Publisher's Synopsis
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. "Carole Klein has written a cultural history of Manhattan, appropriately centered in the area of Gramercy Park, which is the most amusing, the most diverting, and the most instructive that I have ever come across.";--Louis Auchincloss "The original lineaments of Gramercy Park still largely survive. So, too--when it isn't drowned out by traffic--does something of what must have been its original charm. In a city of change, the neighborhood represents continuity; and Carole Klein has had the excellent idea of tracing its history from its beginning to the recent past ...She has a nice eye for the droll detail and the picturesque quotation ...Entertaining."--John Gross, New York Times "Beguiling ...as pleasing as the park itself."--Library Journal
