Why Irving Place matters.
Irving Place is a historic Manhattan street where Gramercy's nineteenth-century residential character meets intimate blocks of brick rowhouses, institutional architecture and a street plan created alongside the neighborhood's private square.
Set between East 14th Street and Gramercy Park South near Union Square and just steps from Washington Irving High School, the six-block street forms a narrow north-south corridor between Park Avenue South and 3rd Avenue at the western edge of Gramercy. Brick and brownstone houses survive beside later apartment buildings and larger institutional structures, preserving changes in scale that accumulated as the area developed from an elite residential enclave into a denser Manhattan neighborhood. Short blocks and comparatively narrow roadway dimensions keep opposite facades visually close, with stoops, ironwork, projecting bays and mature street trees defining much of the pedestrian route north of East 17th Street. The street terminates directly against Gramercy Park, making its northern blocks part of a physical sequence conceived during the nineteenth century to connect Union Square with Samuel B. Ruggles's residential development farther uptown. The result is a compact Manhattan corridor whose surviving houses, close-set facades, restrained street dimensions and direct approach to Gramercy Park preserve the physical logic of an urban plan created almost two centuries ago.
What defines Irving Place.
Irving Place is best known for carrying Washington Irving's name through a street created by lawyer, politician and property developer Samuel B. Ruggles as part of his ambitious reshaping of the area around Gramercy Park. Ruggles acquired Gramercy property in 1831 and pursued a private residential square surrounded by building lots, using controlled development to raise the value and architectural quality of the surrounding district. His plans required stronger north-south access between Third and Fourth avenues, prompting him to petition the New York State Legislature in 1832 for a new thoroughfare extending from 14th Street toward 30th Street. Ruggles owned most of the adjoining land and carried much of the street's assessed construction cost. He divided the route into two named sections: Irving Place honored his friend Washington Irving, author of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. and A History of New York, and Lexington Avenue commemorated the Revolutionary War Battle of Lexington. Irving Place opened northward to 20th Street in 1833, three years before Lexington Avenue opened farther north. Ruggles, Cornelius T. Williams and Peter G. Stuyvesant subsequently imposed restrictive covenants on properties in their respective developments, requiring substantial brick or stone houses within fixed construction periods and prohibiting slaughterhouses, manufactories and other incompatible uses. By 1839, substantial new houses were rising around Union Square and the streets approaching Gramercy, turning Ruggles's transportation intervention into part of a broader residential expansion north of the older city.
The association with Washington Irving later acquired an architectural mythology of its own at 49 Irving Place, a house built by Peter Voorhis in 1843-1844 as part of a group with Nos. 45 and 47. Charles Jackson Martin and his wife became the first occupants, followed during the 1850s by Henry and Ann Coggill and banker Thomas Phelps with his wife Elizabeth, establishing a residential chronology that excludes Irving himself. Actress Elsie de Wolfe and theatrical and literary agent Elizabeth Marbury moved into No. 49 in 1892 and remained until 1911, years during which their home became associated with New York theatrical and literary society. A later plaque by Hungarian sculptor Alexander Finta asserted that Irving had lived in the house, helping perpetuate a claim unsupported by its nineteenth-century occupancy history. The author instead visited a nephew living nearby, leaving the street name itself, bestowed by Ruggles during Irving's lifetime, as the genuine connection between writer and place. Another major commemoration arrived across the street when the city developed Washington Irving High School at 40 Irving Place for an institution that had begun in 1902 as a branch of Wadleigh High School and evolved into Girls' Technical High School. C. B. J. Snyder designed the purpose-built school with brick, limestone and terra cotta, an arched entrance, paired Florentine Renaissance windows and a tiled hip roof. Barry Faulkner later created a mural cycle depicting early Manhattan for its interior, extending Irving's literary association into a civic building filled with visual interpretations of New York history.
How Irving Place fits.
Irving Place works as the anchor for a Gramercy outing connecting Edwin Booth's theatrical circle, Charles De Kay's arts institution and the architectural history of New York's electrical utility.
Begin at The Players, founded by actor Edwin Booth on December 31, 1888 after he purchased a Gramercy Park townhouse and commissioned Stanford White to remodel it for a new social club. White added a two-story colonnaded porch with elaborate iron lanterns, and Booth transferred the deed along with his theatrical library, artworks and memorabilia to the organization at its founding ceremony. Booth envisioned a club where actors associated with people from other professions and where his collection remained available for scholarship; sixteen charter members present that evening included actor Lawrence Barrett and figures drawn from the wider cultural world. A third-floor apartment remained Booth's home, placing the celebrated Shakespearean actor inside the institution he had created until his death in 1893. Continue to The National Arts Club, founded in 1898 by author, poet and New York Times critic Charles De Kay with artists and patrons seeking a permanent institution devoted to the arts. Financier Spencer Trask helped the organization acquire Samuel Tilden's paired Gramercy Park houses in 1906, bringing the club into a residence transformed decades earlier for the former New York governor and presidential candidate. Tilden had commissioned Central Park co-designer Calvert Vaux to combine and remodel the properties with sandstone, bay windows and Aesthetic Movement ornament; John La Farge supplied stained glass, Ellin and Kitson produced elaborate interior woodwork, and Donald MacDonald created a stained-glass dome for Tilden's library. Conclude at Consolidated Edison Building, whose Irving Place frontage grew through successive campaigns by two major architectural firms. Henry Hardenbergh designed the earliest sections between 1910 and 1914 with giant segmental arches, double-story porticos, rusticated limestone piers and an early program of exterior electric illumination embedded into spandrels, soffits and upper-story architectural elements. Warren & Wetmore and engineers Thomas E. Murray, Inc. expanded the complex between 1926 and 1929, wrapping new 18-story office wings around a 26-story corner tower. The later tower was conceived as a memorial to company employees killed during World War I and crowned with a bronze lantern whose illumination turned the utility headquarters itself into an architectural demonstration of electric light. The progression moves from Booth and White's theatrical institution through De Kay, Tilden and Vaux's arts setting and culminates in Hardenbergh and Warren & Wetmore's utility headquarters, connecting performance, patronage and electrical architecture along the streets surrounding Gramercy Park.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
