In late 2004, numerous older hotel properties in the city in prime locations began to be converted to luxury condominium apartments to take advantage of a very, very strong market for such units.

Some of these projects involved total conversion such as the former Intercontinental Hotels on Central Park South and on Lexington Avenue at 48th Street and the former Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue at 81st Street; others involved partial conversions such as this property and the Plaza and St. Regis Hotels on Fifth Avenue; and demolition, such as the Mayflower Hotel at 15 Central Park West.

This property was erected by Bing & Bing as the Gramercy Park Hotel at 2 Lexington Avenue in 1925 and was designed by Robert T. Lyons.

It replaced a house belonging to Stanford White, the famous architect that had replaced a house in which Edith Wharton, the novelist, was born. In 1930, Thompson & Churchill designed an expansion along 21st Street.

Overlooking Gramercy Park, which is private and locked and open only to residents of buildings facing it, the property has an interesting history as the residence of famous writers such as S. J. Perelman, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy, and as the site of Humphrey Bogart’s wedding in 1926 and of a several-month-stay shortly after it opened by Joseph P. Kennedy and his family including the 11-year-old John F. Kennedy, Jr. Babe Ruth often drank at the hotel’s bar.

The developers of this project are Ian Schrager, a founding partner of Studio 54, the...