Archibald Gracie, a man accustomed to getting what he wanted, was one of a remarkable coterie of aggressive merchants who in the early nineteenth century helped make New York City the commercial capital of the United States. Scottish-born, the son of a weaver, Gracie had clerked for a London shipping firm and acquired a part interest in a ship. In 1784, not yet thirty, he sailed to America in charge of a full cargo of goods whose profits went directly into his pocket. With this windfall he helped form a mercantile company in New York, then transferred to Petersburg, Virginia, where he made a bundle trading tobacco. Back in New York in 1793 he went into business as a commissary merchant and shipowner. A friend of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and a member of the Tontine Association, which supervised the trading of stocks, active in insurance and banking affairs, Gracie was one of the most powerful men in town. Although he maintained a principal residence near his office downtown, he presently began looking for a spot in the outlying countryside on which to build a suitable summer home.

He got the best—one of the supreme sites in New York, located on the East River near present-day Eighty-eighth Street and commanding an unexampled view of the treacherous strait known as Hell Gate. Gracie in 1799 constructed a comfortable Federal-style center-hall dwelling that faced roughly south to give him a good view of the river. A few years later, however, perhaps realizing he had scanted his main attraction, he added onto the north side, rearranged interior walls, and turned the house’s axis ninety degrees to orient it to the east, with a new front door dramatically facing Hell Gate. (The switch produced an imbalance of windows on the eastern facade that most visitors hardly notice.) The wide porch that surrounded the house on three sides was, like the roofline, surmounted with delicate trellis railings, while the interior was sumptuous, with exquisitely carved Adam mantels and delicate chandeliers. It was a marvelous setting for parties, and Gracie gave elaborate ones, gathering under his roof the likes of John Quincy Adams, Washington Irving, and Louis Philippe, future king of France.

The splurging was short-lived. During Jefferson’s ruinous embargo of 1807 to 1809, Gracie lost two valuable ships laden with gold and silver; other setbacks followed, and his fortune disappeared. In 1823 he sold his beloved mansion; he died six years later.

Luckily the two families that owned the mansion during the next sixty years cared for it well. The same could not be said of the city, which acquired the property in 1896 following condemnation proceedings because of a park it was constructing nearby (today’s Carl Schurz Park). The ornamental trellis railings were torn off, and the house became a kind of shabby outbuilding in the park. For a while it housed public rest rooms and an ice-cream parlor. In the 1920s it briefly served as the first home of