Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
We often think of Gramercy Park as a slice of “old New York.” But the remarkable thing about Gramercy Park isn’t that it is a survivor of old New York, but rather that it has managed change through the years with such aplomb, when other neighborhoods that have experienced commensurate change became messes.
On the east side of the square stand two distinctive high-rise apartment buildings.One, built in 1910, is faced in brilliant glazed-white terra-cotta. The other, built in 1883, is a somber-hued extravaganza of Gothic Victoriana. Neither of these has anything to do with the 1850s Gramercy Park depicted by Edith Wharton in “The Old Maid,” one of her four “Old New York” novellas. The 1883 building – the “Gramercy” – must have seemed a monstrous intrusion upon its delicate setting.Similarly,the two famous clubs on the square’s south side, the Players Club and the National Arts Club, though housed in 1840s buildings, both had their facades altered beyond recognition, the former in the late 1880s, the latter in the early 1880s.
But when we swing around to the west side of the square, two houses, nos. 3 and 4 Gramercy Park, would, in their present appearance, have been familiar to the Ralstons and Lovells of “The Old Maid.” In their main bodies, these are fine red-brick Greek revival townhouses, kin to any number of such houses in the West Village or Brooklyn Heights. What rivets the eye are the beautiful verandas of cast iron, in a stunning profusion of “Grecian” motifs, not least the signal anthemion of the Greek revival.
While we know that New York was a great center of ornamental iron – visible from factory facades in SoHo to porch railings in Cobble Hill – we don’t associate lush iron verandas with our city. Rather, they evoke New Orleans. It’s therefore well to note that Southern cities’ ironwork came from the North (though typically from Philadelphia not New York). One wonders why New York didn’t produce more verandas of this kind than it did.
At no. 4, note the twin lanterns at the foot of the stoop. Before New York had an official mayoral residence, such paired lanterns marked the residences of mayors.The mayor in this instance was James Harper, whose term actually had expired when he moved into the newly built house in 1847. Harper was less known for being mayor than for being one of the original Harper brothers who built what may at one time have been the largest publishing firm in the world, still going strong as HarperCollins.
We don’t know who designed these houses, but there is speculation that they may have been designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, the countryhouse architect and friend of Herman Melville. Davis’s Lyndhurst, in Tarrytown, is one of the finest houses in the country. And nos. 3 and 4 Gramercy Park are among the finest houses in the city.
