Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury

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New York's Gramercy Park was the Bloomsbury of America. Here Samuel Ruggles, who created Gramercy Park, hosted a grand ball for the visiting celebrity Charles Dickens and his "fat little wife." Here Walt Whitman gratefully accepted from Richard Watson Gilder a rare invitation to a party at a time when few found the poet of Leaves of Grass socially acceptable. Edwin Booth, paralyzed by remorse over his brother's assassination of the president, here sat silently behind drawn curtains. And here O. Henry searched the faces of New York's first underground travelers for the tales he would write about the city he called "Bagdad on the Subway."

Gramercy Park brings to life a place and time of dazzling intellectual achievement. Walk with Henry James, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, George Bellows, and scores of others in an intimate tour of the extraordinary place that helped shape the literary and artistic values of modern America.

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Customer Reviews

Review by Anonymous, 2000-03-27

I get a big kick out of learning fun facts about New York with which to impress my friends, and this book did not disappoint. In-depth looks at Gramercy residents such as Peter Cooper, Edwin Booth, and the visual artists of American modernity are very satisfying, and the tone of the book is nicely conversational. Illustrated with both photographs and drawings, it makes a great companion piece for a walk around Gramercy. Not as interesting as books about the "low-life" of New York's past, and (for a book written by a woman) a little in awe of the tremendous MEN who founded and lived around the park-- however, it's a very comprehensive and well-written history of one of New York's oldest neighborhoods.