The People of Gramercy · No. 1
The Wicked Witch Upstairs
Margaret Hamilton at 34 Gramercy Park East
By Timothy Cohen
My brother and I were terrified of the ninth floor. Then we met her.
Dear Neighbors,
Earlier in the week we wrote about 34 Gramercy Park East, the building where I was born and raised. Up on its ninth floor—the building’s top, “attic” floor—lived Margaret Hamilton, the actress who immortalized the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Annual television broadcasts of the 1939 classic had made her green face and cackling laugh a rite of passage for a new generation of children. To a child’s imagination, actress and character were one and the same: the Wicked Witch lived right upstairs, and I wanted nothing to do with the ninth floor. My big brother, Nicholas, was no help at all—he was every bit as terrified as I was.
Halloween week feels like the right time to launch The People of Gramercy, our new series about the remarkable people who have called this neighborhood home, and to finally take you up to the ninth floor.
Behind the broomstick
Long before she terrified moviegoers, Hamilton was a kindergarten teacher in Cleveland, and she never stopped thinking like one. That made her most famous casting all the more ironic. In The Wizard of Oz (1939), she played both the Wicked Witch of the West and Miss Almira Gulch, the severe Kansas neighbor who arrives with a sheriff’s order to take Toto away.
The magic came at a cost. During her fiery exit from Munchkinland, a mistimed trapdoor and pyrotechnic effect ignited her copper-based green makeup, and she spent six weeks recovering from burns to her face and hand.
By the 1970s, television viewers knew a warmer Hamilton as “Cora,” the friendly general-store keeper in the Maxwell House commercials.
The Witch explains herself
She knew what the Witch did to young viewers, and she made it her business to undo it. In 1975, she visited Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to explain how the Witch’s costume and performance worked. Sitting beside Fred Rogers, she talked gently about playing dress-up, then put on the black pointed hat and cape right in front of the camera. Watching the transformation happen step by step, children could see that the frightening figure was make-believe—and that the person underneath was there to reassure them.
Watch her visit with Mister Rogers →
Back on Gramercy Park
Around the Park, she was a fixture of daily life. A 1977 interview finds her having her hair curled in her kitchen at No. 34, then heading around the corner for eggs Benedict and black coffee. Passersby who recognized Cora would ask where they could find her store, and she would explain, smiling, that it existed only on a television set.
Living in the same building, Nicholas and I couldn’t avoid the ninth floor forever. When we finally met our upstairs neighbor, the spell broke instantly. Instead of the terror of Oz, we found Margaret: a petite, soft-spoken woman who was wonderful with children. She understood exactly what the Witch had done to us, and her remedy was the photograph at the top of this email—the very face that had kept us off the ninth floor, inscribed “For Nicholas and Timothy, from the Wicked Witch of the West, Margaret Hamilton.”
The candle-lit Halloween pumpkins and cookie baskets that lined our hallways, which I mentioned in our last letter, were her doing. She also hung her Wicked Witch costume in her ninth-floor doorway to greet the neighborhood children brave enough to ring her bell, turning the floor my brother and I had once been afraid of into the most welcoming stop in the building.
Read Margaret Hamilton’s full story →
Six chapters of photographs, neighborhood memories, and archival discoveries.
Help keep Gramercy a place that feels like home
On screen, Margaret Hamilton played the neighbor everyone dreads, the woman who came for Toto. At No. 34, she was the neighbor every child hopes for, and she gave the children in our building something that lasted well beyond Halloween: the feeling of being welcome.
That same neighborly spirit is at the heart of the Gramercy Park Block Association. Your membership supports our Clean Streets team, care for neighborhood trees, historic preservation, help for neighbors in need, the research that keeps stories like Margaret’s alive, and so much more. This work depends entirely on voluntary contributions from our neighbors.
Please join or renew your membership and help carry that spirit forward. We’ll send you our 2027 Gramercy Park wall calendar as a thank-you.
Support the Gramercy Park Block Association →
Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
Gramercy Park Block Association
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Images: Signed photograph of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West. Margaret Hamilton and Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer interoffice memorandum concerning Margaret Hamilton, January 5, 1939. Maxwell House publicity photograph, about 1977, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the United States. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood / Fred Rogers Productions, still from the official 1975 clip. Image credits and originals → · Historical sources →