Records of the Hotel Gramatan,
1907-ca. 1964
Entire Record
Catalog
Transcription
The Hotel Gramatan dominated the skyline of the village of Bronxville with its Spanish Colonial, or Mission, style architecture from the day it opened in 1905 until most of it was torn down in 1972, eventually replaced by townhouses. Only the arcade on the ground level and the elevator tower survived.
Built on Sunset Hill in Lawrence Park by real estate developer William Van Duzer Lawrence, the hotel was the epitome of high style and elegance. It had 300 guest rooms, three restaurants, a spacious lobby and a grand staircase leading down into a ballroom. It remained one of the country’s most exclusive suburban hotels until the Depression in the 1930s, when it began a long, slow decline.
The ca. 1960 greeting card shown here reproduces a painting by Hughson Hawks that was commissioned for the hotel’s opening in 1905. The Easter Sunday menu from 1907 and the brochures from ca. 1910 and 1964 impart a sense of what the earlier brochure called the hotel’s “luxury without ostentation.”