Gramercy Stories
One Lexington Avenue
Three lives of one Gramercy Park corner
By Timothy Cohen
A $1.5 million commitment before breakfast—and a vanished Stanford White mansion whose ceilings went to auction.
Dear Neighbors,
At six in the morning on May 8, 1854, Cyrus Field, Peter Cooper, and their fellow investors gathered at the home of Cyrus’s brother, David Dudley Field—one of two adjoining Field houses on today’s One Lexington Avenue site. One investor had to leave town that day, so they met as the early sun came through the windows and organized their telegraph company before breakfast.
They subscribed $1.5 million to lay a telegraph cable across the floor of the Atlantic, carrying messages directly between continents. Cooper, who lived a short walk away at 9 Lexington Avenue, became the company's president.
The idea had taken shape next door that March. Studying a globe in his library (the globe survives today at the Smithsonian), Cyrus wondered whether a telegraph line could continue beneath the ocean to Ireland, and for four evenings he had the investors around his dining table poring over maps and estimates. Turning that idea into reality would take twelve years.
In August 1858, messages finally passed between Europe and North America. Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan exchanged congratulations. New York celebrated; Tiffany sold souvenir pieces of cable. Within weeks, the signal failed.
Field went back to raising money and organizing fresh attempts, crossing the Atlantic repeatedly. Cables broke; another was lost at sea. In July 1866, the Great Eastern finally laid a lasting connection. That September the expedition also recovered and completed the cable lost the year before. Continents that had communicated at the speed of a steamship were now linked in minutes.
The bronze tablet on today’s building remembers Field’s achievement. Yet it gives little hint of the extraordinary mansion that stood here next—or how quickly it vanished.
Stanford White’s vanished mansion
After nearly half a century in the Field family, both brownstones were purchased in 1899 by banker and railroad publisher Henry William Poor. Abandoning his initial plan to demolish them, Poor hired Stanford White to fuse the two houses into a single showplace—moving the entrance around the corner and creating the One Lexington Avenue address.
The old East 21st Street stoops gave way to a glass conservatory facing the Park. Renaissance ceilings framed Poor’s rare books, and a grand staircase rose through the main hall. In March 1902, about 300 guests heard a sixty-piece orchestra conducted by Emil Paur, then stayed for supper and dancing.
After the Panic of 1907, Poor’s world began to come apart. His books went to auction in November 1908; his banking firm failed the next month. By April 1909, buyers were bidding inside the house on the fittings White had assembled. Even the ceilings were for sale. The illustrated auction catalogue offered the main hall’s gods of Olympus and the drawing room’s story of Cupid and Psyche as separate lots, with winning bidders required to dismantle and haul away parts of the house itself.
Though the mansion was held in the name of Poor's wife, Constance, she surrendered the property to help satisfy his creditors. Sold in 1910, White's showplace was demolished less than a decade after its completion. Only its ornamental iron fence survived—and still stands outside the building that replaced it.
The third life of the corner
In September 1911, Herbert Lucas’s twelve-story brick and limestone cooperative opened on the site. Most of its twenty-four apartments were duplexes, with living rooms below and bedrooms above. Open fireplaces and views into the Park’s trees gave the apartments the comforts of a private house. Buyers could help shape their rooms before moving in.
The financial pitch was just as appealing: buyers held shares in the company that owned the building, while unpurchased apartments were rented out to cover running costs and leave owners without maintenance charges. In practice, the math fell short. Rental income helped, but the first owners still had to contribute—and beginning in 1954, strained by vacancies and repair bills, the cooperative gradually converted its corporation-owned rentals into apartments for resident shareholders.
Early residents took full advantage of the building's flexibility. Impressionist painter Henry Salem Hubbell—who later painted Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt—won board approval to add a studio skylight at his own expense and arranged separate apartments on his two floors so he could rent one out. From its earliest years, the cooperative drew prominent figures in arts and letters, including New York Times editor John Huston Finley and book publisher William Warder Norton.
After the brownstones' half-century and the mansion's brief splendor, this third life has now lasted 115 years.
Next time you pass the northeast corner of East 21st Street and Lexington Avenue, pause at the 1929 bronze tablet commemorating Cyrus Field, notice Stanford White’s surviving iron fence along the sidewalk, and step back to take in Herbert Lucas’s columned limestone entrance—all three lives of one of Gramercy Park’s most storied corners.
Explore the story of One Lexington Avenue →
More photographs, original plans and the people behind this corner in our newly expanded building profile.
Stories like this one come from the Block Association’s own research in archives, libraries and building records. Every gift, of any size, helps us keep uncovering Gramercy’s history and caring for the neighborhood we call home—and every donor receives our 2027 wall calendar of Gramercy Park photographs as our thanks.
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Images: One Lexington Avenue entrance: Timothy Cohen / Gramercy Park Block Association. Daniel Huntington, The Atlantic Cable Projectors, 1895, New York State Museum, Albany (via Smithsonian American Art Museum). Henry Poor residence: McKim, Mead & White Collection, Museum of the City of New York (90.44.1.911). One Lexington Avenue archival exterior: apartment-house album, The New York Public Library Digital Collections (image 417176). Photo credits → · Historical sources →