Gramercy Park Block Association
History of Gramercy Park / Buildings & Monuments
Gramercy Stories

One Lexington Avenue

From the Atlantic cable to a pioneering cooperative

By Timothy Cohen

The columned entrance and limestone façade of One Lexington Avenue, with two trees in sidewalk tree pits.
The columned entrance and limestone façade of One Lexington Avenue.

Three lives of one corner

A plan to connect two continents took shape at a dining table here. Half a century later, the same corner held a mansion so lavish that, when its contents went to auction, even the painted ceilings found buyers.

Around 1852, Cyrus W. Field built his house beside a matching home for his brother David Dudley Field. Cyrus hosted the March 1854 meetings that launched the transatlantic telegraph cable; David helped reshape the law through his Field Code of civil procedure.

In 1899, financier and railroad publisher Henry William Poor bought both houses. Stanford White united them into a single showplace filled with rare books, paintings and Renaissance furnishings. Within a decade, Poor’s financial collapse sent the collections to auction and doomed the mansion itself.

The twelve-story cooperative that replaced it opened in September 1911. Architect Herbert Lucas offered the space of a private house above the Park, with an ambitious bargain: rents from some apartments would pay the building’s expenses. More than a century later, his building still stands at the foot of Lexington Avenue.

c. 1852–1899 · The Field houses

An ocean crossed, from a home on Gramercy Park

Two brothers, two ambitions

Cyrus Field had made his fortune in the paper trade. His corner house stood at 123 East 21st Street (then numbered 84 East 21st Street); David Dudley Field lived next door at No. 125 (then No. 86). The houses shared a double stoop, and the brothers were in daily contact. Their rooms “could be thrown into one,” the Tribune reported—an arrangement Stanford White would make permanent half a century later.

Garmey dates Cyrus’s purchase of original Lot 50 to 1851. The family’s presence extended farther along the row to No. 127, where David’s son Dudley Field lived. Cyrus engaged cabinetmaker and decorator Charles Baudouine to furnish his house, bringing professional direction to rooms that would become a meeting place for businessmen, inventors, and relatives.

The household’s possessions included seven paintings by Frederic Edwin Church and a 262-piece Minton china service. A greenhouse brought plants into the private house, while the second-floor library looked toward the Park. Garmey’s account of these rooms gives the cable enterprise a domestic setting: books and pictures, family connections, and an unusually ambitious household.

While Cyrus looked toward global commerce, David pursued legal reform. His Field Code of civil procedure, adopted in New York in 1848, simplified the rules for bringing lawsuits; other states adopted versions of it, and English reformers studied the experiment.

Detail of Daniel Huntington’s 1879 portrait of Cyrus W. Field.
Cyrus W. Field in 1879.

Compared with Peter Cooper’s spare house next door, Cyrus’s rooms were exuberant. Klein describes a decorator brought from France—reportedly a first for a private New York homeowner—and heavy Italian curtains, Greek statues, marble and frescoed ceilings that drew private mockery in George Templeton Strong’s diary. An English butler presided over the dining room, where the 262 pieces of blue-and-white Minton china were displayed on the walls. Klein also credits Mrs. Field with the city’s first private greenhouse.

Behind the house, a cow shared the stables with the horses and grazed in the still-rural neighborhood. Cyrus watched this pastoral scene over breakfast with his hat already on. Intent on leaving no hour unplanned, he wrote out the day’s tasks and tucked the list inside his hatband before setting off.

The passage between the brothers’ houses did not mean every relative was welcome. According to Klein, Cyrus’s wife barred his younger brother, the Rev. Henry Martyn Field, later of 22 Gramercy Park South, after he married Henrietta Desportes. The former Parisian governess had been caught up in the Choiseul-Praslin murder scandal of 1847; Mrs. Field’s description of her as “that murderess” expressed a family prejudice, not an established fact. Henrietta taught across the square at Miss Haines’s School at 10 Gramercy Park South. Klein pictures Mrs. Field turning her head away as Henrietta led thirteen bonneted pupils six times around the Park fence and up to Lexington Avenue.

Cyrus could also be a generous neighbor. The day after the December 1853 fire destroyed Harper & Brothers, he offered James Harper of 4 Gramercy Park West a $10,000 loan. Within months, his own dining table would become the meeting place for an enterprise whose setbacks would call on the same neighborhood loyalties.

Four evenings at Field’s dining table

The cable project began with a shorter connection. In 1854, telegraph entrepreneur Frederick Gisborne approached Cyrus about a line between Newfoundland and the North American mainland. Cyrus’s daughter, Isabella Field Judson, later described him studying a globe in his Gramercy Park library and wondering why the line could not continue across the ocean to Ireland. He wrote to Samuel Morse about the electrical questions and to Matthew Fontaine Maury about the ocean.

Cyrus invited Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts and Chandler White into his dining room. For four evenings, the five men examined Gisborne’s company records, studied maps and worked through estimates. On March 10, 1854, they signed an agreement to take over his undertaking.

Cooper had only a short walk to the meetings from his house at 9 Lexington Avenue, on the site of today’s No. 7. He and Field were neighbors as well as investors.

Field’s globe survives. Made by Newton & Son in 1852, it is now in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Dawn at David Dudley Field’s

The next founding meeting took place next door. On May 8, 1854, the associates gathered at David Dudley Field’s house at six in the morning. One of them had to leave town that day, so the business began before breakfast.

They formally organized the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company, chose Cooper as president and committed $1.5 million in capital. In his published account, Cyrus and David’s brother Henry M. Field describes the gathering in the first morning light. The plans discussed in Cyrus’s dining room had become a company in David’s house. Henry, who preserved the account, later made his own home on the Park at 22 Gramercy Park South.

Cyrus Field and the men behind the Atlantic cable gathered around a table, with a globe in the foreground.
Cyrus Field, standing at right, and Peter Cooper, seated at left, in Daniel Huntington’s 1895 painting The Atlantic Cable Projectors.

The cable reaches across the Atlantic

It took twelve years to turn the Gramercy Park plans into a lasting connection. Field raised money, negotiated with governments and brought together scientists, engineers and manufacturers. He crossed the Atlantic repeatedly, returning to the effort after each failure.

In August 1858, messages finally passed between Europe and North America. Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan exchanged congratulations; New York celebrated, and Tiffany sold souvenir sections of cable.

Strong watched the celebrations with a diarist’s skepticism. “Newspapers vie with each other in gas and grandiloquence,” he wrote in the entry quoted by Klein. The previous day’s Herald, he reported, had compared the cable—“or perhaps Cyrus W. Field, uncertain which”—to the Angel in the Book of Revelation, one foot on land, proclaiming that time would be no longer.

As the signal weakened, Strong found a quieter and more haunting comparison: “a slowly dying person whose breathing is scarcely perceptible, whose lips at times move faintly but form no intelligible words.” That autumn also brought the destruction of New York’s iron-and-glass Crystal Palace, which Klein describes as burning to the ground in fifteen minutes.

The press began calling Field a swindler, and former admirers turned their backs on him in the street. Klein recounts him breaking down in tears in Peter Cooper’s library next door. “We will go on,” Cooper told him. He helped raise fresh capital, giving his neighbor the support to return to the work.

Within weeks, the signal failed. Broken cables and renewed attempts followed for eight more years. In July 1866, the steamship Great Eastern finally established lasting transatlantic service. That September, the expedition recovered and completed the cable lost the previous year, providing a second connection. Messages could now cross between continents without waiting for a ship.

At the Chamber of Commerce banquet celebrating the eventual triumph, Cooper’s toast brought those years of persistence into a single sentence: “God rewards patient industry.”

The Fields celebrate fifty years

On December 2, 1890, Cyrus and Mary Bryan Stone Field celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in the house where they had lived for nearly forty years. A gathering planned for close relatives grew into a large reception. Cyrus’s brother, the Rev. Henry M. Field, conducted a renewal of their vows.

The celebration reached beyond the house, with greetings from both sides of the Atlantic. An American commemorative certificate, now at the Smithsonian, carries more than two hundred signatures. William Ewart Gladstone, Oscar Wilde and Constance Wilde were among the signers of the separate British tribute.

After the Fields

The following year brought a succession of losses. Mary died at Irvington in November 1891; days later, their son Edward’s brokerage collapse depleted Cyrus’s fortune. Their daughter Grace Field Lindley died at the Gramercy Park house in January 1892, and Cyrus died that July. David died in April 1894 at 22 Gramercy Park South, where he kept apartments after leaving the Park’s north side, in the house where his brother Henry also lived. By the end of the decade, both East 21st Street residences had become boarding houses, their grand rooms subdivided and much of their contents gone. In 1899, the two properties passed together to a new owner.

An 1866 color lithograph celebrating the Atlantic cable, with Cyrus Field above allegorical figures of Britain and America.
An allegorical print celebrates the Atlantic cable, with Cyrus Field above Britain and America, 1866.
1899–1910 · The Poor residence

Henry Poor’s house at One Lexington Avenue

A collector moves to the corner

Henry William Poor, a banker and publisher of Poor’s Manual of Railroads, bought both Field houses in April 1899 for a reported $200,000. His family’s business would give Standard & Poor’s its name. A collector of books, pictures and architectural objects, Poor initially planned to demolish the houses.

Instead, between 1899 and 1901, Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White joined the two brownstones and remade their interiors. He removed the Park-facing stoops and added the glass conservatory visible in photographs of the completed mansion. Moving the formal entrance around the corner to Lexington Avenue gave the combined house a new address: One Lexington Avenue.

Garmey records $137,844 for White’s work on the mansion, with another $22,344 spent adapting the stable at 134 East 22nd Street as a squash court and garage. The commission reached through the block as well as across the two former Field houses.

White made Poor’s home a setting for carved wood, marble, paintings, antique furniture, Italian Renaissance mantelpieces and tapestries. A grand staircase rose through the main hall. Renaissance ceilings and woodwork framed a library of rare books, fine bindings and illuminated manuscripts.

A Renaissance wellhead furnished the entrance hall, and a palm nook softened the parlor. In the Italian Renaissance drawing room, a ceiling of fifteen coffered panels overlooked a winter garden facing the Park, its columns made of Irish green marble.

The northeast breakfast room occupied space adapted from Mrs. Field’s greenhouse. Its most extraordinary furnishing was the roughly thirteen-foot-high marble ciborium from San Stefano at Fiano Romano: a twelfth-century altar canopy brought into a private dining room. The object’s later passage to the Metropolitan Museum is recorded in the Poor auction below.

White knew this setting well. He had created elaborate interiors for his own house across Lexington Avenue, on the site of the later Gramercy Park Hotel. Across the Park stood another of his projects, The Players at 16 Gramercy Park South.

An engraving of the Field residence at Lexington Avenue and Gramercy Park, showing its high stoop, brick walls, arched windows and iron fence.
The Field residence before Henry Poor’s remodeling. Undated engraving.
The joined Field houses in Henry Poor’s time, with a conservatory facing Gramercy Park and an entrance on Lexington Avenue.
Henry W. Poor’s residence, formed from the two Field houses. Photograph published in 1907.

A ballroom on the Park

At the Poors’ first large entertainment in December 1901, guests had the run of the glass conservatory and an indoor squash court. The following March, some 300 guests heard a sixty-piece orchestra conducted by Emil Paur before staying for supper and dancing.

In January 1904, the mansion’s red-and-gold drawing room hosted Edith Poor’s wedding reception.

Those rooms can still be seen in Stately Homes in America, published in 1903, whose seven interior views capture the conservatory, halls, dining room and drawing room at their height. Within just a few years, the house itself would be gone.

An auction inside One Lexington

The main hall of Henry Poor’s demolished residence, viewed from the second-story stairway in the 1909 auction catalogue.
Henry Poor’s main hall, viewed from the second-story stairway.

In the aftermath of the Panic of 1907, Poor’s finances began to unravel. The books were the first to leave: in November 1908, the Anderson Auction Company held the first of five sales of Poor’s library, including a 1482 Polychronicon printed by William Caxton. The following month, Poor’s banking firm, H. W. Poor & Co., officially failed.

The library sales continued through April 1909. After the last of them, the American Art Association auctioned the furnishings inside the house on April 21–24. Its illustrated sale catalogue photographed the rooms and identified what buyers could take away—not just their contents, but parts of the rooms themselves.

Even the ceilings were on the block: the catalogue described the main hall’s coffered ceiling as coming from an Umbrian palace, its painted panels filled with the gods of Olympus. In the drawing room, another ceiling told the story of Cupid and Psyche. Buyers could bid on each: the catalogue listed them as separate numbered auction lots.

Doorways, mantels and light fixtures were offered too, along with a pair of Italian wrought-iron entrance gates. Buyers had to pay for their removal and take responsibility for any damage or other risks involved in dismantling them.

What the auction scattered

The medieval marble altar canopy acquired by the Metropolitan Museum at the Poor sale.
The medieval marble ciborium sold from Henry Poor’s collection, now on view at The Met Fifth Avenue.

American Art News reported that the four-day sale brought $171,445. Mrs. Samuel Untermyer bought both painted ceilings, paying $2,000 for the main hall’s and $4,100 for the drawing room’s.

The Metropolitan Museum paid $7,100 for an Italian marble altar canopy, or ciborium, made around 1150 by Nicolaus Ranucius and his sons. Listed in the catalogue as the Tabernacle of San Stefano in Fiano, it is now on view at The Met Fifth Avenue.

Architect Charles A. Platt bought tables, a fountain, a marble bench and four marble columns. Room by room, the fittings White had assembled passed into other hands.

The house belonged to Poor’s wife, Constance Brandon Poor, who contributed her own property to help pay her husband’s debts. Its sale would bring White’s mansion to an end, within a decade of the remodeling.

1910 to today · The cooperative

One address, many households

One Lexington becomes a shared home

Herbert Lucas’s 1910 architectural drawing of the proposed One Lexington Avenue apartment house, viewed across Gramercy Park.
Herbert Lucas’s 1910 design for One Lexington Avenue.
One Lexington Avenue in 1915, showing its limestone base, brick façades and projecting cornice.
One Lexington Avenue in 1915, four years after the cooperative opened.

Where Poor had entertained hundreds of guests in one mansion, Herbert Lucas planned twenty-four apartments with the comforts of private houses. High ceilings, open wood-burning fireplaces and views into the Park trees would come with passenger and freight elevators and a shared roof garden. Most apartments would be duplexes—homes on two floors—with private stairs between the living rooms and bedrooms.

The project began in January 1910, when Charles Buek bought the house from Constance Poor to replace it with apartments. His first scheme called for forty-four apartments, a restaurant and a roof garden. Lucas reduced the number of apartments and brought experience from 24 Gramercy Park South, the cooperative he had completed down the block in 1909.

In May, the property passed to the Number One Lexington Avenue Co., which Lucas had organized with capital of $250,000. Buyers would own shares in the company that held the building and occupy apartments of their own. They could choose their decoration and, within limits, arrange their rooms before moving in. Other apartments would be rented, with the income intended to pay the building’s expenses.

The builder Edward Corning and the lawyer and civic reformer John Brooks Leavitt were among the future owners; Leavitt became the first board president. Other backers included Rodman Gilder, Juliet K. Lamont, Cornelia B. Earle and editor John S. Phillips. In June, the Edward Corning Company won the construction contract. Land and building together were expected to cost $600,000.

Before the new homes could rise, the builders had to contend with soft ground. At the lender’s insistence, crews excavated down to bedrock while incorporating part of an earlier house’s foundation beneath the Park-facing wall. In September 1911, owners and tenants began moving in.

The twelve-story building changed the scale of the Park’s north side. Three months after it opened, Henry Sleeper Harper bought the house beside his own at 131 East 21st Street. The Record and Guide noted the new cooperative and said Harper had made the purchase “in order to protect his residence.” The story of 45 Gramercy Park North follows that purchase and its unexpected sequel: Harper later hired Lucas to design his next home.

Immediately east of One Lexington, a much smaller house survived. The narrow building at 127 East 21st Street, also known as 48 Gramercy Park North, was home to Peter Cooper’s grandson Edward Ringwood Hewitt. Its few floors and iron verandas still meet the cooperative’s twelve-story wall, making the change in scale visible at a single lot line.

“This will be a house owned by a club.”

Real Estate Record and Guide · May 21, 1910

The rent would pay the maintenance

The rental income was meant to do more than offset a few bills: it was supposed to spare shareholder residents from paying maintenance altogether.

That promise proved too optimistic. From the start, buyers still faced annual assessments; while rents helped subsidize operations, they could not make living at One Lexington free of shared expense.

The architect’s oasis

In a 1917 essay, Lucas described Gramercy Park as an “oasis” in the city. Apartment houses had changed its skyline and brought more people, he wrote, yet the neighborhood retained its character. Cooperative ownership gave residents a say in their surroundings and a home arranged to suit them.

One Lexington Avenue at left, with 45 Gramercy Park North behind it and 36 Gramercy Park East across the Park’s trees, lawns and curving paths.
One Lexington Avenue at left, with No. 45 behind it and No. 36 across the garden.

Inside an early duplex

An early apartment-house album plate showing One Lexington’s exterior and the main and bedroom floors of Duplex Apartment B.
One Lexington’s exterior and the main and bedroom floors of Duplex Apartment B, published in 1910.

The plan of Duplex Apartment B shows how a household could spread across two floors.

The living room faces Gramercy Park, with two bedrooms directly above. The dining room adjoins the living room; kitchens, pantries and service spaces sit farther back. The private staircase connects the household’s two floors.

The advertisement beneath the plans promises light on three sides, roomy apartments and open fireplaces. A special kitchen ventilation system offered relief from cooking odors.

Rooms for maids and a separate service elevator show that the designers expected households with live-in domestic staff.

At home in early One Lexington

Early photographs of Donald F. Crane’s apartment show how residents furnished the generous rooms Lucas had planned: a curving stair rising from a tiled entrance hall, and a hallway lined with bookcases, patterned rugs, framed pictures and a hanging lantern.

A curving staircase beside a tiled entrance hall, with a desk and lamp, in Donald F. Crane’s apartment at One Lexington Avenue.
The staircase and entrance hall in Donald F. Crane’s apartment.
A duplex entrance hall at One Lexington Avenue, with a red-carpeted staircase, rugs and bookcases.
Entrance hall of a fifth- and sixth-floor duplex, shown in a 2024 listing.

A painter’s skylight and a writer’s papers

Impressionist painter Henry Salem Hubbell wanted a studio in his new home. Trained in Chicago and Paris, he had painted among the American artists at Giverny.

He asked Lucas for a skylight and a higher studio roof, and the board approved the skylight provided Hubbell paid for it.

Hubbell also arranged his two floors as separate apartments so he could rent one out. His later portrait subjects included Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.

Other layout changes are recorded as early as 1916: a duplex could be divided into two homes, while separate floors might later be rejoined as households’ needs shifted.

Another early resident, Carolyn Frevert, moved across the Park from the National Arts Club, where she had lived with her brother, novelist and journalist David Graham Phillips. In January 1911—while One Lexington was rising across the street—Phillips was fatally shot outside the Princeton Club on Lexington Avenue. At One Lexington, Frevert managed his literary estate and arranged the posthumous publication of his work, including Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise in 1917.

Editors and a publisher

Publishing was well represented at One Lexington. Founding shareholder John S. Phillips, a co-founder of McClure’s Magazine and later editor of The American Magazine, helped make investigative journalism a national force. He remained a resident into the 1920s.

Mark Sullivan, editor of Collier’s, lived here during the building’s first decade. Later residents included book publisher William Warder Norton—who co-founded W. W. Norton & Company with his wife, Mary Dows Herter Norton—and the Rev. William Pierson Merrill, longtime minister of Brick Presbyterian Church.

An editor’s daily walk

In the 1920s and into the 1930s, New York Times editor John Huston Finley and his wife, Martha Boyden Finley, made their home at One Lexington. A former president of City College and New York State commissioner of education, Finley walked through the Park each day—and once a year walked Manhattan’s entire thirty-two-mile perimeter. The East River esplanade named John Finley Walk commemorates him today.

A TIME profile of May 3, 1937, captures Finley’s affection for the square: on behalf of neighborhood parents, he presented the Park’s gardener, Hannan, with a bronze medal and $1,000.

A studio and a short walk

Painter and illustrator Albert Sterner moved his studio from the National Arts Club to One Lexington. In his 1927 biography, Ralph Flint found Sterner still here, attached to Gramercy Park and unwilling to exchange it for a European capital.

Architect Arnold W. Brunner kept a different neighborhood appointment: at five-thirty, a memorial recalls, he would appear at The Players, a short walk from his apartment.

Another resident architect, D. Everett Waid, later worked with Harvey Wiley Corbett on the Metropolitan Life North Building at 11 Madison Avenue, the massive structure north of the familiar clock tower. He also became president of the American Institute of Architects.

Laundry days and the question of awnings

Sharing a building meant sharing decisions about everyday life. A basement laundry timetable allotted days to each family, with a place for its ironing board.

Before air-conditioning, residents sought permission for window awnings. The board allowed them only on the north and east sides, keeping the Gramercy Park and Lexington Avenue fronts uncovered—though none appear to have been installed.

The entrance canopy won collective approval in December 1912. Kitchens had iceboxes before electric refrigerators became familiar, and the building was equipped for both gas and electricity.

One Lexington in a winter scene

John Falter’s February 1950 cover for The Saturday Evening Post places One Lexington at the upper center, its pale base and rows of windows rising behind the fence. Below are children crossing snowy paths, adults on benches and the statue of Edwin Booth at the center of the Park.

Bare branches reveal the building that summer foliage conceals, a backdrop to the neighborhood’s winter afternoon.

About John Falter
The February 11, 1950 Saturday Evening Post cover, with children playing in the snowy Park and One Lexington Avenue at upper center.
A winter afternoon in Gramercy Park, February 11, 1950.

The rental bargain wears thin

The original rental bargain grew harder to sustain. Empty rental apartments still needed upkeep, and rents did not reliably cover repairs and operating costs. Beginning in 1954, the cooperative gradually converted its corporation-owned rental apartments into shareholder-owned homes, reducing its dependence on rental income.

The apartments themselves continued to change. In 1977–78, Richard Meier redesigned an interior at One Lexington with suspended white beams, broad fascias, and translucent glass walls. Recorded by Garmey and in the USModernist project archive, the commission brought a distinct modernist vocabulary inside Lucas’s early cooperative.

After the brownstones’ forty-seven years and the mansion’s brief splendor, this third life reached its 115th anniversary in 2026.

At street level · One Lexington Avenue

What remains on this corner of Gramercy Park

At the corner today, columns and arched windows rise from deeply jointed limestone blocks. Above this base, red brick extends to a projecting cornice, and ornamental iron balconies mark the duplex floors within. The early apartment-house album shows the long Lexington Avenue front and the shorter Gramercy Park side together. Across the garden, trees partly screen the building behind the statue of Edwin Booth.

Buek’s first announcement had promised buff brick and Indiana limestone; the red brick chosen for the upper floors gives the corner its warmer color.

The ornamental iron fence along the sidewalk is older than the apartment house itself. Designed by Stanford White for Poor’s 1899–1901 mansion, it was retained by Herbert Lucas, who echoed the mansion’s entrance in his own limestone base. Restored during façade conservation work in 2023, White’s ironwork remains a physical link to the mansion that first gave this corner the address One Lexington Avenue.

One Lexington Avenue seen across Gramercy Park in autumn, with the Edwin Booth statue and garden in the foreground.
One Lexington Avenue seen across Gramercy Park, with the Edwin Booth statue in the foreground.

A tablet on the corner

On June 20, 1929, the Gramercy Park Association, joined by members of the Field family, unveiled a bronze tablet on the corner of the 1911 apartment house. The surviving inscription begins its account of the site with “Here for forty years was his home” and commemorates the planning of the first transatlantic cable. Set into Herbert Lucas’s limestone base, it returns the passerby to the dining room where Field and his associates met in March 1854 to begin the undertaking.

The Cyrus W. Field commemorative tablet on One Lexington Avenue, photographed in 1929.
The Cyrus W. Field tablet on One Lexington Avenue in 1929.

Residents of Note

The People of Gramercy
  • Arnold W. BrunnerBeaux-Arts architect and city planner (1857–1925); designed public buildings, synagogues, and civic plans, lived at One Lexington Avenue, and walked across the square each afternoon at five-thirty to The Players
  • Cyrus W. FieldResident of an earlier house on the site (1819–1892); paper merchant and financier who lived at 123 East 21st Street (then No. 84) for forty years and hosted the March 1854 dining-room meetings that launched the transatlantic telegraph cable
  • David Dudley FieldResident of an earlier house on the site (1805–1894); legal reformer and principal author of New York’s 1848 Field Code of civil procedure who lived next door at 125 East 21st Street (then No. 86) and hosted the May 8, 1854 dawn meeting organizing the telegraph company
  • John Huston FinleyEducator and editor-in-chief of The New York Times (1863–1940); former president of City College and New York State commissioner of education who lived at One Lexington Avenue in the 1920s and 1930s, walked daily through the Park, and circled Manhattan’s thirty-two-mile perimeter once a year
  • Carolyn FrevertFounding apartment owner (1865–1932); moved across the square from the National Arts Club after the January 1911 murder of her brother, novelist and journalist David Graham Phillips, and managed his literary estate and posthumous publications from her home at One Lexington Avenue
  • Henry Salem HubbellAmerican Impressionist and portrait painter (1870–1949); trained in Chicago and Paris and painted at Giverny, commissioned a custom skylight for his studio at One Lexington Avenue, and later painted portraits of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • John Brooks LeavittFounding owner and first board president (1849–1930); prominent New York lawyer, legal author, and civic reformer who helped organize the Number One Lexington Avenue Co. in 1910
  • William Pierson MerrillPresbyterian clergyman, author, and hymn writer (1867–1954); served as senior minister of Brick Presbyterian Church from 1911 to 1938 and made his home at One Lexington Avenue
  • William Warder NortonBook publisher (1891–1945); lived at One Lexington Avenue and co-founded W. W. Norton & Company in 1923 with his wife, translator and musicologist Mary Dows Herter Norton
  • John S. PhillipsFounding shareholder and resident into the 1920s (1861–1949); co-founder of McClure’s Magazine and editor of The American Magazine who helped make investigative journalism a national force
  • Henry William PoorOwner and resident of the earlier mansion on the site (1844–1915); Wall Street banker, bibliophile, and publisher of Poor’s Manual of Railroads who bought both Field houses in 1899 and commissioned Stanford White to unite them into One Lexington Avenue
  • Albert SternerKept his studio here; London-born American painter, portraitist, and illustrator (1863–1946) who moved his workspace across the square from the National Arts Club to One Lexington Avenue
  • Mark SullivanJournalist, political commentator, and historian (1874–1952); editor of Collier’s and author of the six-volume Our Times who lived at One Lexington Avenue during the cooperative’s first decade
  • D. Everett WaidResident architect (1864–1939); served as president of the American Institute of Architects and collaborated with Harvey Wiley Corbett on the Metropolitan Life North Building at 11 Madison Avenue
Building at a glance

The building record

Address
One Lexington Avenue · 123–125 East 21st Street
Earlier 84–86 East 21st Street · Northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and Gramercy Park North.
Built
1910–11
Completed September 1911, according to the centennial history.
Architect
Herbert Lucas
Architect and organizer of the cooperative company.
Earlier houses on site
Cyrus W. & David Dudley Field Houses · c. 1852 Garmey dates Cyrus Field’s purchase of original Lot 50 to 1851; the adjoining Field properties occupied original Lots 49–50.
Remodeled and united by Stanford White for Henry W. Poor, 1899–1901.
The original idea
Cooperative living
Private-house scale and individualized rooms within a shared apartment building.
The builder
Edward Corning Company
General contract reported in June 1910; new-building plan 697 of 1910.
The founding corporation
Number One Lexington Avenue Co.
Organized by Herbert Lucas in 1910; the original plan called for twenty-four apartments.
The city record
Manhattan · Block 877, Lot 22
Also recorded as 123–125 East 21st Street. The apartment house has twelve stories.
Historic districts
City and National Register boundaries differ
Outside the LPC’s Gramercy Park Historic District and its 1988 extension; within the larger National Register district, listed in 1980.
The commemorative tablet
Cyrus W. Field · 1929
Unveiled on June 20 by the Gramercy Park Association.

The boundary across the street

One Lexington stands on the Park’s north side, at the foot of Lexington Avenue, just outside the city’s Gramercy Park Historic District, designated in 1966. Its neighbors at 48 Gramercy Park North, 45 Gramercy Park North and 44 Gramercy Park North are also outside the boundary. The 1988 district extension did not include this block.

The larger Gramercy Park district listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 does include One Lexington. The federal listing and the city’s landmark designation cover different areas.

Over time

c. 1852

Two brothers, neighboring houses

Cyrus Field builds his Gramercy Park home; David Dudley Field lives in the matching house next door.

March & May 1854

A project takes shape at home

Four evenings in Cyrus Field’s dining room lead to the March 10 agreement; a 6:00 a.m. meeting at David Dudley Field’s house on May 8 formally organizes the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company.

July 1866

Across the Atlantic

After the brief 1858 signal and years of setbacks, the Great Eastern establishes permanent transatlantic telegraph service. The lost 1865 cable is recovered and completed that September.

December 1890

The Fields celebrate fifty years

Mary and Cyrus Field renew their vows in their Gramercy Park home, where the cable meetings had taken place, and receive greetings from both sides of the Atlantic.

1899–1901

Poor’s chapter begins

Poor buys the Field houses in April 1899. Stanford White’s remodeling joins them into a residence entered from Lexington Avenue.

1909

The house’s contents are dispersed

The April furnishings sale realizes $171,445. Two painted ceilings go to Mrs. Samuel Untermyer; a medieval marble altar canopy goes to the Metropolitan Museum.

September 1911

An apartment house replaces the mansion

Following Poor’s financial collapse in 1908 and the corner’s sale to Buek in January 1910, Lucas organizes the cooperative company. Edward Corning Company builds the twelve-story apartment house, completed in September 1911.

1917

The architect looks back

Herbert Lucas describes Gramercy Park as an “oasis” and makes the case for cooperative living.

1923

The Finleys at One Lexington

John Huston Finley and his wife, Martha Boyden Finley, live at One Lexington.

1929

A tablet remembers Cyrus Field

On June 20, a bronze tablet is unveiled at the corner where Field’s home had stood.

1954

The rental model changes

The cooperative begins gradually converting its rental apartments into shareholder-owned homes.

2011

Residents preserve a century of history

A centennial booklet assembles the stories of the site, its architecture and its households.

2023

Care for the building and its ironwork

Façade and roof conservation includes repairs and stabilization of Stanford White’s iron fence.

Sources cited

The 2011 centennial history supplies the detailed account of the building’s early households, board decisions and later changes. Contemporary publications document its cooperative origins and architectural plans; museum and library collections document the earlier houses and the cable enterprise.

Photo credits for this page
  • Daniel Huntington, The Atlantic Cable Projectors, 1895, oil on canvas. New York State Museum, Albany. Image via the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
  • One Lexington Avenue entrance. Photographer unidentified.
  • Historic elevated view of One Lexington Avenue and Gramercy Park. Photographer and date unidentified.
  • Field residence engraving and opposite view of Henry Poor’s music room: reproduced in Eugene E. Weise, M.D., A Tour of Historic Gramercy Park, Gramercy Park Block Association, May 7, 2006, PDF pages 27 and 35.
  • John Falter, Gramercy Park, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, February 11, 1950. Museum of the City of New York, Dorothy Dignam Collection on Gramercy Park, PRO2014.3, folder 1.
  • Staircase and entrance hall in Donald F. Crane’s apartment. Museum of the City of New York, image MN123716.
  • Daniel Huntington, Cyrus W. Field, 1879. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Cyrus W. Field, 1892, 92.10.41. Museum record; public domain.
  • Kimmel & Forster, The Eighth Wonder of the World—The Atlantic Cable, 1866; Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-04508. No known restrictions on publication.
  • Henry W. Poor’s residence, Old Buildings of New York City, 1907; Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive; public domain.
  • Henry Poor’s main hall. American Art Association, 1909 sale catalogue; Frick Art Reference Library, 31072002473702_00109; public domain.
  • One Lexington Avenue, exterior and duplex plans. The World’s apartment-house album, 1910. The New York Public Library, Irma and Paul Milstein Division, image 417176; public domain.
  • Herbert Lucas’s design for One Lexington Avenue, published in Record and Guide, May 21, 1910, p. 1085. Columbia University Libraries; public domain.
  • Ciborium, ca. 1150, Nicolaus Ranucius and his sons Johannes and Guittone. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1909, 09.92.3; Met Open Access, public domain.
  • One Lexington Avenue seen across Gramercy Park, November 17, 2009. Eden, Janine and Jim, via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY 2.0.
  • Henry Poor’s residence, 1899–1901. Museum of the City of New York, McKim, Mead & White Collection, 90.44.1.911 (MNY210268). Museum catalog record.
  • One Lexington Avenue, 1915. Underhill. Photograph.
  • Entrance hall of a fifth- and sixth-floor duplex, published July 29, 2024. Tim Waltman of Evan Joseph for Douglas Elliman; Curbed / New York.
  • Cyrus W. Field tablet at One Lexington Avenue, 1929. Wurts Bros.; Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.1.3669 (MNY237228). Museum catalog record.