18 Gramercy Park South

Forty-seven years of the Luther C. Clark mansion (1853–1900)

In 1853, as the southern perimeter of Samuel B. Ruggles’s private square filled with grand family residences, Wall Street investment banker Luther Clapp Clark (1815–1877) erected a substantial red-brick corner mansion at 18 Gramercy Park South, with a long flank and brick carriage stable stretching south down Irving Place. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, Clark had partnered with his brothers in St. Louis before coming east in 1845 to co-found the powerhouse New York banking house of Clark, Dodge & Co.—the firm that helped finance the Mexican-American War, bankrolled early American railroads, and trained future Civil War financier Jay Cooke in his brother Enoch’s Philadelphia office.

Photographed for the 1907 volume Old Buildings of New York City, Clark’s mansion was a commanding presence at the head of Irving Place: a broad brownstone stoop flanked by pedestal lamps rose to a deeply recessed entrance framed by fluted Corinthian columns, while three stories of tall sash windows were crowned by a dormered Second Empire slate mansard roof looking straight across the square. At the right edge of the 1907 photograph, immediately to the west, stands the neighboring clubhouse of The Players at 16 Gramercy Park South.

Its four-bay brick front and later mansard roof made the old house unusually broad beside the narrower townhouses to the west. The rear stable was an important part of the property’s later adaptability: what had served a private household’s horses and carriages could be put to a new club’s recreational use.

For forty-seven years, the corner mansion remained in the hands of Luther C. Clark—who died in the house in April 1877—and his widow, Julia Crawford Clark (c. 1826–1900), who lived here until her death in November 1900. Over those decades, the household supplied the newspapers with two memorable neighborhood stories. In July 1884, after jewelry and cash repeatedly vanished from the upper bedrooms, Mrs. Clark quietly marked a five-dollar bill and left it on a dressing table for the newly hired assistant butler, William H. H. Vallette; when detectives searched him, they recovered the marked bill along with a stolen purse and a pawn ticket for a diamond ring. Fifteen years later, on May 14, 1899, the New-York Tribune devoted a feature story to the giant wisteria vine planted beside the mansion in 1853: over nearly half a century, its gnarled woody trunk had woven itself so tightly through the cast-iron fence on Irving Place that its growth had wrenched entire sections of iron railing out of their stone foundations, leaving passersby to wonder “whether the fence is growing out of the vine or the vine from the fence.”

The Columbia University Club and thirteen baffled architects (1905–1917)

In the spring of 1905, the Columbia University Club—founded in 1901 by two hundred alumni at Sherry’s—purchased the Clark mansion and stable for $150,000 to serve as the first permanent clubhouse in its history. To adapt the residence, the club enlisted one of its own members: architect Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison (1872–1938, Columbia Class of 1894), the École des Beaux-Arts–trained designer of the Lackawanna Railroad Terminal in Hoboken and Pennsylvania Station in Baltimore. Spending $10,000, Murchison installed a basement grill room and bar, an open-air rear dining loggia overlooking the courtyard, second-floor libraries and card rooms, fourteen upper bedrooms, and three squash tennis courts inside the old brick stable on Irving Place. The blue-and-white Columbia flag was hoisted over 18 Gramercy Park South on September 7, 1905.

Garmey fills in the atmosphere of the remodeled rooms. The lounge and dining room were painted Columbia blue, and colored-glass droplights hung above the pool tables. On the kitchen roof, a summer dining terrace was screened with clematis. Among the members who used the clubhouse were Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler, the future Bishop William T. Manning, and philanthropist Edward S. Harkness.

Within three years, booming alumni membership had outgrown the building. In 1908, a committee of thirteen prominent architects within the club’s membership competed to devise an expansion plan on the corner lot. “However cunningly they contrived,” the Columbia Alumni News later recalled, “the result was the same”—the geometry of the fifty-by-eighty-four-foot site defeated all thirteen architects. Even so, the clubhouse hosted unforgettable nights: in the autumn of 1916, when gold baseballs were presented to Columbia’s championship nine, “Gramercy Park rang with Columbia cheers and Number Eighteen literally rocked on its aged foundations.” In December 1916 the members voted to acquire a larger clubhouse on West 43rd Street, moving uptown in January 1918.

Officers, squash players, and the wreckers (1918–1926)

After architect W. L. Rouse briefly took an option on the corner in 1917 for an unbuilt fourteen-story artists’ studio tower—assuring reporters that “north light is very important to artists in order to consummate their greatest conceptions”—18 Gramercy Park South became the wartime and postwar headquarters of the Army and Navy Club of America, which housed visiting officers until 1921; by 1920, the club had pronounced the 1853 rooms too small for the hundreds of visiting servicemen arriving in New York each year.

Sold in the summer of 1921, the old mansion was subdivided into small apartments while its Irving Place stable courts continued to operate as the Gramercy Park Squash Club. Finally, in June 1926, the property was acquired by the Gramercy Park Club, Inc., headed by George J. Gillespie, which announced plans for a new “restricted modern residence exclusively for women.” By November 1926, Luther Clark’s mansion had been demolished, prompting The New Yorker to lament: “Once more we call upon our tear ducts to relieve our emotion. And this time it is for the treading down of quaint old Gramercy Park by the foot of progress. The park is still there, let us hasten to reassure you; but the quiet, drowsing atmosphere that once hung about the enclosure is now gone forever.”

Garmey also records a brief use of the old house as a club for professional women in its final years. The Parkside would make women’s accommodation the principal purpose of the much larger building that followed.

Murgatroyd & Ogden and the 1920s women’s hotel movement

To design the new seventeen-story residence at 18 Gramercy Park South, the developers turned to the preeminent specialists in New York residential club hotels: architects Everett Murgatroyd and Palmer H. Ogden (Murgatroyd & Ogden). Famous as the house architects for the Allerton chain of residential hotels for young professionals, Murgatroyd & Ogden designed the Parkside on Gramercy Park and the celebrated Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street back-to-back in 1926–1927. While the Barbizon rose in vertical Romanesque and Gothic tracery uptown, the architects dressed 18 Gramercy Park South in a restrained Neo-Georgian vocabulary of warm red brick, limestone belt courses, classical pilasters, and a two-story white Doric entrance portico on Gramercy Park South designed to harmonize with the nineteenth-century townhouses of The Players immediately to the west.

The building answered an urgent social transformation in 1920s Manhattan. As thousands of single young women arrived in New York after the First World War to pursue careers in publishing, business, music, and the arts, existing charitable residences had long waiting lists and a 1923 city guidebook could identify only three commercial hotels in all of Manhattan catering specifically to businesswomen. Like the Christian Workers’ Home across the square at 7 Gramercy Park West, the new women’s residential hotels of the late 1920s offered safety, respectability, and independence under one roof.

Samuel H. Gottscho’s lens and life inside the Parkside Hotel

Opened in 1927 as The Parkside (and soon operated through the Depression and postwar decades as the Parkside Hotel, welcoming both long-term women residents and quiet transient guests), the building contained roughly three hundred compact rooms wrapped around an E-shaped light court, crowned on the sixteenth floor and roof by glass-walled solariums and open-air brick terraces overlooking the Manhattan skyline and the locked garden below.

Two luminous photographs taken for the hotel by master architectural photographer Samuel H. Gottscho—now preserved at the Museum of the City of New York—capture the Parkside in its prime. On May 5, 1929, Gottscho framed the soaring red-brick tower from across Gramercy Park just as a hatted neighbor paused at the southern iron gate with a key; two and a half years later, on December 28, 1931, Gottscho photographed the Parkside’s double-height dining room at Christmastime, where Windsor chairs and crisp white tablecloths surrounded a towering, tinsel-draped Christmas tree on a black-and-white checkerboard floor beneath a wrought-iron mezzanine balcony. Throughout the 1930s, illustrated postcards for the Parkside Hotel promised “charm and quiet refinement,” advertising single rooms from $2 to $3 a day ($10.50 to $18 a week) and doubles from $6 a day ($30 a week), complete with roof terraces, solariums, restaurant dining, and “use of New York’s only private park.”

A room of one’s own—with Salvation Army rules and eleven Park keys

In 1963, The Salvation Army purchased the Parkside Hotel and rededicated it as a women-only residential haven: the Parkside Evangeline Residence. The name honored General Evangeline Cory Booth (1865–1950)—daughter of Salvation Army founder William Booth, National Commander of The Salvation Army in the United States from 1904 to 1934, and recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal for her work in World War I—who had established the network of Evangeline Residences to provide young working women with affordable, dignified housing in major cities.

For the next forty-five years, from the Kennedy administration into the twenty-first century, the Parkside Evangeline housed some three hundred women at a time in roughly hundred-square-foot single rooms, providing maid service, breakfast and dinner in the ground-floor dining hall, sunned roof terraces, and strict house rules that never wavered: no alcohol, no hot plates, and no male visitors allowed past the first-floor parlor, with all guests out by 11:00 p.m. Even in 2005–2006, weekly rates for a room and two daily meals remained under $300.

The residents formed an extraordinary cross-section of New York women: NYU and Parsons students, summer interns, fashion models, aspiring actresses, entry-level editorial assistants, and a devoted core of older women who had lived in the building for decades. Historian Sharony Green, who lived at the Parkside Evangeline in the early 2000s, warmly recalled the first-floor parlor “where we were overseen by mostly elderly women and a West Indian doorman,” and the eleven coveted keys to Gramercy Park kept behind the front desk that residents could sign out in a ledger for an hour’s stroll inside the iron fence. When Harvard student Sarah Milov checked in for a summer internship in 2005 and signed the “three-page paper outlining all the building’s commandments,” she reported the ultimate perk to readers of The Harvard Crimson: “Yes, I have a key.”

Novelist Amy Rowland and the trees with nametags

Among the young writers who found a foothold in New York inside the Parkside Evangeline was future novelist Amy Rowland, who lived in the building in the late 1990s while working in the classified-advertising department of The New York Times. “For 800 and some dollars a month,” she recalled in a 2019 essay for Literary Hub, “I got two meals a day in the dreary dining hall, a tiny bedroom, and a beige bathroom, complete with handrails.” Walking to work in Midtown to save subway fare and collecting literary rejection slips in the evenings, she found her sanctuary directly across the street: after dinner, she signed out one of the front desk’s Park keys and walked the gravel paths beneath the London planes, horse chestnuts, and Ohio buckeyes.

“I knew all their names because the trees in Gramercy Park wore nametags.”

Amy Rowland, “Where New York’s Literary Single Girls Lived” (2019)

Although the manuscript she drafted in her tiny room at No. 18 was set aside, her years at the Parkside Evangeline inspired her acclaimed 2014 novel The Transcriptionist—“about a rural girl of slender means at a New York newspaper.”

Closing the doors of a forty-five-year institution (2006–2008)

By the autumn of 2006, facing mounting maintenance costs on the eighty-year-old tower, The Salvation Army placed 18 Gramercy Park South on the market and ceased accepting new applications, working to relocate its long-term residents to its Markle Evangeline Residence in Greenwich Village and Ten Eyck-Troughton Residence in Murray Hill. The Parkside Evangeline officially closed its doors in 2008, ending eight decades of hotel and residence-hall life at the corner of Irving Place.

From three hundred rooms to sixteen homes (2007–2012)

In May 2007, developers William Lie Zeckendorf and Arthur Zeckendorf of Zeckendorf Development, in partnership with Eyal Ofer’s Global Holdings—the team then completing 15 Central Park West—entered into a contract with The Salvation Army to acquire 18 Gramercy Park South, bringing in their 15 Central Park West collaborator, architect Robert A. M. Stern (1939–2025) and Robert A. M. Stern Architects. Working closely with the Gramercy Park Block Association through the landmark review process, Stern’s office presented its restoration and window-enlargement plans to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on April 22, 2008, winning unanimous 7–0 approval before closing on the $60 million purchase in July 2010 and completing the architectural transformation in 2012.

Inside Murgatroyd & Ogden’s 1927 envelope, Stern’s team reconfigured the three hundred tiny residence rooms into sixteen expansive condominium homes: fourteen full-floor residences, a duplex maisonette with a private entrance on Irving Place, and a crowning duplex penthouse with heated outdoor loggias and rooftop terraces. Taking advantage of the building’s original E-shaped footprint, each full-floor residence sweeps across the entire northern Gramercy Park frontage, while the low rooflines of The Players and the National Arts Club immediately to the west allow southern and western sunlight—and diagonal views of the Park—to penetrate deep into the rooms. Externally, Stern’s office lowered the sills and enlarged the small hotel window openings into tall seven-foot double-hung mahogany sash windows while preserving the classical rhythm of the Neo-Georgian brickwork.

Solving the 134-degree Irving Place steam vaults (2015–2016)

Alongside cleaning and repointing the red brick and limestone trim, repairing the cast-iron storefront columns, and laying a new bluestone sidewalk, the restoration encountered an unexpected underground adversary along the Irving Place curb: every newly planted street tree died.

In February 2015, Robert A. M. Stern Architects submitted a forensic streetscape study to the Landmarks Preservation Commission prepared with a certified arborist, identifying extreme heat near Con Edison’s high-pressure underground steam vaults along Irving Place as the likely cause. Soil temperature readings documented the extraordinary conditions beneath the pavement: on an August afternoon when the air temperature was 78°F, the soil inside the three Irving Place tree pits measured 90°F, 98.5°F, and a root-cooking 117.2°F; on a cold January day when the air stood at 40.6°F, a manhole cover adjacent to the northern pit registered 134.6°F.

With the active backing of the Gramercy Park Block Association and its president, Arlene Harrison, the architects designed custom ventilated cast-stone raised planters tinted to match the building’s limestone water table—lifting the root balls above the overheated ground, with Sargent cherry trees, Japanese holly, and catmint proposed for the planting. By April 2016, the planters and trees were installed, with evergreens and perennials to follow in warmer weather, bringing greenery back to the corner where Luther Clark’s wisteria had climbed the fence a century and a half before.