Bounded by 14th Street and 34th Street on Manhattan's East Side, Gramercy Park, a neighborhood filled with brownstones and other townhouses, is one of the most pleasant places to live in New York City. It has four parks - Madison Square Park, Gramercy Park, Union Square Park, and Stuyvesant Park. Gramercy Park and Stuyvesant Park have both been designated as national landmarks and Gramercy Park is the only remaining private park in New York City. Only if you're lucky enough to buy or rent an apartment in a co-op, condo, or rental building bordering Gramercy Park will you be able to get keys to it.
Manhattan's Gramercy Park neighborhood is rich in history. The original Madison Square Garden was located there. Abraham Lincoln gave a galvanizing speech at the Cooper Institute in 1860, while Edwin Booth - brother of John Wilkes Booth -- actually lived on Gramercy Park. Statues of Lincoln and Booth can be found in the Gramercy Park neighborhood.
The quaint stretch of street known as Irving Place is named after author Washington Irving, whose nephew owned a place here. Irving Place is lined with old row houses.
Landmark buildings in Gramercy Park include the Flatiron, Metropolitan Life and New York Life Buildings. The Flatiron, south of Madison Square Park, is probably one of the most photographed buildings in all of New York City, with its unique triangular shape coming to a rounded point near Madison Square. The Metropolitan Life Tower is actually two buildings connected by a skywalk and boasts Wyeth murals in its lobby. The New York Life Building is best known, aside from its architecture, for the fact that it was built where Madison Square Garden used to be.
Today, the Gramercy Park neighborhood is filled with excellent restaurants -- including Pete's Tavern, the oldest saloon in New York City - as well as nightclubs, chic stores and the largest Greenmarket in New York City, where you can buy fresh produce year round. Although Gramercy Park still has many beautiful prewar apartment buildings and townhouses, it is a young and vital neighborhood where you can rent apartments or buy coops or condo in modern high-rise luxury apartment buildings and converted lofts in addition to brownstones.
