Inside the clubs in 1976
A reporter visits the National Arts Club and The Players, finding award dinners, working researchers and plenty of stories behind their historic doors.
Columbia Daily Spectator
Read the storyFrom the Archives · 1894–1976
Gramercy in the Newspapers
A quiet square. A city full of stories.
Old newspaper clippings bring the neighborhood close: a house number carried to a new home, a business behind a familiar door, a runaway horse and an argument about the value of a garden.
Start here · September 24, 1905
A quiet eddy in a changing city
Charles de Kay watched private houses become clubs—and imagined a neighborhood that could change without losing its quiet.
Read the storyMore from the clippings
People, houses and everyday streets
The house number that went with them
When the YWCA school left Gramercy Park, a brass numeral carried the memory of its first home.
New-York Tribune
Read the storyA dressmaker crosses the threshold
Mrs. Sherwin had repaired the house, fitted it for her business and secured a five-year lease. Some neighbors wished she had never arrived.
The New York Times
Read the storyWhat does a private garden give the city?
An 1894 editorial asked whether the value of Gramercy Park stopped at its locked gates.
The World
Read the storyThe “ghosts” were people
Two newspapers told the same neighborhood disturbance very differently. Read together, they reveal the people behind a ghost story.
New-York Tribune and The New York Times
Read the storyA wolf in the city records
The headline sounded immediate. The story was about a search for a document roughly eighty years old.
The Sun
Read the storyA runaway on a birthday
A coal delivery, a passing automobile and a frightened horse brought several generations of city transport into collision.
New-York Tribune
Read the storyAn afternoon interrupted by a cat
Behind a sensational headline lies a glimpse of nurses, children, servants and police sharing the streets around the Park.
The World
Read the storyA dispute at the door
A brief police report opens a less comfortable view of Gramercy: requests for money, household complaints and severe punishment.
The New York Times
Read the storyEmily Dickinson’s niece at No. 34
A court report places writer Martha Dickinson Bianchi at the Gramercy apartment house—and opens a connection to a remarkable literary family.
The New York Times
Read the storyReading the old newspapers
Each story pairs a short introduction with its original clipping, a full or selected transcript and links into the neighborhood’s history. These are contemporary voices, with the opinions, incomplete information and assumptions of their time. Where accounts disagree, the differences remain visible.
The collection brings together thirteen distinct articles in eleven stories. Publication dates and page references follow the supplied clippings; editorial notes identify uncertainties and distinguish the original reports from later interpretation.
Sources & illustration credit
Newspaper clippings from the GPBA research collection: The World, The Sun, New-York Tribune, The New York Times and Columbia Daily Spectator, 1894–1976. Full citations accompany each story. The featured illustration appeared with Charles de Kay’s “Manhattan’s Quiet Eddy in Gramercy Park,” The New York Times, September 24, 1905, printed page 7. Restored illustration from the GPBA archive.