A look at Gramercy Park, Manhattan’s only surviving private park.
LOOK, BUT DON’T TOUCH
If you were strolling down Park Avenue South from 23rd Street, you probably wouldn’t even notice that just east of the walls of tall office buildings there’s a small, secluded, formal park that looks as if it were plucked out of 19th-century London. That two-acre green space is the 175-year-old Gramercy Park, and it’s bordered by its very own streets: Gramercy Park West, East, North (actually East 21st Street), and South (actually East 20th Street). In fact, the park is so special that even the surrounding neighborhood has taken the name Gramercy Park.
The park is enclosed by a wrought-iron fence made of eight-foot-high bars. Inside the fence are huge trees, carefully tended shrubs and flower beds, clipped lawns, raked gravel paths, and old-fashioned wooden benches. No litter, no Frisbees, no pets, no parties. It’s beautiful, but it’s also off-limits: On each side of the park are gates with heavy-duty locks. Only the people whose apartment buildings or townhouses face directly onto the park get the privilege of receiving a key to the gates—and they have to pay for it.
Gramercy Park has rarely been open to the public. In 1863 it was briefly turned into an encampment for Union soldiers sent to control riots that broke out in protest of Civil War conscription. And the gates used to be open for one day each year (Gramercy Day, usually the first Saturday in May), but that tradition was abandoned in 2007. It’s still open for a few hours for caroling on Christmas Eve. And on 9/11, even Gramercy Park’s rules were suspended, and the south and north gates were unlocked to allow hundreds of New Yorkers to hurry through the park as they escaped from downtown Manhattan.
NICE SWAMP
Early Dutch settlers called the Gramercy area Krom Moerasje (“little crooked swamp”) or Krom Mesje (“little crooked knife,” because of the shape of the swamp and brook on the site). Those names gradually transformed to Crommessie, which over time became Gramercy.
Oldest organization founded and still running in NYC: Collegiate School (est. 1628).
In the early 1800s, Manhattan was growing and moving northward. Samuel B. Ruggles, a clever real-estate developer, bought the “little crooked swamp” in 1831 with the intention of turning it into a level, dry, open square surrounded by lots that would be sold for the construction of townhouses. The central square would be privately maintained as a park and cooperatively used by the owners of the lots, with no government support or interference. Ruggles spent $180,000 to drain the swamp and level the terrain. Then he laid out the park, divided the surrounding land into 66 parcels, and began to sell the lots. He decreed that no owner could “erect within forty feet of the front of any of the…lots any other buildings saving brick or stone dwelling houses of at least three stories in height.” According to this rule, the park would be ringed only by gracious homes—no stores or businesses. To complete his plan, in 1833 Ruggles deeded the park to a group of trustees who would act on behalf of the owners to maintain the character of the park and the surrounding area.
A GOOD MANSE IS HARD TO FIND
By the 1860s, Gramercy Park—exclusive, quiet, beautiful—had become a fashionable enclave of the wealthy, the accomplished, and the politically powerful. Here are some of the important addresses in the neighborhood:
• #3 and #4 Gramercy Park West. Two of the most unusual townhouses on the park, these two were built in the 1840s and have iron lacework porches that look a lot like the French Quarter of New Orleans. James Harper, founder of Harper & Brothers publishing company and mayor of New York in the mid-1840s, lived in #4 from 1847 until his death in 1869. When he moved in, “Mayor’s Lamps” were installed at the entrance, an old Dutch custom for making it easier to find the mayor’s house at night. But for Harper they were purely ceremonial, since he wasn’t actually the mayor anymore.
• #15 Gramercy Park South. Politician Samuel J. Tilden bought this house in the 1860s and hired Calvert Vaux (co-designer of Central Park) to give it an overhaul. Vaux added bay windows and Gothic ornamentation, and the renovation was completed in 1874, the year Tilden was elected governor of New York. Two years later, after he ran for president and lost, Tilden decided he’d better do a few more renovations—politics, he’d found, could get a little rough—so he installed rolling steel doors behind the bay windows and built an underground tunnel to 19th Street…just in case he needed to get out fast.
Waterloo, NY, is recognized as the birthplace of Memorial Day.
• #16 Gramercy Park South. In 1888, Edwin Booth, America’s most celebrated actor (and brother of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln), bought the mansion at #16. That same year, Booth joined with Mark Twain, General William T. Sherman, and 13 others to found the Players—a gentlemen’s club for actors, artists, writers, lawyers, and other professionals interested in the arts. Booth deeded #16 to the Players, on the condition that he be allowed to keep his apartment on the third floor; he died there in 1893. The Players still own #16, which now functions as a social club, a repository of theater memorabilia, and a performance space.
• #36 Gramercy Park East. Designed in 1909, with elaborate pointed arches, protruding stone gargoyles, and a pair of knights in armor guarding the exterior, this 12-story building has been home to several more historical figures: actor John Barrymore, circus founder Alfred Ringling, sculptor Daniel Chester French (who created the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln at Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial), and playwright Eugene O’Neill.
George Washington had no navy during the Revolutionary War, so he used privateers. One of New York’s best known was Stewart Dean, who captained a six-gun sloop called Beaver which sailed from New York in 1776, 1779, and 1781. Dean took Beaver throughout the Caribbean and the Atlantic—attacking British ships and confiscating their cargoes to help feed and clothe the American army and help fill the depleted American war treasury.
The first “subway series” took place in 1921 between the Giants and the Yankees.