arriving with ideas to exchange.
The Weissberg hotel
Charles W. Schwefel, a former Bing & Bing purchasing agent, managed the hotel for New York Life during the 1940s and bought it in 1949. In April 1958, hotelier Herbert R. Weissberg acquired the property, beginning the forty-five-year family stewardship that defined its best-known decades. Apart from a brief hiatus after the family’s wider hotel corporation entered reorganization in 1967, the Weissbergs guided the Gramercy from the mid-1970s into the twenty-first century as an old-world refuge for writers, eccentric regulars, and touring musicians.
Musician and bandleader Paul Shaffer, who lived in a two-room suite with a kitchenette for eleven years, fondly remembered the musty carpets, worn upholstery, European visitors, and elderly widows who had lived on the upper floors for decades, tended by bellmen like Pinky, who worked the doors for fifty-one years starting in 1945. Herbert’s grandson Max Weissberg recalled the red-glass candles, the mirrors behind the bar, and his grandfather’s reserved corner seat—describing the hotel’s faded grandeur as “halfway between Casablanca and the Titanic.” On any given afternoon in the late 1970s, a neighbor passing through could spot gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson stretched out on a floral suite sofa with a cigarette holder and a bottle of beer, as photographer Lynn Goldsmith captured in 1977.
A writer’s room
“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, December 1972
Humorist S. J. Perelman moved into the Gramercy in December 1972 and lived here for the rest of his life. After returning from London, he relished being halfway between Greenwich Village and Midtown, with The Players, the Mercantile Library, and his favorite chophouses within walking distance, and a window view of Gramercy Park’s trees that reminded him of a London square.
His familiarity with Gramercy reached back nearly half a century. In 1927, his close Brown University friend and future brother-in-law Nathanael West became night manager of the Kenmore Hall Hotel at 145 East 23rd Street. Perelman and fellow Brown alumnus Quentin Reynolds dropped in for lunch, a swim in the hotel pool, and late-night literary talk. When Dashiell Hammett was evicted, West and Reynolds sheltered him under a fictitious registration name so he could finish The Maltese Falcon.
Another novel had its beginnings in that circle. In 1929, Perelman took West to dinner with a Brooklyn Eagle advice columnist. The readers’ letters they discussed supplied the inspiration for West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, published in 1933.
Writer Prudence Crowther recalled his modest rooms equipped with a kitchenette, a hot plate, a counter oven, and a rubber fried egg brought back from Japan. Hotel life continually supplied him with comic material: one morning, Perelman walked into his sitting room in his shorts to find a newly arrived couple with suitcases insisting the suite was theirs. When the front desk suggested the couple had accidentally grabbed the wrong key, Perelman dryly pointed out that the key rack sat six feet behind the reception counter. He lived at the hotel until his death there on October 17, 1979.
Management of the hotel finally passed out of the Weissberg family in late 2002. Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen purchased the property the following year, closing the doors for a top-to-bottom reconstruction in the winter of 2004–2005. When the old furnishings were liquidated in the lobby in January 2005, Gramercy neighbors lined up to carry pieces of the familiar rooms home—though several members of the Weissberg family remained as residential tenants in the building until 2017, their story chronicled in Douglas Keeve’s 2008 documentary Hotel Gramercy Park and Max Weissberg’s history of the hotel.
The hotel at home, in the records
- The Gramercy Park Hotel: A New York Icon · Max Weissberg, 2026
- “Inside the Gramercy,” Rolling Stone · Max Weissberg
- “Knowing S. J. Perelman,” The New York Review of Books, 1987
- The New York American on the Bogart–Menken wedding, 1926
- New York City Guide, 1939
- Mother’s Day dinner, 1955
- Hotel Gramercy Park, Tribeca Film Festival 2008
The musicians’ hotel, on screen and off
By the mid-1970s, the Gramercy had become a musicians’ address. Touring bands joined the permanent residents, and the bar became a place where an evening could continue after the clubs closed.
The appeal was practical as well as atmospheric: affordable rooms, tolerant management, and a neighborhood close to Max’s Kansas City, Irving Plaza, and the Palladium. In Max Weissberg’s account, his grandfather gave guests considerable freedom as long as the bill was paid.
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.
Dylan, October 1975
In October 1975, Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue used the Gramercy as its New York headquarters before setting out across New England. While rehearsals took place downtown, the musicians lived and gathered at the hotel—so informally that singer Ronee Blakley recalled telephoning the front desk, asking for Dylan, and having him pick up the house phone himself. On the eve of departure, Rolling Stone found Dylan holding court in the hotel bar, explaining the tour’s name through the sound of thunder rolling across the sky before the tour buses pulled away from East 21st Street.
Blondie, 1978
In May 1978, Martyn Goddard photographed Debbie Harry on the rooftop and in the hotel’s cocktail bar. Harry and Chris Stein were staying here; Goddard’s own room was paid for by their record company. He recalled a barman describing the Gramercy as a place for bands on their way up—and on their way down.
That summer, Blondie prepared to record their breakthrough album Parallel Lines. Producer Mike Chapman never forgot his first meeting with the band in Harry and Stein’s cluttered Gramercy suite: Stein answered the door holding a switchblade, warming up only after the two bonded over vintage guitars—an unnerving start to a collaboration that produced “Heart of Glass.”
The Clash and U2, 1981
The Clash made the Gramercy their base during the celebrated 1981 run at Bond’s International Casino. Singer Joe Ely, who shared the bill, remembered the hotel as one of the places musicians gathered after the shows.
Joe Strummer returned to its roof for Bob Gruen’s camera in 1989. Like the photographs of Debbie Harry, those images made the hotel’s upper floors part of the city’s rock iconography.
Bono remembered U2 staying when the Clash were there. Lou Reed lived at the hotel in the mid-1970s. For Paul Shaffer, spotting a band at the desk or in the bar was part of an ordinary week.
A closer lookThe old hotel on screenThe Gramercy in film and documentary
Before Mean Streets went before the cameras, Martin Scorsese worked with his actors in a two-room suite at the Gramercy. Rehearsals in 1972 helped turn improvised exchanges into the film’s dialogue.
In 1977 Terry Southern lived in Room 320 while developing a screenplay of William Burroughs’s Junky for Dennis Hopper. Southern, Burroughs, and Hopper met here to discuss a film that was never made.
The hotel later appeared in Almost Famous, The Devil’s Own, and Addicted to Love. Its rooms and public spaces offered filmmakers an already recognizable New York atmosphere.
Douglas Keeve’s Hotel Gramercy Park, premiered at Tribeca in 2008, made the building itself the subject. It followed the Weissberg family through the transfer to Ian Schrager and the remaking of the hotel around the residents who remained.
A closer lookOn the page and in songLiterary and musical appearances
The Gramercy also entered fiction and song: John Barth’s The Tidewater Tales, Amy Ephron’s One Sunday Morning, and Richard Hell’s Go Now all use the hotel as a setting. Charly García and Pedro Aznar recorded a song named for it in New York in 1985.
Musician Stephen Duffy wrote movingly of returning to the hotel on September 10, 2001, choosing it out of affection. After the attacks the next morning, his scheduled performance at the Fez became a benefit for firefighters.
Music & film in the records
- Dylan and the Revue: Rolling Stone, 1975
- Bowie’s 1973 and 1974 stays, day by day
- Debbie Harry on the roof · 1978 · in the cocktail bar · 1978
- Mike Chapman meets Blondie
- Joe Ely remembers the Clash in New York
- Joe Strummer on the roof · 1989 · Bob Gruen
- Stephen Duffy, “Blues Fell This Morning” · 2001
- Hotel Gramercy Park · 2008
An art fair in the bedrooms, then an art-filled hotel
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.
2003–2006: a different kind of hotel
Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen bought the hotel in 2003. After an extensive renovation, it reopened in August 2006 with a new identity and the old name above the door.
The transformation reached far beyond fresh upholstery. While the 1930 western annex was split off to become twenty-three cooperative apartments at 50 Gramercy Park North, the 1925 hotel’s warren of smaller rooms was reconfigured into 185 generously scaled guestrooms and suites, accompanied by a rebuilt lobby, new bars and restaurants, and a landscaped roof garden.
Schrager invited painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, working with HS2 Architecture, to reimagine the public rooms and suites with the tactile warmth of an artist’s palazzo. Stepping beneath a rebuilt bronze entrance canopy modeled on the 1925 original, guests entered a lobby floored in black-and-white checkerboard tile and a hand-tufted crimson carpet monogrammed “GPH,” anchored by a sixteen-foot Renaissance limestone fireplace, cypress ceiling panels, velvet draperies, and custom Venetian chandeliers.
A closer lookNext door: John Pawson and 50 Gramercy Park NorthThe transformation of the former annex
Next door, John Pawson transformed the former annex into 50 Gramercy Park North. His design combined the older brick building with a new glass-and-bronze addition.
The two projects offered strikingly different interiors beside the same Park: Schnabel’s richly furnished hotel and Pawson’s restrained residential spaces.
Art, the Rose Bar, and a new musical life
Art from Aby Rosen’s collection filled the hotel: works by Warhol, Twombly, Basquiat, Hirst, and others appeared in its public rooms. The collection rotated, and the Rose Bar’s menu identified the works on its walls.
Music returned in a new form through Nur Khan’s Rose Bar Sessions. Intimate, invitation-only performances brought artists into a room hung with major paintings. Rufus Wainwright performed in March 2010; that September, Liza Minnelli sang from Confessions for about a hundred guests.
The hotel’s musical life had moved from chance encounters at the bar to deliberately staged evenings. The room also helped introduce Schrager to a new collaborator: a 2006 visit by Marriott’s Arne Sorenson became part of the story behind their EDITION partnership.
A closer lookThe partnership endsSchrager’s departure in 2010
Schrager sold his interest in December 2010, describing his departure as bittersweet. Rosen’s RFR took full ownership. The interiors and public rooms created during their partnership remained central to the hotel’s identity.
The art fair and the rebuild, in the records
- Tess Thackara, The Art Newspaper, March 6, 2019, on twenty-five years of the Armory Show · founders and participants remember the first fair
- The Armory Show’s own history, 2014
- Jack Hanley’s recollection of the first Gramercy fair, Artsy, 2013
- Ossian Ward on Tracey Emin, Art in America, 2011
- frieze, issue 23, 1995, on the Gramercy International and other fairs
- Jonathan Napack, The Art Newspaper, May 1997
- The Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts archives, Bard College
- HS2 Architecture · GACE · Architectural Metal Fabricators · John Pawson
- Tim Girvin’s 2006 visit
- Ian Schrager’s statement, December 2010
Around the table at the Gramercy
The roof
By the spring of 1926, guests were dining in a roof garden above Gramercy Park. Over the decades the roof hosted wedding parties, supper crowds, theatergoers, and societies gathering for annual dinners.
In the 1930s it became the Skyline Café. The hotel advertised green-and-white jungle wallpaper, waiters in green jackets, and supper served until one in the morning. A summer theater company performed in connection with the café and bar.
Later generations found other uses for the space, including major Go tournaments in the 1980s. The room’s appeal endured through changing fashions: a gathering place high above the city.
Schrager’s 2006 roof club added ivy-covered trellises, a retractable roof, and a ceiling of glowing bulbs. Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group reworked it as Gramercy Terrace in 2012, bringing breakfast, lunch, and weekend brunch back to the rooftop.
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 with a red carpet, red curtains, and glossy dark surfaces, as Chef Yuji Wakiya interpreted Chinese cooking through a Japanese sensibility. In 2009, the ground-floor space welcomed a new culinary chapter.
Maialino
In November 2009, restaurateur Danny Meyer opened Maialino on the ground floor, bringing the warmth of a Roman neighborhood trattoria to the corner of Gramercy Park North. Meyer had initially declined Schrager’s invitation, but when he agreed, his Union Square Hospitality Group also took over the hotel’s wider food-and-beverage operations.
Designed by the Rockwell Group with wainscoting reclaimed from a New Jersey barn and blue-and-white checked table skirts, Maialino—named for Chef Nick Anderer’s signature roast suckling pig—quickly became a beloved neighborhood gathering place, where Gramercy neighbors started their mornings in the sunlit front room overlooking the Park and gathered in the dining room for family celebrations.
The roof, the bar, and the table, in the records
- The Times, May 11, 1926 · the first known roof-garden dinner
- The Billboard, July 24, 1937 · the Skyline Roof Cafe and Roof Bar
- The Instructor, June 1938 · “brunch” in the Sky Café
- American Go Journal, 1984 and 1986 · tournaments on the roof
- The Architect’s Newspaper, November 2006 · the Private Roof Club and Garden
- Danyelle Freeman on Wakiya, 2007
- Gothamist on Maialino, November 2009 · on the terrace, May 2012
- Mother’s Day dinner, 1955
The doors close
March 2020: the hotel closes
The Gramercy Park Hotel closed in March 2020 as the pandemic reached New York. Maialino closed with it.
September 2022: the contents are sold
In September 2022, people lined up around the block for a sale of the hotel’s furnishings. Lamps, chairs, robes, and pieces of the familiar rooms left through the lobby. The auctioneer told WABC that this hotel felt different from others he had handled: people were emotionally attached to it.
Former employees came back. A couple who had met at the Rose Bar chose pillows. The major artworks were not part of the sale, but everyday objects carried their own associations. As in 2005, pieces of the Gramercy went home with people who wanted to keep something of it.
The closing years, in the records
The next era
A return to 2 Lexington Avenue
In August 2023, MCR Hotels acquired a 99-year lease on the Gramercy Park Hotel. After three years of closed doors, the agreement brought a plan to reopen the hotel under new operators.
MCR and MORSE Development describe an extensive renovation of the guestrooms and the spaces where so much of the hotel’s life took place: the lobby, the restaurants and bars, and the rooftop overlooking Gramercy Park. Their published plans call for the return of a 197-room hotel.
The next era, in the records
Residents of Note
The People of Gramercy- Alfred AdlerViennese psychologist; lived and taught in his suite in the 1930s
- Humphrey BogartActor; married Helen Menken in her hotel suite, May 1926
- David BowieMusician; stayed here during his 1973–1974 New York visits
- James CagneyActor; lived here with his wife Frances Vernon in the 1920s
- Susan GlaspellPulitzer Prize–winning playwright; stayed here in 1930–1931
- Robert G. IngersollOrator; lived in an earlier house on the site (117 East 21st Street)
- John F. KennedyFuture U.S. president; lived on the second floor with his family in 1927
- Mary McCarthyWriter and critic; lived here with Edmund Wilson in 1943–1944
- Helen MenkenBroadway actress; resident who married Humphrey Bogart in her suite
- John Gardner MurrayPresiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church; moved into a suite in 1926
- Floyd PattersonFuture heavyweight boxing champion; worked here as a teenager
- S. J. PerelmanHumorist and New Yorker writer; lived here from 1972 until his death in 1979
- Lou ReedMusician and songwriter; lived at the hotel in the mid-1970s
- Babe RuthBaseball legend; frequent regular in the hotel bar and dining room
- Terry SouthernScreenwriter and novelist; lived in Room 320 in 1977
- Herbert WeissbergHotelier; purchased the hotel in 1958
- Stanford WhiteArchitect; lived at 119 and 121 East 21st Street on the site, 1892–1906
- Edmund WilsonLiterary critic and essayist; lived here with Mary McCarthy in 1943–1944
Building at a glance
One hotel. Many lives.
2 Lexington Avenue · Established 1925
The building record
- Address
- 2 Lexington Avenue, at Gramercy Park North
- Opened
- September 1925 Original suppliers included W. & J. Sloane for furnishings, B. Altman for linens, and Gorham for silver.
- Original architect
- Robert T. Lyons
- Developers
- Bing & Bing
- Westward expansion
- 1929–30 · Thompson & Churchill
- 2006 reinvention
- Interiors by Julian Schnabel, with HS2 Architecture
Over time
Greek Revival rowhouses stand at Nos. 117, 119, and 121 East 21st Street, with accounts dating No. 117 as early as the 1830s.
Stanford White rents No. 119 from May 1892 and in 1898 agrees to rent No. 121, the larger house next door.
The contents of White’s house are sold on the premises. The Princeton Club takes the house.
An officers’ club, then war-service and YWCA tenants, use the house. The YWCA is the seller in 1924.
Alexander M. Bing assembles the corner site. In December, No. 117, where Robert G. Ingersoll lived in his last years, is torn down.
The hotel opens as 52 Gramercy Park North. Bing & Bing are the developers and Robert T. Lyons the architect.
A bronze tablet to Robert G. Ingersoll is unveiled on the new building.
Humphrey Bogart and Helen Menken are married in her suite.
Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy house their young family, including ten-year-old John F. Kennedy, on the second floor of the hotel.
Thompson & Churchill build the westward annex, now 50 Gramercy Park North.
The roof becomes the Skyline Cafe, which opened on May 23.
New York Life holds the hotel, with Charles W. Schwefel as managing agent. In September 1949 he buys it.
Herbert R. Weissberg contracts to buy the hotel.
The H. R. Weissberg Corporation offers shares in a group of hotels that includes the Gramercy Park.
The Weissberg corporation files for bankruptcy protection in 1967. The 1970 Red Book lists another operator. The family is back by the mid-1970s.
S. J. Perelman takes his rooms. He lives at the hotel until his death there on October 17, 1979.
David Bowie checks in for just over two weeks of rehearsals and the Radio City shows.
Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue is quartered at the hotel.
Martyn Goddard photographs Debbie Harry on the roof and in the cocktail bar.
The Clash stay during their residency at Bond’s International Casino.
The Gramercy International Contemporary Art Exhibition fills the guest rooms. In 1999 the fair moves to the 69th Regiment Armory as the Armory Show.
Operations pass from the Weissberg family to Steven Greenberg under a sublease.
Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen buy the hotel.
The old hotel’s fixtures are sold off in the lobby.
The rebuilt hotel reopens with interiors by Julian Schnabel. Beside it, John Pawson remakes the former annex as 50 Gramercy Park North (2004–07).
Maialino opens for dinner.
Ian Schrager announces the sale of his interests.
Union Square Hospitality Group revamps the roof terrace as Gramercy Terrace.
The hotel closes as the pandemic reaches New York.
The hotel’s contents are sold to the public in the lobby.
MCR acquires a 99-year lease. MCR and MORSE Development announce plans to renovate and reopen the hotel.
A century of reinvention
Explore the turning points
Sources cited
- The site before the hotel.Tom Miller’s history of the Stanford White house; Paul R. Baker’s Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White; the American Art Association’s 1907 auction catalogue; the Times’s 1924 apartment-hotel announcement and its Sunday feature, “Famous Ingersoll House Torn Down”; and Time’s report of the Ingersoll tablet.
- The building and its owners.The Times on the assembly of the site, May 17, 1924; the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s Barbizon report on apartment hotels; the Russell Sage Foundation’s official history.
- The hotel as a place to live.Prudence Crowther’s “Knowing S. J. Perelman”; Max Weissberg’s The Gramercy Park Hotel: A New York Icon (The History Press, 2026) and his account in Rolling Stone; Paul Shaffer’s We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives; the New York City Guide of 1939; and Douglas Keeve’s documentary Hotel Gramercy Park.
- Music, photographs, and memory.Martyn Goddard’s cocktail-bar photograph and rooftop portrait of Debbie Harry; the Mike Chapman and Blondie interviews; Rolling Stone on the Rolling Thunder Revue; Bowie’s stays of 1973 and 1974; and Stephen Duffy’s September 2001 recollection.
- The art fair.The Armory Show’s history and The Art Newspaper’s interviews with participants document the fair’s beginnings in the hotel; Jack Hanley’s recollection in Artsy; and the frieze survey of 1995. The fair’s own files are in the Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts archives at Bard College.
- The architecture of reinvention.Project records from HS2 Architecture, John Pawson, GACE, and Architectural Metal Fabricators; Architectural Record’s plan of December 2006; and Tim Girvin’s 2006 visit. Ian Schrager’s statement on leaving the hotel is dated December 2010.
- Restaurants and public rooms.Contemporary accounts of Wakiya, Maialino’s opening, and the 2012 terrace; Danny Meyer’s 2026 interview in Surface; and the Mother’s Day dinner of 1955.
- The closing years.
- The next era.
- Cooper-Hewitt Museum and New-York Historical Society photographic archives, as cited in Garmey for the earlier houses and Stanford White’s interiors.
- Charles C. Baldwin, Stanford White (1931), as cited in Garmey; White’s residence and the dispersal of its contents.
- Stephen Garmey, Gramercy Park (1984), pp. 7, 105, 114–126, 131, 172, 179. The Jones, Ingersoll, and Lawrence houses; White’s rooms; the hotel’s furnishings and reused fireplaces; and its literary residents.
- Carole Klein · 1987.Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), pages 18–36: “A New Family in the Park,” on George Templeton and Ellen Ruggles Strong’s neighboring house at 74, later 113 East 21st Street. Also pages 116, 144–146, 293, documenting Stanford White’s Gramercy Park North residence and its later replacement by the Gramercy Park Hotel. Also pages 268–281, on S. J. Perelman, Nathanael West, and the earlier literary circle at the Kenmore Hall Hotel.
For additional photographs of the earlier hotel and its later interiors, see Max Weissberg’s historical image collection, HS2 Architecture’s project gallery and John Pawson’s 50 Gramercy Park North gallery.
Photo credits for this page
- Gramercy Park Hotel overlooking the Park. Photograph by Gilbert McCarragher, via John Pawson.
- Looking north across Gramercy Park toward Lexington Avenue, with the Gramercy Park Hotel at left and One Lexington Avenue at right. Courtesy of Max Weissberg, The Gramercy Park Hotel: A New York Icon.
- Stanford White’s residence at 121 East 21st Street (corner of Lexington Avenue), exterior view, c. 1905. Museum of the City of New York.
- Rooms inside Stanford White’s residence: main hall (MNY210280), picture gallery (MNY210282), and dining room (MNY210287), 1907. Museum of the City of New York.
- The block before the hotel, 1903. Atlas of the Borough of Manhattan, Sanborn Map Company; The New York Public Library, Map Division.
- Elevated view of the Gramercy Park Hotel and Gramercy Park, late 1920s. The New York Public Library, Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy (Image 720039F).
- Hotel Gramercy Park vintage color postcard. Gramercy Park Block Association historical archive.
- Hotel entrance and view into Gramercy Park. Drawing by Helen Louise Woerner, from Gramercy Park’s Illustrated Bulletin (1933–1939); The New York Public Library.
- Cover and neighborhood map (“52 Gramercy Park North”), Gramercy Park’s Illustrated Bulletin, Spring 1938. The New York Public Library, Irma and Paul Milstein Division.
- The 1925 Gramercy Park Hotel and its 1930 annex, seen across Gramercy Park. Photograph by Ewing Galloway, c. 1932; The New York Public Library, Irma and Paul Milstein Division.
- Friends’ Seminary school bus outside the hotel, from Gramercy Park’s Illustrated Bulletin (1933–1939). The New York Public Library, Irma and Paul Milstein Division.
- Helen Menken and Humphrey Bogart, May 1926. Historical press photograph, via Max Weissberg collection.
- Mother’s Day dinner menu, May 8, 1955. Hotel Gramercy Park historical menu archive.
- Herbert Weissberg holding his grandson Max in the hotel hallway. Courtesy of Max Weissberg, The Gramercy Park Hotel: A New York Icon.
- Earlier hotel lobby and reception desk, sitting room, Le Parc canopy, and vintage Park view. Courtesy of Max Weissberg, The Gramercy Park Hotel: A New York Icon.
- David Bowie during his 1973–1974 New York stays. Courtesy of Max Weissberg collection.
- A visitor among artworks in a guest room (1994) and Mark Dion’s lemonade stand (1996) at the Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair. Colin de Land Collection, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
- Rachel Harrison installation at the Gramercy fair, mid-1990s. Courtesy of Kenny Schachter.
- Fourth annual Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair announcement, May 2–5, 1997. Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery archive.
- Reimagined hotel lobby, bar interiors, and guest room (2006). Courtesy of HS2 Architecture and Gramercy Park Hotel archive.
- Eighteenth-floor bar, June 26, 1941. Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
- Skyline Café advertisement. Courtesy of Max Weissberg, The Gramercy Park Hotel: A New York Icon.
- Gramercy Terrace rooftop, 2012. Photograph by Sam Horine / Gothamist.
- Thanksgiving dinner menu, November 24, 1955. Baratta Menu Collection, Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library.
- Wakiya and Maialino dining rooms. Photographs via New York magazine.
- Inside the hotel during the September 2022 liquidation sale. Photograph by Mary Reinholz / The Village Sun.