Flatiron Art Guide
The stretch of Manhattan running from 14th Street north to 30th doesn’t get the art-world credit it deserves. Chelsea has the galleries. SoHo has the lofts. The Flatiron district gets the tourists photographing a building. Dig a little deeper and you find one of the densest concentrations of art history in the city — a neighborhood that produced Ashcan painters, sheltered Warhol’s most dangerous years, gave New York its most bizarre private hotel rooms, and still anchors some of the finest public sculpture in any American park.
1. The Flatiron Building and Prow Artspace
175 Fifth Avenue
Start at the obvious place, but don’t just photograph it and move on. The Flatiron Building went up in 1902, designed by Daniel Burnham, and its narrow triangular prow cutting into the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway remains one of the genuinely thrilling pieces of urban architecture in America. The building was considered a folly when it went up — engineers predicted it would collapse, neighbors worried the wind tunnel it created would blow women’s skirts up (crowds gathered to watch, and police reportedly had to shoo them away with the phrase “23 skidoo”).
What most people miss is the ground floor. The glassed-in apex of the building’s triangular front doubles as a free exhibition window called the Flatiron Prow Artspace. The tenant at the time was Sprint, which ran the space with a rotating program focused on sustainability, eco-friendly living, technology, and interactivity. Whether or not the current programming hits the mark on any given visit, the concept itself is quietly remarkable: a commercial tenant turning one of the world’s most photographed building facades into a public gallery. You don’t need a ticket. You don’t even need to stop walking.
2. Madison Square Park and Its Sculpture Program
Madison Square Park, Fifth Avenue between 23rd and 26th Streets
Madison Square Park has been running one of the most serious temporary public sculpture programs in New York for years, commissioning and presenting major works on its lawns and pathways. The park sits in the shadow of two of the neighborhood’s great architectural landmarks — the Flatiron to the south and the Met Life Tower to the north — which means any sculpture here has to earn its place against extraordinary competition.
British sculptor Tony Cragg’s series “Walks of Life” exemplified what the program does at its best. Cragg placed three large bronze works around the park, each doing a different job. Caldera, in the southwest corner, was low enough and tactile enough that kids ran around it and touched it — a polished, undulating surface that invited contact. Mixed Feelings, on the northwest lawn, was elevated and distant, its weathered bronze patina gone pale green like the Statue of Liberty, meant for observation at a remove. Points of View, three vertical stacked forms in a central lawn, shifted as you walked around them, their relationship to each other and to the park’s architecture constantly changing. Together they turned a walk through the park into something with a beginning, middle, and end.
The park conservancy has maintained this commissioning tradition for decades — at any given time there’s something worth looking at between the dog walkers and the Shake Shack line.
3. Met Life Tower and the New York Edition Hotel
5 Madison Avenue
The gilded cupola rising above the park’s northeast corner belongs to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, built in 1909. Napoleon LeBrun modeled it after the Campanile di San Marco in Venice, and when it opened it was briefly the tallest building in the world — holding that title for two years until the Woolworth Building surpassed it in 1913. The four clock faces each span 26.5 feet in diameter, with minute hands weighing half a ton.
When MetLife vacated in 2005, the building sat in architectural limbo for years before Ian Schrager — who has a knack for rescuing historically significant New York spaces and filling them with art — converted it into the New York Edition Hotel. The conversion preserved the building’s Gilded Age bones while adding a photograph collection in the clocktower restaurant space curated salon-style, covering walls with images of Max’s Kansas City, Studio 54, the Mudd Club, and the general wreckage of a more interesting New York. Schrager has a type.
4. The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
Founded in 1898 by author and poet Charles De Kay, the National Arts Club occupies a Victorian Gothic mansion on the south side of Gramercy Park that is, by any measure, one of the most beautiful interiors in New York. Tiffany ceilings. A permanent collection packed wall to wall. Period furniture and sculpture in every room. The club was explicitly democratic for its era — women admitted from the beginning, unusual for a private institution at the turn of the century.
The membership list across its history reads like a syllabus: Alfred Stieglitz and Mark Twain were early members. The current roster includes Martin Scorsese, Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke, and Robert Redford. The club also has a history of scandal — a long-serving president’s tenure ended when his twin brother was found guilty of tax fraud, the twins were discovered hoarding in the upstairs apartments, and, most inexplicably, someone started dumping dead birds in Gramercy Park. New York institutions contain multitudes.
The club periodically opens its doors for exhibitions and lectures. When it does, go. The basement gallery where most programming happens is unremarkable, but getting into the mansion itself — the staircases, the permanent collection, the sheer density of historical accumulation — is worth whatever pretext it takes.
5. Gramercy Park and the Calder Nobody Sees
Gramercy Park, between 20th and 21st Streets at Lexington Avenue
Gramercy Park is the only private park in Manhattan. It has been since the 1830s, when the developer Samuel Ruggles laid out the neighborhood and deeded the park to the surrounding property owners. Only residents of the buildings facing the park hold keys. Everyone else peers through the iron fence.
What most people peering through the fence don’t realize is that there is an Alexander Calder mobile inside. It was commissioned in 1969 by “Baby Jane” Holzer — the Warhol superstar — originally for a shopping mall on Long Island developed by her then-husband. The Calder Foundation’s president, who lived on the park, loaned it to the park starting around 2011 and it stayed past its expiration date. A large-scale Calder mobile, one of the defining forms of twentieth-century American sculpture, sitting behind an iron fence in a private park that most of the art world walks right past. This is New York.
6. The Gramercy Park Hotel
2 Lexington Avenue
Built in the late 1920s, the Gramercy Park Hotel has had a remarkable guest list for almost a century. Humphrey Bogart was married here. A young JFK lived here for several months. Babe Ruth drank here. Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Madonna, and Blondie all stayed here. But the hotel’s art credentials were established more recently, when hotelier Ian Schrager hired Julian Schnabel to oversee the redesign and decor.
Schnabel, who is both a filmmaker and a painter of large, uncompromising canvases, designed all the furniture and curated the photographs in the guest rooms. The result is the Rose Bar and Jade Bar, which house a collection that includes Basquiats, Warhols, Hirsts, Harings, Twomblys, and Princes — hung in an environment of hundreds of Edison bulbs that gives the impression of sitting inside a Jeff Wall photograph. It is one of the few hotel interiors in New York where the art collection is actually the point rather than the wallpaper. Drinks are expensive. The collection is worth it.
7. The Players Club
16 Gramercy Park South
Next door to the National Arts Club sits the Players Club, New York’s oldest continuously operating private club in its original location. Edwin Booth — yes, the brother of Lincoln’s assassin — founded it in 1888, explicitly to bring actors and artists together with their audiences in a setting of mutual respect. The theatrical world was a suspect profession in the late nineteenth century; the club was partly a project of social rehabilitation.
Mark Twain was a member. So were Gregory Peck, Kevin Spacey, Liza Minnelli, Jimmy Fallon, and Roger Moore. The club maintains a permanent room dedicated to Everett Raymond Kinstler, one of the great American portrait painters of the twentieth century, whose over 1,200 portraits include official likenesses of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Katharine Hepburn. A formal salon organized around one artist’s achievement, tucked inside a private club on a private park most New Yorkers have never entered.
8. The Block of Artists: East 19th Street
146 and 147 East 19th Street
In the early 1900s, East 19th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue quietly became one of the most interesting artist blocks in New York. The architect Frederick Sterner transformed several brownstones with idiosyncratic facades — eclectic stained glass, decorative tiles, unconventional ornamentation — creating a block that read as a collective art project.
At number 147 lived Robert Winthrop Chanler, a mural painter from old New York money (his family lines ran through the Astors, Stuyvesants, Delanos, and Winthrops). Chanler showed at the Armory Show in 1913, worked for patrons including Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and decorated his own home with the fantastical animal murals that gave it the name the House of Fantasy. Across the street at number 146 lived George Bellows, the Ashcan School painter who spent the years 1910 to 1925 here, working in a studio on the top floor. Bellows used the city around him as source material — the struggling working class, the ease of the upper class, the raw physicality of street life and amateur boxing. The two buildings still stand. They don’t look like much. They were everything.
9. The Carlton Arms Hotel
160 East 25th Street
In the early 1980s, the Carlton Arms was a home for junkies, drunks, and sex workers — the kind of transient hotel that filled a particular New York niche before rising rents made that kind of accommodation economically impossible. The hotel’s manager at the time, Ed Ryan, decided to change direction. He started hiring artists as front-desk employees. The artists asked if they could paint the walls. He said yes.
Since 1984, over 54 rooms and all the common areas of the five-story hotel have been turned over to successive artists who have done whatever they wanted with the space. The lobby goes down to the skeleton. The stairwells are dense with imagery. Each room is entirely different, some quietly strange, some overwhelming. The rates are among the lowest in Manhattan — remarkable given the hotel’s location a few blocks from Gramercy Park. It is not shiny. It is not new. It is genuinely bohemian in the sense that it is a functioning institution built around the idea that art should saturate daily life, and that the people who make it should be trusted with the walls.
10. Danceteria and the Art-Club Continuum
30 West 21st Street
The building at 30 West 21st Street is luxury condos now, which is the fate of most important cultural spaces in New York. From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s it was Danceteria, the nightclub that sat at the exact intersection of art, music, and downtown New York life more completely than any other venue of the era.
Keith Haring worked there as a busboy. Madonna worked the hat-check counter before her first public performance, while she was dating Jean-Michel Basquiat. The club had six floors of programming, including a video lounge designed by video artists John Sanborn and Kit Fitzgerald — essentially a curated moving-image gallery in a nightclub, showing video art, early music videos, and found footage. Kembra Pfahler performed there before fully developing the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. The building itself is a monument to a kind of creative density that New York produced for a specific window of time and has not reliably produced since.
11. Warhol’s Union Square Factories
33 Union Square West and 860 Broadway
Andy Warhol moved the Factory to Union Square in 1968, after his previous space on East 47th Street was demolished. The move brought him closer to Max’s Kansas City at 213 Park Avenue South — the restaurant and bar that was, from 1965 to 1981, the center of the New York art world in a way that no single place has been before or since. Carl Andre, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Roy Lichtenstein, Carolee Schneemann, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Willem de Kooning all drank there. Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and the Velvet Underground played. Debbie Harry waitressed.
On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas walked into the Factory at 33 Union Square West and shot Warhol three times. The third shot passed through his left lung, spleen, stomach, liver, esophagus, and right lung. He was pronounced dead and then revived. After the shooting, the Factory moved to 860 Broadway, where Warhol installed bulletproof doors, closed-circuit surveillance, and secret rear exits. He hired only foreign receptionists so that obsessive callers would give up having to spell their names repeatedly. From here, between 1974 and 1984, he produced the Time Capsules, the Skull paintings, the Piss Paintings, and much of his film work.
12. Union Square Public Art
Union Square Park, 14th to 17th Streets
Union Square itself is a layered text of public art if you slow down enough to read it. The most disorienting piece is Metronome, installed in 1999 on the south facade of One Union Square South. Commissioned through the Public Art Fund at a cost of $3 million, designed by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel after a competition of over 200 submissions, the 100-by-60-foot work combines an undulating brick wall, a circular void with gold-leaf overlay, a protruding rock, a digital clock counting elapsed and remaining hours simultaneously, and a lunar sphere synchronized to the phases of the moon. Most people stop and ask what the hell it is. That’s probably correct.
On the ground, look for the 22 bronze squares arching along the park’s south side. Artist Gregg LeFevre installed them in 2002; each commemorates a moment in the square’s history from the 1600s through 1882, when New York held its first Labor Day parade on this site. They look ancient. They aren’t. That’s the trick.
This neighborhood rewards the kind of attention that most visitors don’t bring to it. The Flatiron Building is the hook, the famous shape in a thousand photographs, but the area around it is denser with art history than almost anywhere in New York — hotels with museum-quality collections, private parks hiding Calder mobiles, townhouses where Ashcan painters worked a century ago, and the ghosts of clubs and factories where the twentieth century was partly invented. Walk slowly and look down occasionally. There’s more here than the skyline.