Sage House

Choosing a corner on New York’s “Philanthropy Row”

For its first nine months, the Foundation worked out of two borrowed rooms in de Forest’s law offices at 30 Broad Street before squeezing into the United Charities Building at Fourth Avenue and East 22nd Street in 1908. Erected in 1893 by philanthropist John Stewart Kennedy on the corner where Calvary Church’s wooden sanctuary had stood in the 1840s, the United Charities Building—together with the adjacent 1905 Kennedy Building at 105 East 22nd Street and the Episcopal Church Missions House across Fourth Avenue—had made East 22nd Street the national capital of organized philanthropy. By early 1912, however, the Foundation’s staff of more than a hundred was scattered across three separate buildings between Union Square, Madison Square, and Fourth Avenue.

On February 12, 1912, de Forest wrote Mrs. Sage that the ideal site—“from the point of view of adjacency to other charitable work, central point, and quiet”—was the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 22nd Street, one block east of the United Charities Building and one block north of Gramercy Park. Within weeks, the Foundation acquired three nineteenth-century rowhouses at the southwest corner (Nos. 6 and 8 Lexington Avenue and 128 East 22nd Street), adding No. 4 Lexington Avenue in May to secure a footprint of 65 feet on the avenue by 95 feet on the street. Immediately to the south, the rest of the Lexington Avenue blockfront down to Gramercy Park belonged to the Princeton Club, then housed in architect Stanford White’s former residence until the Gramercy Park Hotel replaced it in 1924–1925.

1928–1931 · A bargain with the hotel next door

Even with the tenth-floor addition, the charities clustered around the Foundation were outgrowing their quarters. Relief came late in 1928 through a neighborly pact across the center of the block. The owners of the Gramercy Park Hotel, looking to build a westward annex at what is now 50 Gramercy Park North, proposed acquiring a sixty-foot-wide plot running all the way through the block from East 21st to East 22nd Street: the hotel would take the southern half facing Gramercy Park, and the Foundation would buy the northern half at 122–126 East 22nd Street.

To ensure that neither building choked off the other’s daylight, both parties agreed to a permanent light-and-air covenant restricting construction height along their shared boundary court and requiring pale brick on the courtyard walls. Early in 1929, before the stock-market crash, the trustees commissioned Atterbury and his associate John Almy Tompkins II to design a fifteen-story “West Wing” annex at 122 East 22nd Street. Linked to the 1913 building by a five-story hyphen that honored the light covenant, the $750,000 annex carried Atterbury’s rusticated Kingwood stone and arcaded crown westward along 22nd Street, more than doubling the complex’s floor area when tenants—led by the New York School of Social Work (later the Columbia University School of Social Work) on the lower six floors and the Welfare Council of New York City on the top five—moved in during June 1931.

Even the carvings needed a committee

When the headquarters opened in 1913, the stone shields and panels above the ground-floor arches were left as blank blocks while the trustees debated how best to symbolize the Foundation’s evolving work in stone. Beginning in 1921, Atterbury collaborated with architectural sculptor René Paul Chambellan—an early commission for the master modeler who later sculpted the bronze doors and flagpole bases at Rockefeller Center and the Art Deco reliefs of the Chanin Building—to carve the program in stages between 1922 and 1926.

Over the main East 22nd Street archway, Chambellan carved a sweeping allegorical relief uniting Study, Service, and Counsel above the words “FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF SOCIAL AND LIVING CONDITIONS,” flanked by reclining figures looking down toward the street. Around the second-story frieze, eight sculpted shields spell out the pillars of progressive reform: Health, Work, Play, and Housing along East 22nd Street, and Education, Civics, Religion, and Justice along Lexington Avenue. Giving “Play” equal standing beside Justice and Work reflected one of the Foundation’s signature campaigns: its national leadership in the urban playground and recreation movement.

From Catholic Charities to residential cooperative

By the late 1940s, the Russell Sage Foundation’s operating model had shifted. Under president Donald Young and trustee E. Whitney Debevoise, the Foundation phased out its subsidies to outside social-welfare agencies to focus on academic social-science research, and after the Columbia-affiliated New York School of Social Work departed for Andrew Carnegie’s mansion on East 91st Street in 1949, a vast complex built for a hundred staff members and dozens of tenant organizations was no longer needed.

In 1949, the Foundation sold the building and its annex to the Archdiocese of New York, which made 122–130 East 22nd Street the headquarters of Catholic Charities from 1950 until 1973, when archdiocesan offices consolidated at the new Catholic Center on First Avenue. For nearly a quarter-century under the Archdiocese, the halls continued the exact work of social service carved over the East 22nd Street doorway.

The rediscovered vaulted lobby

Following a 1974 sale to residential developers, architect Henry George Greene converted the 1913 headquarters and 1931 West Wing into 163 apartments in 1975—predominantly studios and one-bedroom homes, together with setback rooftop additions. Initially marketed as Gramercy Towers and owned since the 1980s by the Gramercy Towers Owners Corporation, the cooperative soon reclaimed the name Sage House in honor of its founder.