The People of Gramercy

Samuel Bulkley Ruggles

The city he saw coming

Founder of Gramercy Park · Lawyer, developer and public advocate

Samuel B. Ruggles in a nineteenth-century engraving.

A sidewalk and a city

At the northern end of Irving Place, traffic turns and the garden begins. In 1832, the city had authorized an avenue that threatened to continue straight through it. Samuel Ruggles, the lawyer and developer who created Gramercy Park, responded with a sketch of a curb and sidewalk.

His memorandum of July 12, 1832, considered how an unbroken sidewalk could make the street end at the garden—and help persuade the city to leave it there.

He had bought pieces of an old estate, moved earth, planned streets and reserved ground on which he could have built houses. His sketch was another choice about the neighborhood those houses would belong to. Again and again, Ruggles would commit money and effort to what he thought the city could become, even when a quicker return was within reach.

The December 31, 1831 survey places Gramercy Park among numbered building lots and irregular older property boundaries.

1814–1831 · The young Ruggles

A young man with a city in mind

Samuel Bulkley Ruggles graduated from Yale in 1814, at fourteen. Born in New Milford, Connecticut, and raised in Poughkeepsie, he had entered the college’s senior class the previous August. His father, Philo, was a lawyer; Samuel followed him into the profession and established a New York practice in 1821.

The next year he married Mary Rosalie Rathbone. They would have three children: John Rathbone, Ellen Caroline and James Francis. The family’s fortunes became tied to a city expanding northward, where old farms were being divided into streets and building lots.

Black-and-white reproduction of Henry Inman’s painted portrait of a young Samuel Bulkley Ruggles, seated in a dark coat, white waistcoat and high white collar. — Ruggles in a painted portrait from the 1820s, reproduced in black and white.

Augustus R. Macdonough, writing after Ruggles’s death for the Century Association, remembered a companion whose conversation could fascinate even those who did not share his excitement. He “belonged, if ever human spirit did belong, to the future.”

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 had laid a grid across Manhattan’s farms and country estates, with little space for neighborhood squares. Buying land in the path of those streets offered the prospect of profit. Ruggles would alter the streets themselves and make a garden the reason people wanted to settle there. Part of his investment would be ground he agreed never to build on.

Engraving of Yale College at New Haven, with the college buildings and church spires seen across a broad lawn, trees and small groups of people. — Yale College’s Old Brick Row in 1832, eighteen years after Ruggles graduated.

1831 · Making Gramercy

A hill, a swamp and a garden

In 1831, Ruggles acquired part of the old Duane estate, known as Gramercy Seat. The name Gramercy was a modern form of the old Dutch Crommessie. John B. Pine linked it to krom, meaning crooked, and mesje, meaning little knife; he thought the name described the crooked turns of a brook rather than the shape of a farm.

James Duane had been New York’s first mayor after the Revolution. His heirs’ property still bore the awkward shapes of an older landscape: long, narrow holdings cut across the city’s proposed blocks. Before Ruggles could offer building lots, he had to buy, exchange and combine pieces of ground.

He also had to change the ground itself. Between the property and the built-up city stood the Bowery Hill, some twenty feet above street level. Beyond lay marshy land. Ruggles acquired both and moved the hill into the low ground. Charles King estimated three million loads of earth, costing $180,000, across the larger development of more than fifty acres.

A hand-colored 1831 property map showing the new street grid over older estates, including the Duane Farm near the future Gramercy Park. — This 1831 map records older farm boundaries, including the Duane holdings where Ruggles established Gramercy Park.

At its heart he reserved ground that could otherwise have held buildings. The garden would give the surrounding houses light, air and a view—and make their lots more desirable. The founding deed made that connection explicit. He gave up building land to improve the neighborhood around it.

On December 17, 1831, Samuel and Mary conveyed forty-two lots, including the Park’s approaches, to five trustees. The trustees would hold the garden; the neighboring properties would enjoy its use and pay for its care. The right belonged to the property and could pass to the next owner. A second deed in 1833 secured that continuing relationship.

That basic arrangement still guides the Park today: the Trustees hold the garden, while the surrounding properties enjoy its use and pay for its care.

The restrictions show the neighborhood he intended. The garden was to remain free of buildings. Around it, the deed required substantial brick or stone houses and excluded slaughterhouses, breweries, tanneries and livery stables. Buyers had some assurance about what might appear across the fence—or next door.

A city guide of 1833 compared the intended garden to London’s private squares. Ruggles had adapted that idea to Manhattan and used his legal training to make it survive the sale of his lots. Before the trees matured, he had arranged who would look after them.

The founding deed in detail

The original trustees were Charles Augustus Davis, Thomas L. Wells, Robert D. Weeks, Thomas R. Mercein and Philo T. Ruggles. The deed acknowledged ten dollars in consideration. The full parcel measured 520 feet east–west by 184 feet north–south, including walks and carriageways; the enclosed garden’s permitted length was between 400 and 420 feet.

The deed required an iron fence on stone coping, with ornamental gates, by May 1, 1833, and walks, trees and shrubs by January 1, 1834. Within forty feet of the surrounding property fronts, permitted houses had to be brick or stone and at least three stories high.

Numbered lots 1 through 60 each carried one-sixtieth of the trustees’ lawful expenses, including maintenance and taxes. Six additional parcels, lettered A through F, were reserved for possible streets, without additional maintenance shares. Access extended to owners, their families and tenants. The confirmatory deed of December 24, 1833, secured the garden easements for succeeding owners.

Read the original founding deed for its full terms.

1830–1835 · Two squares, two streets

Room for a growing city

Ruggles’s garden needed better ways to reach it. Third and Fourth Avenues were separated by unusually long blocks. He promoted a route through their middle: Irving Place would approach from the south, Lexington Avenue from the north.

The avenue authorized in 1832 threatened to cut through the garden. His July 12 memorandum, reproduced here, shows him considering an unbroken curb and sidewalk along its southern edge. This would make Irving Place end at the Park, an arrangement he hoped would persuade officials to preserve it.

He needed streets to reach his property, but a continuous avenue would undo the square. Lexington opened north of the Park in 1835. Today both approaches give a view of the garden while directing traffic around it.

Ruggles’s handwritten memorandum of July 12, 1832, with a sketch of the junction at the south edge of Gramercy Park. — Ruggles considers a curb and crossing in his memorandum of July 12, 1832.

He named Irving Place for Washington Irving and Lexington Avenue for the Revolutionary battlefield. King noted that Ruggles had passed up the chance to put his own name on either street. Gramercy kept the old estate’s name. The neighborhood could carry the names of people and places he admired.

An 1831 plan of Samuel Ruggles’s land showing Gramercy Park and the blocks extending toward Union Place. — This companion 1831 plan connects Ruggles’s Gramercy holdings with Union Place to the southwest.

His work reached southwest to Union Place, an awkward junction of roads already marked on the city’s plan. In 1830, he joined other owners in petitioning for its improvement. Authorization followed in 1831; enlargement and landscaping began in 1832. Unlike private Gramercy, the resulting square was public.

He paid as well as petitioned. Assessments for Union Square reached as far as Gramercy, where he owned many lots. The cost came before the benefits he expected a better neighborhood to bring.

An 1819 watercolor survey map showing rural properties, small buildings, old roads and the street grid around triangular Union Place. — John Randel Jr.’s 1819 survey shows old roads and scattered buildings around triangular Union Place, before its enlargement and landscaping.

During a walk around Union Square with the Rev. Dr. Hawks, Ruggles pictured towers and palaces crumbling while the open ground remained:

“space—free, glorious, open space—will remain to bless the City forever!”
Samuel B. Ruggles, as recalled by Charles King in 1851

Hawks supplied the reply often associated with Gramercy: “Man makes buildings, but God makes space.” Ruggles had made it his business to keep a few pieces of Manhattan unbuilt.

1833–1850 · A neighborhood, a family

At home in Union Square

For all his association with Gramercy Park, Ruggles lived beside Union Square. After building a house at 36 Bond Street in 1833, he moved uptown to 24 Union Place, where an inventory of his books survives from 1842. The squares he had helped shape were now his own neighborhood.

Gramercy took longer to become the place he imagined. The Panic of 1837 slowed building. In November 1844, the trustees engaged James Virtue to plant a thousand privets and a hundred trees. Thirteen years after the founding deed, the garden was still acquiring its hedge and shade.

Over the following decades, the residents Ruggles had hoped to attract arrived: James Harper lived at No. 4 from 1847 to 1869, and Cyrus W. Field made his home on East Twenty-first Street. Samuel J. Tilden bought No. 15 in 1863; it is now part of the National Arts Club.

A colored 1849 lithograph looking south over Union Square, with a fountain, paths, surrounding buildings and the city beyond. — Union Square in 1849, looking south, as homes and businesses spread around it.

On May 15, 1848, Ellen Caroline Ruggles married George Templeton Strong, a lawyer and prodigious diarist. It was her parents’ twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. Ellen and George settled on the Park’s north side, just west of Lexington Avenue, a short walk from Samuel and Mary at Union Square.

On May 25, 1850, Strong was taking tea at the Ruggles house when Samuel was called into the hall. He soon summoned his son-in-law. A traveler returning from California had brought news of John, Samuel and Mary’s eldest son: he had died aboard ship nineteen days earlier, on his way home after illness. That night, Mary and Ellen learned of his death.

Black-and-white seated portrait of the diarist George Templeton Strong, wearing a dark coat and patterned necktie, with one arm resting on a chair. — George Templeton Strong, the diarist who married Ruggles’s daughter Ellen.

A hand-colored insurance map of Gramercy Park and the surrounding blocks, showing individual houses and churches in pink, blue and yellow. — An insurance map from the 1857 atlas shows houses and churches around Gramercy Park, with Irving Place and Lexington Avenue approaching opposite sides.

On the map today: Where Ruggles and the Strongs lived

The family’s households were a short walk apart. Here is where to look today:

The Strongs: north of the Park, west of Lexington Avenue. Ellen and George lived at 74 East Twenty-first Street, later 113. The parcel became part of the Gramercy Park Hotel’s westward expansion: the hotel company acquired 111–113 and 115 East Twenty-first Street in 1928. Today, 50 Gramercy Park North incorporates the former annex, beside the corner hotel at 2 Lexington Avenue.

Ruggles: Union Square East, near East Fifteenth Street. His home at 24 Union Place was also recorded as 24 Union Square, on the east side between East Fifteenth and East Sixteenth Streets. His house faced the public square he had helped improve; Ellen and George lived beside the private garden he had founded. His former stable was nearby at 103 East Fifteenth Street.

1838–1854 · The price of confidence

A fortune under strain

Ruggles had built his career on the expectation that New York would grow. In the Assembly in 1838, he urged borrowing against future canal revenues to speed improvements. Better transport would bring more traffic, he argued, and that traffic would help pay for the work. As with his streets and lots, the investment had to come before the return.

An 1836 lithograph of the Erie Canal at Lockport, with paired flights of locks rising through the village and horse-drawn canal boats below. — The Erie Canal at Lockport in 1836, before Ruggles entered the Assembly and championed enlargement.

In 1851, creditors demanded money he could not produce. He had borrowed heavily for investments that included warehouses at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Docks, developed with Edward Curtis. Valuable property could not meet an immediate demand for cash. At Union Square, Strong watched his father-in-law suffer over the losses his failure might inflict on others.

Strong blamed Ruggles’s optimism for the crisis and thought him too amiable to defend himself firmly against attacks on his integrity. He did not believe the charges.

An 1851 engraving of the Atlantic Dock basin in Brooklyn, with sailing ships, long warehouse rows, grain elevators and goods piled on the foreground wharf. — Atlantic Dock, Brooklyn, in 1851. Ruggles’s warehouses here brought a financial crisis and a prolonged effort to recover.

By July, he had taken an office, put up a tin sign and advertised. He was practicing law again.

In his December defense, King pointed to a choice Ruggles had refused to make. Cheaper buildings and temporary uses of his heavily indebted land around Gramercy and Union Square could have brought money sooner. He had held to the neighborhood he wanted to build, even as the debt pressed on him.

In May 1853, Strong attended a settlement with a major creditor’s estate. The account was settled in full, and the warehouses were transferred back under an arrangement he helped finance with a $5,000 second mortgage. Ruggles had recovered property still carrying debt, with his son-in-law’s money now tied up in it.

His public commitments continued. An original trustee of the Astor Library, he saw it open its reference collections free to the public in 1854; it would eventually become part of the New York Public Library. He had also served as a Columbia trustee since 1836. There, a scientist’s religion was about to bring him into conflict with his colleagues.

An 1854 engraving of readers inside the Astor Library, surrounded by tall bookcases, ornate galleries, arches, and a vaulted ceiling. — Readers in the newly opened Astor Library, 1854. Ruggles was an original trustee.

1854–1869 · Conviction and argument

A man prepared to make his case

Wolcott Gibbs was a chemist and a Unitarian. In 1854, his beliefs stood in the way of an appointment at Columbia. Ruggles, an Episcopalian, took up his cause: the college owed its students the strongest scientific teaching it could secure. Religious differences should not disqualify a candidate.

He began with a letter to a fellow trustee. In Ruggles’s account, the recipient could not see why the argument applied to him, why it had been addressed to him, or what its object was. Ruggles printed the letter for the other trustees. Their responsibilities were public, he insisted, and open to discussion.

His pamphlet joined the defense of Gibbs to a demand that Columbia take science seriously. He lost the immediate battle. Gibbs was rejected.

Sepia cabinet photograph of the chemist Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, with a full beard and dark jacket, facing to the viewer’s right. — Wolcott Gibbs, whose candidacy Ruggles defended in 1854, in a photograph from 1870–73.

An 1828 engraving of Columbia College at its Park Place campus, with a long classical building behind mature trees and figures walking in the foreground. — Columbia College at Park Place in 1828, eight years before Ruggles joined its trustees.

Title page of Ruggles’s 1854 pamphlet, The Duty of Columbia College to the Community, and Its Right to Exclude Unitarians from Its Professorships of Physical Science. — Ruggles’s published defense of scientific merit against religious exclusion, 1854.

In September 1863, Ruggles reached the international statistical congress in Berlin after a fog-delayed Atlantic crossing. A committee discussing the metric system had listed the Confederate States separately in its report. As the United States delegate, he objected: those states remained part of the Union. The committee changed its wording.

The war gave his statistics a political purpose, too. His report set out American population, agriculture and mineral resources for a European audience. While the country fought over its survival, he presented evidence of its strength and prospects.

A hand-colored 1865 lithograph shows Lincoln’s funeral carriage pulled past Union Square by horses draped in black, watched by crowds and soldiers. — Lincoln’s funeral procession passes Union Square on April 25, 1865. The square Ruggles helped improve had become a gathering place for the city’s public life.

Cover of Resources of the United States, Samuel B. Ruggles’s report to the International Statistical Congress at Berlin, published by the Loyal Publication Society in New York in 1864. — The 1864 printed edition of Ruggles’s report to the 1863 statistical congress in Berlin.

A hand-colored 1867 lithograph showing the Paris Universal Exposition beside the Seine, with the huge oval exhibition palace, gardens, pavilions and crowded riverbanks. — The Universal Exposition in Paris, 1867, the year of Ruggles’s monetary mission. This view shows the exposition grounds, not the conference.

Paris and The Hague: two later missions

At Paris in 1867, Ruggles advocated compatible gold coinages to ease international exchange; at The Hague in 1869, he sought agricultural statistics that countries could compare.

1875–1881 · Still making plans

“Go ahead”

In 1875, his grandson John Ruggles Strong placed a stone tablet in the pavement before Gramercy Park’s western gate. It named the founder and recalled his gift of 1831.

In January 1876, Ruggles attended every lecture in a Columbia series given by the young scholar John W. Burgess. He was in his mid-seventies. He then spent months urging Burgess to join the college.

Mary died in 1878, after more than half a century of marriage. In the spring of 1880, Burgess was still visiting Ruggles at Union Square.

Sepia photograph of Samuel B. Ruggles in later life, mounted in an embossed album page numbered 83, with his name and 1866 written below. — Ruggles in the Century Association’s photograph album. The mount is inscribed 1866; the photograph is undated.

On April 5, Burgess arrived with a problem: history, politics, economics and public law had too little room in the college. He had considered proposing a separate school but hesitated. Ruggles listened, then said they would have to found one.

Burgess went home and worked through the night on a plan. Ruggles took it to the trustees, who approved the School of Political Science on June 7. Burgess was in Paris, studying a model for the institution, when a cable arrived at about five the next morning:

“Thank God, the university is born. Go ahead.”
Samuel B. Ruggles to John W. Burgess, June 1880, as recalled by Burgess

Ruggles was eighty when he sent it. He suffered a stroke in June 1881 and died on Fire Island on August 28. Nearly fifty years had passed since he and Mary signed the Gramercy deed. The garden stood among houses whose occupants had grown accustomed to looking out on it.

Black-and-white photograph of Daniel Huntington’s 1882 portrait of Samuel B. Ruggles, showing an older man with curled hair, side whiskers, a dark coat and black bow tie. — A posthumous painted portrait of Ruggles, 1882.

After 1881 · Ruggles remembered

The man at the western fountain

The shortcut Ruggles had worried about in 1832 kept tempting his successors. A cable-railway proposal threatened Gramercy Park in 1890; an extension of Irving Place through the garden followed in 1912. Trustees and residents helped preserve the open ground. His legal arrangements mattered, as did the people prepared to defend them.

His grandson John Ruggles Strong gave the memorial fountain at the garden’s western end. By 1921, Edmond T. Quinn’s bronze portrait of Ruggles stood above the basin and pedestal designed by Charles I. Berg. Quinn had also sculpted the Park’s Edwin Booth statue. The fountain’s history and restoration tell the later story of that family gift.

Historic view of the west fountain in Gramercy Park, with Ruggles’s memorial tablet, basin, fence and trees. — The west fountain, reproduced in a 1921 history of Gramercy Park.

The restored fountain with an open water basin and exposed stone rim, aligned to the pre-restoration view. — From a planted basin to flowing water: the fountain before restoration and after the 2025–2026 work.

Before restoration, shrubs surround the memorial and fill the fountain basin, concealing much of its stone edge. — From a planted basin to flowing water: the fountain before restoration and after the 2025–2026 work.

In 1931, fifty years after Ruggles’s death, James Thurber observed that most people knew him as the man behind Gramercy Park and knew little else about him.

To find his work, walk to the end of Irving Place. The street stops at the garden, and the traffic turns. Behind the fence, trees occupy ground on which he could have built houses. Nearly two centuries after Ruggles considered that sidewalk, you can still see what he was trying to do.

Life at a glance

Full name: Samuel Bulkley Ruggles
Known for: Establishing Gramercy Park’s trust in 1831 and shaping its surrounding streets; a wider career in transport, education and international affairs.
Education: Entered Yale’s senior class in August 1813; graduated in 1814.
Family: Married Mary Rosalie Rathbone in 1822. Three children: John Rathbone, Ellen Caroline and James Francis.
New York homes: 36 Bond Street, then 24 Union Place, near Union Square.
Public service: New York State Assembly, 1838; canal commissioner, 1839–42 and briefly in 1858; Columbia trustee, 1836–81.
Gramercy connection: Samuel and Mary Ruggles executed the founding conveyance on December 17, 1831: forty-two lots for the Park parcel and its approaches, with upkeep charged to sixty numbered surrounding lots.
Died: August 28, 1881, on Fire Island.

Sources cited

This profile draws on Ruggles’s own publications, the founding deed, contemporary recollections, institutional records and later historical scholarship.

The sidewalk memorandum. Samuel B. Ruggles, memorandum and sketch, July 12, 1832, Samuel B. Ruggles papers, New York Public Library. Reproduced and interpreted in the Museum of the City of New York’s The Greatest Grid, image 15.
Family, education and death. Yale, Obituary Record of Graduates, June 1882, printed pp. 63–64, class of 1814. The obituary gives April 11, 1799; NYPL, the Century Association and other accounts give April 11, 1800. Strong’s diary records Ruggles’s sixtieth birthday on April 11, 1860 (vol. III, p. 20), supporting the latter date.
The personal and business archive. Jim Moske, Samuel B. Ruggles Papers, 1801–1881: Finding Aid, New York Public Library, 2000; biographical note and collection inventory. Documents the family, the 1851 financial crisis and surviving personal materials. Strong’s diary supplies the subsequent 1853 warehouse settlement.
Assembling Gramercy. Edwin Smith, property plan, December 31, 1831, engraved by D. R. Harrison; NYPL. MCNY, The Greatest Grid, image 13, explains the map’s irregular boundaries and land exchanges. The wider plan, image 14, shows the relationship to Union Place. The exhibition also supplies context for the Commissioners’ Plan.
A contemporary portrait of the improver. Charles King, Progress of the City of New-York, During the Last Fifty Years (1852), pp. 60–65; lecture delivered December 29, 1851. The Union Square conversation appears on printed p. 62. It is undated and reported by an admiring friend. Hawks, not Ruggles, speaks the line about God making space. King’s estimates of three million loads, $180,000 and more than fifty acres concern the wider development, not the garden alone. Pine reproduces this account in his history. On pp. 64–65, King explicitly defends his friend after the 1851 financial crisis, including his resistance to cheaper uses of the indebted Gramercy and Union Square land.
The founding instrument. Indenture of Samuel B. and Mary R. Ruggles to the Trustees of Gramercy Park, December 17, 1831, reproduced on the GPBA website. The original language supplies the five trustees’ names, ten-dollar consideration, 520-by-184-foot parcel, enclosure and planting deadlines, sixty numbered maintenance shares, six lettered lots, access and building conditions. The property-value purpose is explicit.
The garden’s early development. John B. Pine, The Story of Gramercy Park, 1831–1921 (1921), especially the discussion of the first recorded trustees’ meeting in 1844. Also used for the Duane estate, the name’s derivation, the suggested London parallel, street names, the 1875 western-gate tablet, the two end fountains designed by Charles I. Berg, John R. Strong’s gift, Edmond T. Quinn’s portrait medallion, early planting and maintenance, and the later railway, subway and tax disputes. References are to Pine’s original text, distinguished from modern introductory material.
Union Square. MCNY, The Greatest Grid, image 8, on the 1830 property-owner petition, 1831 authorization and 1832 work; and image 9, the 1849 view. Ruggles’s role is distinguished from the square’s earlier existence and later redesigns. The exhibition’s Gramercy Park view, image 16 places the neighborhood’s growth in the context of the Panic of 1837 and the recovery of the later 1840s.
The canal policy in context. Noble E. Whitford, History of the Canal System of the State of New York (1906), chapter III, and chronological summary. Prepared for the state’s engineering administration; establishes the enlargement’s authorization, borrowing, stoppage and completion.
Ruggles’s offices and canal argument. “Ruggles, Samuel Bulkley,” Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, vol. 5 (1888), pp. 343–344, transcribed by Irwin Collier; checked against Yale’s obituary for the 1839 appointment. Appletons dates active canal service from 1840 through 1842 and records the separate 1858 term. Its Assembly date is mistranscribed as “1888” on the transcription page; the correct year is 1838. Ruggles’s original 1838 report, especially printed pp. 38–41, distinguishes the hypothetical forty-million-dollar borrowing calculation from a recommendation to make all the listed investments.
Columbia and the Gibbs controversy. Samuel B. Ruggles, The Duty of Columbia College to the Community, and Its Right to Exclude Unitarians from Its Professorships of Physical Science (1854), opening Note and especially printed pp. 11–17 and 24. Columbia’s 250th-anniversary historical timeline confirms Gibbs’s rejection. The university’s history of Columbia and New York City documents the campus move in May 1857.
The School of Political Science. John W. Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar (1934), pp. 150–153, 187–195; trustees’ resolution, June 7, 1880; and Joseph Dorfman, “The Department of Economics,” in A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University (1955), pp. 169–172. Transcriptions and source references collected by Irwin Collier. The recruitment of Burgess, April 5, 1880 home conversation and June cable are attributed to Burgess’s retrospective memoir.
Berlin, 1863. Samuel B. Ruggles, Resources of the United States: Report to the International Statistical Congress at Berlin, presented September 11, 1863; Loyal Publication Society edition, 1864. Includes the transmittal letter and the statistical report.
The diplomatic incident. Norman Judd to William H. Seward, September 9, 1863, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1863, part II, document 339; Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State.
Paris and monetary coordination. Ruggles to Seward, November 7, 1867, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1867, part I, document 313. For the conference’s limits and failure to reassemble, see the contemporary “Paris Monetary Conference,” in Lalor’s Cyclopaedia, reproduced by Econlib.
The Hague and comparable statistics. Samuel B. Ruggles, Internationality and International Congresses (1871), report on the 1869 congress, especially printed p. 72 for the adopted agricultural-statistics resolutions.
Bond Street and Union Place. Sara Mascia, Historical Perspectives, Inc., Stage 1A Archaeological Assessment: 32–40 Bond Street, Manhattan, New York (January 2003), printed p. 13 (PDF p. 17), property history of 36 Bond Street; read alongside NYPL’s inventory of books at 24 Union Place in 1842. The report’s narrative and land-transfer appendix disagree on the sale year.
A friend’s recollection. Augustus R. Macdonough, memorial in the Century Association Reports (1882), reproduced in the Century Association Archives member entry. A recollection of his character and family connections.
The Astor Library. Astor Library Records, 1839–1911, New York Public Library Archives, collection history. Lists the original trustees, incorporation, public opening and eventual consolidation into NYPL.
Remembering the founder in 1931. James Thurber, “Ruggles,” The New Yorker, print issue May 16, 1931. A short centenary portrait, used here for its observation about Ruggles’s remembered reputation. Its description of the Park as a gift to the city is superseded by the original deed.
The grid’s dimensions and rationale. Gouverneur Morris, Simeon De Witt and John Rutherfurd, Remarks of the Commissioners, March 22, 1811, transcribed in MCNY’s The Greatest Grid. Explains the limited open spaces, block depths and 920-foot interval between Third and Fourth Avenues.
The 1833 confirmation and later interpretation. People ex rel. Poor v. Wells, 139 A.D. 83 (1910), pp. 84–88. Reproduces the founding maintenance obligations and describes the confirmatory deed of December 24, 1833; distinguishes the value of the Park easements in surrounding properties from a separate assessment of the encumbered garden.
A contemporary description of the planned garden. New-York as It Is, in 1833, printed p. 182. Describes Gramercy’s intended planting by comparison with London’s private squares and records Irving Place’s seventy-five-foot width and legislative establishment in 1832.
The Strong family connection. Benjamin W. Dwight, The History of the Descendants of Elder John Strong (1871), vol. 1, printed pp. 635 and 639. Gives the May 15, 1848 marriage of Ellen Ruggles and George Templeton Strong, the May 15, 1822 marriage of her parents, and their son John’s death at sea on May 6, 1850. The author acknowledges Strong’s assistance with family particulars.
The family and the financial crisis, in Strong’s diary. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas (1952), vol. II, The Turbulent Fifties. May 26, 1850, pp. 14–15, describes the previous evening’s news of John’s death; May–June 1851, pp. 43–54, records the financial crisis and Strong’s June 24 assessment of Ruggles’s temperament. The financial overview on p. 43 is the editors’ account. July 8, 1851, pp. 57–58, records his return to law; May 7, 1853, p. 124, records the settlement with Francis Griffin’s estate, reconveyance of the warehouses and Strong’s $5,000 second-mortgage contribution. Strong was an involved son-in-law, not a detached observer.
Illness, recovery and a birthday. Strong, vol. III, The Civil War, January 17–22 and February 29, 1860, pp. 4–5 and 11–12, for Ruggles’s illness at Washington Hunt’s Lockport home, Mary’s intended journey and his recovery at Union Square; April 11, p. 20, for his sixtieth birthday.
The neighboring households. Columbia College, Statutes (1866), printed pp. 7 and 9: Ruggles at 24 Union Square, George T. Strong at 74 East Twenty-first Street, and their membership on the School of Law committee. Historical addresses are given as printed. Columbia’s Catalogue of the Governors, Trustees, and Officers … from 1754 to 1870 (1871), printed p. 35, lists Strong at 113 East Twenty-first Street.
Neighbors arriving over time. Pine on James Harper at No. 4, 1847–1869; Isabella Field Judson, Cyrus W. Field: His Life and Work (1896), chapter III, on the surroundings of his East Twenty-first Street house; the National Arts Club’s history of the Tilden mansion, documenting his 1863 purchase of No. 15.
The Strong house site and the hotel annex. “Sage Foundation Buys,” The New York Times, December 11, 1928, records the hotel company’s acquisition of 111–113 and 115 East Twenty-first Street. John Pawson’s 50 Gramercy Park project record identifies the remodeled 1930 hotel annex as part of today’s 50 Gramercy Park North. Read together with Columbia’s address records, these sources connect the Strong household to the later annex site; they do not establish the exact outline of the nineteenth-century house.
Union Square’s east side and the former stable. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square (University of Chicago Press, 2019), p. 34, places Ruggles’s house at 24 Union Place in the row between East Fifteenth and East Sixteenth Streets. New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Union Square Savings Bank designation report (1996), pp. 2–3, locates the neighboring houses at 20 and 22 Union Square East, beginning at East Fifteenth Street. New York Historical, Gramercy Neighborhood Associates Records, Series IV.A, Box 6, Folder 8, identifies photographs of Ruggles’s former stable at 103 East Fifteenth Street.

For a deeper archival study

Daniel Garrison Brinton Thompson’s Ruggles of New York: A Life of Samuel B. Ruggles (Columbia University Press, 1946) is a dedicated biography and a guide to further sources. The NYPL papers offer the next step for a closer reconstruction of the Atlantic Docks business and Ruggles’s private correspondence.

The New York Times review of Thompson’s biography, April 6, 1947, discusses Thompson’s biography.

For a deeper archival study

Further reading and listening