The city acquired Gracie Mansion in 1896 after its previous owner, Noah Wheaton, died and left the historic home riddled with back taxes. The house was incorporated into an ongoing public land development, Carl Schurz Park. Gracie Mansion became many things over the next 20 or so years: “It actually turned from this merchant class, high-end country home to a public restroom and an ice cream shop at one point, and a storage facility for parks equipment,” Giulietta Fiore, executive director of the Historic House Trust of New York City, says. “It was repurposed and utilized for what the city needed at the moment.”
During the Depression era, Gracie got a much-needed remodel thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and New York’s ambitious parks commissioner, Robert Moses, decided to turn it into a historic house museum. But it never really gained any popularity due to its then still remote location. FDR Drive hadn’t been finished yet, so the only way to get close was via the mind-numbingly slow crosstown trolley.
That’s not to say that New Yorkers didn’t have ideas on what could be done with this newly renovated home. A young man named Thomas Cooney lobbied the city to turn it into a nightclub. “There is no place in Manhattan that offers us this entertainment. The movies are the inevitable answers to our dates. After the picture, a soda in an overcrowded ice cream parlor where corner-store roughnecks ruin any atmosphere of pleasantness,” he wrote in a letter to then mayor Fiorello La Guardia, republished in Gracie Mansion: A Celebration of New York City’s Mayoral Residence. “Nobody ever goes to see Gracie Mansion. My friends and I would like to start at once, with your approval.”
But Moses had a better idea. Since the 1660s, New York’s mayors had lived in their own homes. Moses, however, believed they should have a more dignified residence. He originally proposed the Charles M. Schwab House, a grand 75-room mansion on the Upper West Side. Perhaps wisely, La Guardia thought that might be a political death wish in those Great Depression days, when so many New Yorkers stood outside in soup lines. But would he consider the beautiful but long-neglected landmark of Gracie Mansion?
“Robert Moses saw it and was like, ‘This is an amazing location. Let’s figure out how to create the mayoral residence out of this location, just like some of the other residences of leaders of cities and states in the United States and across the world,’” Fiore says. In 1942—and after another light refresh from the WPA—La Guardia and his family moved in.