The People of Gramercy
Ludwig Bemelmans
Paris on the Ceiling, Gramercy Outside the Window
By Timothy Cohen
Inside No. 20’s painted rooms, a tavern booth on Irving Place, and the 1945 Gramercy lease battle that inspired a classic New York book.
At Ludwig Bemelmans’s Gramercy Park apartment, Paris was on the ceiling.
Cut off from Europe during the Second World War and plagued by chronic insomnia, the writer and painter pasted a large street map of Paris directly above his bed at 20 Gramercy Park South. When sleep refused to come, he switched on a flashlight and traced the beam along the quays and bridges of the Seine—taking midnight walks through occupied Paris until morning broke over the trees of Gramercy Park.
To the wider world, Bemelmans (1898–1962) is the creator of Madeline, the smallest and bravest of twelve schoolgirls walking in two straight lines beneath the eyes of Miss Clavel. Yet for this Austrian-born bohemian who spent his life longing for Old World squares, Gramercy Park was the closest thing Manhattan offered to a European place: an enclave of quiet hotels and historic clubs that anchored his New York life for more than two decades.
Twelve little girls in a booth on Irving Place
Sent to New York from the Austrian Tyrol at sixteen after a fiery run-in with his uncle’s headwaiter, Bemelmans learned to read human nature from the dining room up. As a young busboy and waiter at the Ritz-Carlton, he broke porcelain, wore mismatched shoes, and sketched pompous millionaires on the backs of order pads—the gilded backstage comedy he later turned into his bestselling “Hotel Splendide” stories. When Viking editor May Massee visited his downtown studio and saw the bright Tyrolean mountains he had painted across his rolled-down window shades to blot out a grim brick wall, she knew immediately that he belonged in children’s books.
It was two blocks south of the Park that his signature heroine stepped onto the page. In 1938, after a summer bicycle collision in France landed him in a provincial hospital near a little girl proudly showing off her appendectomy scar, Bemelmans sat down in a wooden booth at Pete’s Tavern at East 18th Street and Irving Place. Turning over a menu, he wrote:
In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
Borrowing the name of his wife, Madeleine (“Mimi”)—and dropping the first “e” so Madeline would rhyme cleanly with vines and lines—he published the book in 1939, giving the world its most fearless Parisian schoolgirl from a tavern booth just off Gramercy Park.
A painted fifth floor at No. 20—and a clash with Benjamin Sonnenberg
Around Gramercy Park, the Bemelmans household—Ludwig, his wife Mimi, their daughter Barbara, and their poodle Toots—treated every apartment as an extension of his canvas. Around 1940 they lived at the Hotel Irving (26 Gramercy Park South), which Bemelmans affectionately disguised in a 1942 Vogue essay titled “Splendide Apartment,” describing the quiet residential hotel where a uniformed doorman walked young Barbara across the street to unlock the gates of the Park.
Moving to the top floor of 20 Gramercy Park South, on the southeast corner of Irving Place, Bemelmans had white paper pasted over the living-room walls and painted sweeping green chestnut leaves across them. In the dining room, he painted a frieze of donkeys wearing real straw hats pinned directly to the plaster. There he painted for hours with a bottle of champagne chilling beside his easel and pecked out manuscripts on his typewriter with two fingers.
That fifth-floor sanctuary ended in a collision between two unforgettable Gramercy figures. Next door at 19 Gramercy Park South lived the legendary publicist and collector Benjamin Sonnenberg. In 1945, at the height of New York’s wartime housing shortage, Sonnenberg bought both the No. 19 townhouse and the adjoining apartment house at No. 20 to unite them into his famous thirty-seven-room mansion—and declined to renew the Bemelmans family’s lease so he could convert their fifth-floor rooms into a private screening room for his guests.
Evicted from the square, Bemelmans took his revenge in print with his 1950 rhyming picture book Sunshine: A Story About the City of New York, which begins and ends at the iron gates of Gramercy Park.
On a square whose real house numbers stop at 61, Bemelmans tacked a single digit onto his old address at No. 20, setting his tale at “No. 203 Gramercy Park.” In place of Sonnenberg, he dreamed up a crotchety umbrella tycoon named Mr. Sunshine, who rents his upstairs floor to gentle music teacher Miss Moore—only to scheme for her eviction when her pint-sized pupils rattle his ceiling with the overture to William Tell. Outfoxed in court and buried under two thousand yellow auction umbrellas, the humbled landlord surrenders what Bemelmans never got in real life: a fifty-dollar-a-month lifetime lease on Gramercy Park, ending with landlord, tenant, and children gathered inside the snow-covered Park on Christmas Eve singing “O Holy Night.”
Edwin Booth beyond the lilies & a final studio behind No. 15
Even after leaving No. 20 and trading his paintbrush for eighteen months of luxury suite living uptown at The Carlyle—where he covered the walls of Bemelmans Bar with his beloved 1947 Central Park murals—he could never stay away from his old square for long.
Gramercy Park remained the view he loved best. Looking out his window across the winter fence, he painted one of his most tender New York canvases, Gramercy Park, Statue of Booth—framing Edmond T. Quinn’s bronze statue of Edwin Booth behind a pot of white lilies on his sill.
For his final New York home, he returned to the south side of the square, taking a studio in the National Arts Club’s Studio Building directly behind 15 Gramercy Park South. Even in his final months in the summer and autumn of 1962, he was still dashing off illustrated letters on stationery headed 15 Gramercy Park and correcting the proofs of his last book in his studio overlooking the neighborhood.
Shortly before his death, he sent his longtime Viking editor, Pat Covici, the five words he wanted carved as his epitaph: “Tell Them It Was Wonderful.”
Next time you look up at the mansard roof of 19–20 Gramercy Park South, glimpse Edwin Booth’s statue through the Park railings in front of the National Arts Club, or pass the bronze plaque outside Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place, remember the neighbor who looked out at Gramercy Park and saw Paris on the ceiling.
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Images: Walter Sanders, Ludwig Bemelmans and family in their Gramercy Park apartment, House & Garden, 1942 (Condé Nast Archive). Ludwig Bemelmans, cover illustration for Madeline (1939), interior spreads from Sunshine: A Story About the City of New York (1950), and mural detail at Bemelmans Bar, The Carlyle (1947), © Estate of Ludwig Bemelmans. Mural photograph: Ɱ / Wikimedia Commons, 2023, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo credits → · Historical sources →