A locked private square behind a cast iron fence, ringed by brick and brownstone houses from the 1840s onward.
What Gramercy Park looks like
A cast iron fence rings the square and keeps it locked to everyone but keyholders, its posts and finials repeating unbroken from corner to corner under a canopy of plane trees. Cast iron lampposts line the gravel paths inside, and a bronze statue of Edwin Booth as Hamlet stands among the beds, visible through the bars from the street.
Brick and brownstone houses face the square on three sides, mostly three to six storeys tall. Their fronts run Greek Revival, Italianate and Gothic Revival, dating from the 1840s to the 1880s. On the west side, a pair of houses share one arched cast iron veranda over their stoops, a lantern at either end. A corner mansion on the south side wears black shutters on every window under a slate mansard roof, its stoop behind its own iron railing.
Two clubhouses stand side by side further along the south row. One is a Victorian Gothic brownstone with a bay window that looks straight across at the trees, and next door a plainer brick front has an unbroken cornice line. On the east side, an apartment tower rises past its neighbors' roofline in dark red brick, corner turrets capped in copper and a run of dormers along the top.
One block south, East 19th Street runs toward Third Avenue past a row of townhouses where no two fronts match. Cast iron railings and stoops carry over from the square itself, though the fronts here run in brownstone and painted brick rather than the mansard roofs closer to the park.
Shot in Gramercy Park
The opens its own front rooms on the square's south side to film crews, its bay window looking straight out at the trees across the street. Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence both filmed inside the club, redecorated for the second production in a treatment the club kept afterward.
Manhattan Murder Mystery, 1993
National Arts Club
Carol Lipton attends a wine tasting in the club's front room and spots a supposedly dead neighbor riding past on a bus, seen through the same bay window pictured here. The club's exterior on Gramercy Park South also appears in the same film. Street View
What Gramercy Park can double for
Louisburg Square in Boston, Massachusetts
Louisburg Square is Boston's own locked private square, a wrought iron fence around a garden reached only by residents' keys, ringed by Greek Revival row houses built between 1834 and 1847. The scale and the access rule match Gramercy Park closely, brick fronts three or four storeys facing a fenced green the public cannot enter. Boston's bow fronts read narrower in close coverage. Try searching locked square Greek Revival houses now.
Cadogan Square in Chelsea, London
Cadogan Square in Chelsea is a private communal garden behind red brick Queen Anne Revival houses built between 1877 and 1888, open to keyholders only. The red brick and the gabled fronts are a showier, more ornamented style than Gramercy Park's own houses, closer to the apartment tower on its east side than to the square's own rows. Try searching red brick private garden square now.
