The Edwin Booth Statue

The pause before “To be, or not to be”

Quinn’s subject was an actor remembered through a part. At the unveiling, drama scholar Brander Matthews described the figure as “about to utter the soul-searching soliloquy on life and death.” The bowed head and hand at the chair suggest a moment of inward attention before speech.

In the account of Booth’s 1864–65 Hamlet quoted by Stephen Garmey, biographer Eleanor Ruggles evokes a more intimate stage image. Booth sits near the footlights, chin in hand, and begins the soliloquy almost in a whisper. Both descriptions convey the restraint for which audiences remembered him. The photograph below, made at J. Gurney & Son’s gallery around 1870, preserves another image of Booth beside a carved chair.

The tunic, cape, chain and dagger identify Hamlet in the bronze. The committee’s records describe a replica of Booth’s stage costume and copies of its accessories among the references assembled for the project. The front of Edwin S. Dodge’s circular pedestal bears the actor’s name and dates, facing south toward The Players.

EDWIN BOOTH
1833 – 1893

On the reverse, the dedication records that members of The Players erected the monument in 1918 in loving memory of their club’s founder. The two faces identify both the actor and the people who wished to keep his memory here.

Triumph, tragedy, and a final home at 16 Gramercy Park South

No role in the history of the American stage belonged more completely to one performer than Hamlet belonged to Edwin Thomas Booth (1833–1893). Born near Bel Air, Maryland, to the tempestuous English-born Shakespearean tragedian Junius Brutus Booth, young Edwin had accompanied his father on rough-and-tumble tours from Bowery playhouses to California gold-mining camps before claiming his own place as America’s preeminent classical actor—replacing the bellowing melodrama of an earlier era with psychological naturalism, poetic grace, and a voice contemporaries compared to a cello.

On November 26, 1864, the thirty-one-year-old Booth opened his landmark production of Hamlet at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, playing the Dane for an unprecedented one hundred consecutive nights through March 22, 1865. Twenty-three days after that hundredth-night triumph, on April 14, 1865, his younger brother John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre.

The blow nearly destroyed Edwin Booth. A staunch Unionist, Edwin supported Abraham Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 and expressed his loyalty in an October letter to his friend Colonel Adam Badeau on General Ulysses S. Grant’s staff. He had, by a remarkable twist of fate, personally saved the President’s eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, from death or grave injury on a crowded railroad platform in Jersey City before the assassination, seizing him by the coat collar as he fell into the open gap between a moving passenger car and the station platform. Stricken with grief and shame in April 1865, Edwin vowed never to act again. Yet financial necessity forced him back to the footlights nine months later: when he stepped onto the Winter Garden stage as Hamlet on January 3, 1866, a packed house rose and cheered for minutes.

Carole Klein places his Gramercy neighbors in the front rows that evening. They joined the audience in nine rounds of applause, and spectators brought flowers to the stage. Long before the memorial was proposed, people from the neighborhood had helped welcome Booth back to his profession.

Booth continued acting for another quarter century, giving what proved to be his final performance as Hamlet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 4, 1891. In 1888 he had bought the former Potter house at 16 Gramercy Park South from Virginia Potter and engaged Stanford White to adapt it for The Players. On New Year’s Eve he gave the house to the club, retaining his third-floor bedroom and sitting room. He died there in the early hours of June 7, 1893, aged fifty-nine. His daughter’s account places the great storm on the preceding afternoon, followed that night by the failure of the electric lights.

The fountain before the statue

The center of the Park had a different figure before Booth arrived. Garmey reproduces a photograph of the 1866 fountain, crowned by a water nymph, with water falling from the top and two lower tiers. When the Booth memorial was installed in 1918, the nymph was moved to the east side of the garden, where she stood above a smaller pool. The change gave the Park a new central figure while retaining an older ornament elsewhere among its paths. The history of these fountains continues in the Ruggles Fountain profile.

Booth’s reservations about statues

Booth himself had reservations about such honors. Writing to William Bispham from Denver on April 30, 1889, he hoped a proposed statue would eventually be reduced to a bust. “I do not think actors should be ‘statued’,” he wrote, favoring modest memorials in quiet corners. This was a conversation during his lifetime, years before the Gramercy Park project began. The letter gives a glimpse of the man his friends would later choose to commemorate. Read Booth’s letter.

Launt Thompson’s bust and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1906–1907)

The effort to place a memorial in Gramercy Park began thirteen years after Booth’s death. In March 1906, Booth’s close friend and biographer William Bispham wrote to the Trustees of Gramercy Park on behalf of The Players, asking permission to place a bronze replica of sculptor Launt Thompson’s 1864 bust of Booth as Hamlet on a stone pedestal just inside the southern Park fence opposite the clubhouse. At their meeting on May 8, 1906—communicated by letter on May 29—the Trustees granted permission on practical neighborhood terms: The Players would bear the entire expense and responsibility for the monument and agree to remove it upon reasonable notice.

The club soon began considering a larger memorial. John Drew chaired the general committee, while a seven-member Art Committee under painter Francis Davis Millet consulted Augustus Saint-Gaudens in July 1906. Saint-Gaudens offered to model a bronze Booth as Hamlet for $50,000. His proposal left the location broadly described as somewhere in New York City. The committee waited as his health declined, hoping he might recover, but he died in August 1907 before a contract was signed.

Frederick MacMonnies’s arch and the long negotiations (1909–1913)

In September 1909, following a personal fund-raising appeal to the club’s membership, the committee signed a contract with Paris-based American sculptor Frederick William MacMonnies (1863–1937), creator of the beloved Nathan Hale statue in City Hall Park. Although MacMonnies had offered to execute the monument for $20,000, the committee—convinced that a work of the first rank could not be produced for that figure—insisted on writing the contract for $25,000.

MacMonnies proposed the position that ultimately gave the memorial its place in the neighborhood. At the center of Gramercy Park, he argued, it could speak for the theatre as well as for Booth and his club. The design received in March 1910 showed Hamlet standing on a pedestal beneath an arch combining Roman and theatrical forms. Figures of Comedy and Tragedy supported the arch as caryatids. Some members admired the composition, others found it too elaborate, and some opposed an arch altogether.

The argument unfolded through meetings, letters and petitions. From Giverny, MacMonnies defended a theatrical setting for a costumed Hamlet with his comparison to “a statue of an admiral seated in a Morris chair.” Yet his position changed. Early in 1913 he offered to abandon the arch and the accessory figures and execute Booth on a simple pedestal. The committee’s February reply asked for a model without the arch but retaining Comedy and Tragedy.

MacMonnies sent his resignation on June 14. In July the committee tried to retain him, offering to consider a model with or without the arch or the figures. Edwina Booth Grossman also intervened, writing from Lucerne that August in praise of his design. The efforts failed. On September 23, 1913, the committee accepted his withdrawal. He returned its reference materials and the $4,000 already paid to him. Kyle later wondered whether closer contact with an artist working three thousand miles away might have changed the outcome.

An anonymous competition at the National Arts Club (1913–1914)

The next approach brought the sculptors into direct competition. At a meeting in the club library in September 1913, they divided four to four over whether a competition was desirable. Eight eventually submitted entries, after Gutzon Borglum withdrew. They were Robert I. Aitken, Paul Conkling, John Flanagan, James Earle Fraser, Edmond T. Quinn, J. Massey Rhind, John H. Roudebush and François M. L. Tonetti. Each entrant was allowed $150 toward a model, with a $25,000 commission offered to the winner. Names remained sealed in envelopes identified by the same mottos as the designs, and display positions were assigned by lot.

Even the rule requiring a three-foot figure needed discussion. A seated model measuring three feet from the floor to the top of its head could represent a much larger figure than a standing model of the same height. The competitors agreed to accept the different interpretations and have the discrepancy explained to the judges.

On October 2, 1914, twenty-one jurors gathered to judge the models in the National Arts Club’s gallery. They included Players officers, Gramercy Park Trustee Stuyvesant Fish and three outside sculptors selected by the competitors, Lorado Taft, Charles Henry Niehaus and Albert Jaegers.

The care taken over anonymity produced a revealing moment. John Drew, the club’s president, had already seen Roudebush’s model. The competitors unanimously agreed that he could remain on the jury. Drew nevertheless chose to abstain from the vote.

While the three outside sculptors favored J. Massey Rhind’s more ornate architectural composition, a majority of the full jury voted for the quiet, contemplative figure bearing the motto “HE WAS A MAN”—Hamlet’s tribute to his late father in Act I, Scene 2 (“He was a man, take him for all in all, / I shall not look upon his like again”). When the sealed envelope was opened, it revealed sculptor Edmond Thomas Quinn (1868–1929) and his collaborating architect, Edwin Sherrill Dodge (1874–1938). What won the vote of the actors on the jury—who already admired Quinn’s lifelike bronze bust of Edgar Allan Poe in The Players’ library—was the uncanny humanity of the portrait: the jurors who had acted alongside Booth felt they were looking at their friend. (Before returning to the studio, all eight competition models were exhibited to the public at the National Arts Club for a week, and fellow Player Francis Wilson later placed a bronze reduction of Quinn’s winning Hamlet on his library mantelpiece at 24 Gramercy Park South.)

Modeling from living memory with Edmond Quinn and Edwin Dodge

In his studio at 135 DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, Quinn developed the figure with the help of Players who remembered Booth. Much of the reference material had been assembled for MacMonnies. A replica was made of the Hamlet costume preserved at the clubhouse, photographs were copied, and duplicates of the chain, medallion and dagger were obtained. Howard Kyle put on the costume and posed for eighteen photographs, directed by MacMonnies and fellow Players. The project’s records preserve this unusual effort to recover one actor’s bearing through another actor’s body.

Both artists brought cosmopolitan training to the square. Born in Philadelphia, Edmond T. Quinn had studied painting and anatomy under Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before turning to sculpture in Paris under Jean-Antoine Injalbert; in addition to his Gramercy masterpiece, New Yorkers know his 1927 bust of composer Victor Herbert on the Mall in Central Park and his reliefs on the Battle of Princeton Monument. Architect Edwin S. Dodge—trained at Harvard, MIT, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before spending nearly a decade restoring the Renaissance Villa Curonia in Arcetri outside Florence with his then-wife, salonnière Mabel Dodge Luhan—designed the understated circular drum of polished Conway pink granite. As Quinn and Dodge wrote in their competition statement, the intimate scale of Gramercy Park demanded “simple dignity of treatment”: a pedestal symmetrical from every path inside the garden, yet tall enough to lift the bronze figure into clear view for passersby outside the iron fence. Cast in bronze in 1917 by the Gorham Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island, the statue was ready—save for its stone and a world at war.

A flawed New Hampshire stone and a wartime freight embargo

The committee first planned to dedicate the memorial on April 23, 1917, the Shakespeare birthday observed at The Players as Ladies’ Day. Then the granite for the pedestal reached New York from New Hampshire with a bad seam and proved unusable. An October ceremony was proposed, but wartime restrictions on nonessential freight caused another delay. A second April 23 passed while the stone remained unshipped.

At the end of May 1918, Quinn reported that an appeal to railroad officials had secured shipment of the stone. He thought the memorial could be erected in July. The committee preferred autumn, and some members wanted to store it until the war ended. Edwin Booth’s November 13 birthday was finally selected. The date was already set when the Armistice, signed two days before the unveiling, brought relief from the war’s uncertainty.

Twenty-four minutes at noon on November 13, 1918

At twelve o’clock noon on Wednesday, November 13, 1918—an hour chosen so Broadway performers could attend before their afternoon matinees—more than two hundred actors, playwrights, artists, neighbors, and members of the Booth family assembled around the canvas-draped monument at the center of Gramercy Park. As the New York Evening Post delightedly observed, noon was also the customary hour for neighborhood nursemaids and toddlers in the Park, who remained along the paths as part of the audience.

A male quartet conducted by C. L. Safford opened the ceremony with Thomas Arne’s setting of Shakespeare’s “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind” from As You Like It. The invocation was offered by the Reverend Dr. George Clarke Houghton, rector of the Church of the Transfiguration on East 29th Street—the actors’ cherished “Little Church Around the Corner,” where Booth’s funeral had been held in June 1893 and where The Players had dedicated John La Farge’s stained-glass memorial window to Booth in 1898. Committee secretary Howard Kyle then formally presented the monument free of debt.

The unveiling itself was carried out by three people bound to Booth by blood, friendship, and daily life at No. 16: Booth’s grandson, painter Edwin Booth Grossman, loosened the cord at the front of the pedestal; veteran actor and Players librarian Guy Nichols drew the canvas shrouding away; and clubhouse steward Walter Ottel, who had waited on Booth in his third-floor rooms a quarter century earlier, carried the cloth away.

The Players’ third president, Broadway star John Drew Jr., accepted the statue in the name of the club, recalling Booth as “our leader and our friend” and speaking of the Park trees the actor had loved to watch from his upper windows. Accepting the monument’s presence inside the garden on behalf of the Trustees of Gramercy Park, attorney and neighborhood historian John B. Pine (of 24 Gramercy Park South) welcomed “the distinguished guest you have brought us,” while Columbia University dramatic literature professor Brander Matthews linked the new Hamlet in Gramercy Park to John Quincy Adams Ward’s 1872 bronze of William Shakespeare on the Mall in Central Park. After the quartet sang Shakespeare’s “Who Is Sylvia?”, the twenty-four-minute ceremony concluded. Its brevity was deliberate. The committee had planned for an outdoor audience, mostly standing, in weather that might be cold.

“It is my father as I knew him”

Standing beside the pedestal with her son Edwin Booth Grossman and Booth’s two small great-grandchildren—Lois Fellows Grossman and Livingston Booth Waterbury—Edwin Booth’s only child, Edwina Booth Grossman (1861–1938), offered a deeply personal tribute: “Everything has been just right. The statue is wonderful. It is my father as I knew him. He seems to live again and the more I look at the figure the more deeply I am moved.”

As the crowd drifted back toward the southern gate on East 20th Street, poet and dramatist Percy MacKaye paused, looked back through the railings at the bronze figure framed against the autumn trees, and spoke the line that has belonged to the statue ever since:

“There he is, Edwin Booth taking his eternal curtain call!”

— Percy MacKaye, November 13, 1918 (recorded by Howard Kyle)

Founder’s Day wreaths and painters at the window

The Players had honored Booth’s November 13 birthday from the first autumn after his death: on November 13, 1893, the club filled Madison Square Garden Concert Hall for a memorial tribute led by club president Joseph Jefferson, featuring addresses and messages from Sir Henry Irving and Tommaso Salvini and opening with conductor Walter Damrosch leading Handel’s “Dead March” from Saul—the very music Booth had used in his production of Hamlet.

The memorial became the focus of the club’s November 13 Founder’s Day observance. In the candlelight procession, Players cross from the clubhouse into Gramercy Park and gather around the statue for a laurel wreath and a tribute to Booth. The club’s 2017 announcement described the return to No. 16 for dinner and a birthday celebration. The photographs here record the gathering in November 2023.

Founder’s Night commemorates Booth’s gift of the clubhouse on December 31, 1888. The November birthday observance brings that affection into the Park, where his portrait in bronze faces the home he gave away.

Seen through the iron pickets and across the seasons, the bronze Hamlet quickly became the visual signature of Gramercy Park for painters and illustrators. American Impressionist Johann Berthelsen (1883–1972)—a former concert baritone and longtime Player—painted Gramercy Park, Edwin Booth Statue, Looking from the Players Club, framing the monument from the clubhouse balcony. On February 11, 1950, The Saturday Evening Post carried John Falter’s winter cover painting of children playing in the snow around the Booth statue with One Lexington Avenue rising behind the bare branches. Nine years later, in December 1959, former 20 and 15 Gramercy Park South resident Ludwig Bemelmans exhibited his large oil painting Gramercy Park, Statue of Booth (39 × 31 inches) at the Museum of the City of New York—placing a pot of white lilies on his windowsill to frame Quinn’s bronze Hamlet across the winter fence.

The 2018 centenary conservation in the Park

Care for the memorial was part of the original gift. At the dedication, Howard Kyle recorded that The Players accepted the statue free of debt and assumed responsibility for its care and preservation. He also thanked the Trustees of Gramercy Park for their cooperation.

In August 2018, ahead of the centenary, the Block Association reported that the Trustees had begun restoration of the memorial with historic preservation specialist Gabriel Popian, funded by The Players Foundation for Theatre Education. That contemporary report records the project and the partners who undertook it.

Restoring Booth’s third-floor rooms across the street (2023–2024)

Across the street, The Players Foundation conserved Booth’s bedroom and sitting room during the summers of 2023 and 2024. Surviving wallpaper guided the recovery of historic patterns, original windows were repaired and fitted with protective UV glazing, and furniture, lighting and paintings were restored. A locked cabinet beside the fireplace yielded Booth’s death mask during the work.

The renewed rooms overlook the bronze portrait in the garden. The story of the apartment, its collections and arranged docent visits continues in the profile of The Players. The Foundation also publishes an illustrated account of the conservation.