See inside the historic Gramercy Park Hotel's liquidation sale, where people wait in line for hours and spend thousands on artwork, embroidered chairs, and plush pillows

Gramercy Park is one of Manhattan's oldest neighborhoods, known for its quiet, residential feel. The hotel — with its 185 guestrooms and suites, upscale bars, and rooftop terrace — has long played host to a cache of guests: Madonna, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, John F. Kennedy, Babe Ruth, The Rolling Stones, Humphrey Bogart, Blondie, The Clash, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono, the list goes on.

The crowd wasn't moving when I arrived but I could tell people were bristling with excitement from their smiles and the light chatter. I saw people loading furniture into SUVs and a lovely set of stately, embroidered tapestry chairs waiting to be transported to their new home.

I couldn't see anything inside the hotel yet. I headed towards the back of the line, which stretched around the corner and down the block.

I wasn't surprised to see a line, especially reading all the buzz online. One TikTok video of the sale now has over 750,000 views.

Roughly 1,000 people have come to the sale every day, the auction house said.

I saw an assortment of people waiting in line: a mother with her newborn, young couples, and small groups of friends. I counted 126 people in line as I made my way to the back. As I waited, I heard one passerby say she waited for four hours the other day. The line didn't look too long, so I guessed It'd be about 30 minutes.

One of the main reasons people were waiting in line for so long and spending hundreds or thousands at the sale was because they all wanted a piece of history.

For one shopper, this red mirror is just one piece of the city she was saving. She already found an entire New York City traffic light at a flea market.

"I want to have a bar one day with some NYC stuff," she told Insider.

One auctioneer told me that there's already been at least one bid on the chandelier, but that the chandelier is off the market. Why? "I have no idea. We were told it's not for sale," was all I got from an auctioneer.

It looked like a maze: lush, velvet sofas with $55 matching pillows pushed against the walls, $500 ring-pull cabinets, and $300 mirrored-glass coffee tables. Small picture books of "The Seasons of New York" and copies of Kerby Jean-Raymond's "Surface" dotted the landscape. The grand, beaming Venetian chandelier over our heads shined over an otherwise shadowy and musty lobby.

There was so much furniture that I could barely see the famed Aubusson rug in the lobby designed by Julian Schnabel, the Brooklyn artist behind many of the lauded art pieces inside the hotel.

There were muted conversations happening around me and I was entertained by some of what I heard.

"Sir, the alcohol is not for sale. I don't know how they keep appearing," one worker said.

"How do you know the prices?" one person asked an auctioneer. "You just ask one of us," he responded. I'm not sure the auctioneer answered their question, but I think they caught his drift.

Others lightly scoffed at the prices when they heard them, like one person who joked they could carve Gramercy Park Hotel's logo himself or another person who repeated the price of a cabinet several times in disbelief.

"I don't think I'll need any of this stuff," one person said.

There's less access to the upstairs rooms than when the sale first started. Now, anyone who is interested in purchasing and seeing a few of the hotel's guestrooms and suites upstairs will have a better chance on weekends, Benigno told Insider.

The prices seemed to be arbitrarily set by the auctioneers. Depending on which auctioneer you asked, you might be quoted different prices with just a single, passing glance. I overheard the same red mirror I saw outside of the hotel being quoted at $400 — $100 less than what one person paid.

I heard lamps being quoted for $400, leather tables for $500, television monitors were anywhere from $150 to $250, and drawers could cost up to $500.

The sofas, I found out, were not yet for sale because they were "part of the building so they have to stay here," Joseph Benigno, the owner of Best Buy Auctioneers and lead auctioneer, said, adding that there are around a dozen tenants still living in the hotel.

There have been whispers that the building will be turned into condominiums. But auctioneers told Insider that it's just a rumor.

Benigno kept one eye on traffic and the other on furniture sales. He would let in a dozen or so people at a time, and I didn't count more than 50 people inside the lobby and Rose Bar rooms while I was there.

The second room housed the former Rose Bar, what used to be an upscale, bohemian cocktail parlor. One shopper tried to purchase two bottles of Bombay Sapphire Gin, much to the annoyance of the auctioneer, who wondered out loud who kept supplying the alcohol. He was one of many shoppers I saw who were rather possessive over their found treasures.

While Andy Warhol was a signature touch in the Rose Bar and Jean-Michel Basquiat could easily be stumbled into, neither the Warhol or Basquiat were for sale to the public.

When I announced my surprise at how no one seemed to want to purchase this photograph of a woman, one woman said "She's $1,000!" Another person overheard my comment and said it's a steal because he had seen the same artwork online for double the price. Artwork was amongst the most expensive items for sale at the liquidation, according to Best Buy Auctioneers.

While I didn't see much use for most of the items I saw, I was really interested in the books — mostly New York City-themed picture books meant for coffee tables and tourists — including one book called "Music in the Classic Period" by Reinhard G. Pauly with a stamped inscription on the first page showing its journey to the Gramercy Park Hotel from the Wausau East Senior High School's Music Department.

I also saw Ric Burns and James Sanders' "New York: An Illustrated History" on sale for $30, which is half the sticker price.

For those who are especially attached to the hotel and artistic vision belonging to Julian Schnabel, I saw some items for sale with the hotel's logo, which Schnabel had designed. There were coffee cup sleeves, room slippers, as well as the hotel's signature bathrobes for $100. The GPH umbrellas, t-shirts and hats were sold quickly, according to Avenue Magazine Editor-in-Chief Peter Davis. Those were already gone when I arrived. There were dozens of bottles of the hotel's Aesop clove bud and anise mouthwash bottles for sale, as well.

"The best stuff was the GPH logo items — the bathrobes and the umbrellas," Davis told Insider. "The tee shirts and hats vanished fast. Stuff was pretty pricey for a city-mandated auction/sale! If I was opening a gothic restaurant I would have snagged some of the upholstered tapestry chairs. The dishes and plates were so basic and boring and not 'luxury hotel'-like — think high school cafeteria."

People easily spent thousands on the spot, including one woman who made several trips to the hotel and spent more than $10,000 each time.

"Well, it probably took them more than an hour, but she spent $33,000," one auctioneer, Mark, told Insider.

There were people who tried to negotiate the prices, some jokingly and some who were serious, according to Best Buy Auctioneers. But "100% of the time, they kept walking and paid the price and left," said Mark, one of the auctioneers.

Nur Khan, the former creative director of the hotel's Rose Bar, told Insider that he revisited his old haunt with his business partner, John McDonald, owner of several downtown restaurants, including Lure Fishbar and Bowery Meat Market.

"I picked up some velvet ottomans from Rose Bar and put them in my current Bar Butterfly," Khan said. "Also bought some large bolts of velvet fabric and brand new rugs that were in the large suites."

I left the liquidation feeling like I wouldn't be able to replicate this experience anywhere else. The most recent auction of a similar caliber was in 2020, when the soon-to-be-renovated Waldorf Astoria held an auction for 80,000 items. Now that I've experienced the Gramercy Park Hotel sale, I wish I was at Waldorf Astoria auction.

Even though I don't personally have any ties to the hotel, I witnessed a relationship people shared with the building that was visibly special. And public auctions seem to be a low-barrier way to bridge history with the present.

"It's a hidden part of the American capital system," Mark, one of the auctioneers, told Insider.
"You're gonna get an education about the American capital system, you're not going to get anywhere else. If you don't come, you're never going to know that this exists in a way that it does."

Meanwhile, those with a personal connection to the Gramercy Park Hotel walked out with more than just household goods.

"The one thing that wasn't for sale was the GPH memories," Peter Davis, the Avenue Magazine Editor-in-Chief, told Insider. "Everyone in the NYC social scene has one. I remember meeting Lil' Kim at a [Marc Jacobs] opening party. I congratulated her on her release from prison and she gave me a huge hug and said "I love you baby." What a cool moment. I was a regular cohost of the Rose Bar's Halloween party and all the cohost's rooms became mini after-hours parties. If those walls could gossip!"