New Yorkers regard Gramercy Park as an intact bit of old New York. Yet little remains of the buildings that originally surrounded the park when the neighborhood developed in the 1840s and 1850s. Many houses have yielded to apartment buildings, while other houses bear little resemblance to their original appearance. An example is the National Arts Club, on Gramercy Park southwest of Irving Place.

The club, founded in 1898, moved into this house in 1905. It was originally two houses, both standard issue brownstone houses of the 1840s. Samuel J. Tilden purchased 15 Gramercy Park South in 1863. Tilden was a powerful railroad lawyer. Unlike his friend and confidant John Bigelow, who lived on the other side of Irving Place, Tilden never joined the Republican Party, instead identifying with the anti-slavery “Barnburner” faction of the Democratic Party. A year after moving into the house, Tilden led the opposition to New York Mayor Fernando Wood’s anti-war “Copperhead” faction at the Democratic National Convention, and here Tilden lived when in 1868 New York hosted its first convention, the Democratic convention at Tammany Hall on 14th Street.

Tilden was at the time Democratic national chairman. He led the movement to prosecute the notorious “Boss” Tweed. Though Tweed was a Democrat, Tilden felt the party had to rid itself of corruption so as to take that away as a national campaign issue. In 1874 Tilden was elected governor of New York, and in 1876 won the Democratic presidential nomination. He ran against the Republican Rutherford Hayes of Ohio. The New Yorker won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College by one vote – after disputed electoral counts in three states including Florida.

Tilden then withdrew from politics. A bibliophile, his book collection outgrew 15 Gramercy Park South. The neat solution was to buy the house next door, number 14, and combine the two. In 1881 he hired Calvert Vaux, the co-designer of Central Park, and George K. Radford to remodel the two houses into one, with a new facade.

Vaux and Radford transformed two plain brownstones into a Victorian Gothic extravaganza, completed in 1884.The keynote is “polychromy,” or the dramatic use of materials of contrasting colors, including brownstone, reddish Carlisle sandstone from Scotland, and granite. A profusion of gables, finials, pointed arches, and carvings give great visual interest to the facade, restored a few years ago by Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn.

The most delightful of the carvings is the set of five portrait heads of Tilden’s favorite writers: Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Goethe, and Benjamin Franklin. Notice also that the house has two entrances: a basement entrance on the left and a high-stooped entrance on the right. In the gable over the doorway on the right is a portrait head of Michelangelo.

Tilden died in 1886. His “Tilden Trust” helped New York City establish its first public library. The house languished as a rooming house until the National Arts Club arrived. The club this year celebrates the centennial of its ownership of this splendid house.

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