The death mask unearthed at the Players Club

When Players Club President Townes Coates joined the organization in 2016, the furniture and artifacts in the Edwin Booth Room looked much the same as they did when Booth died over a century ago: a bronze cast of the hand of Booth's daughter Edwina in his living room table ; a portrait of his first wife, Mary Devlin, in the drawing room; and in a corner to the left of the fireplace, a locked cupboard.

“It was locked the whole time we were here,” Coates said. “We always thought it was an air duct between us and the National Arts Club.” But two years ago, the club and its affiliated nonprofit, the Players Foundation for Theater Education, began a major restoration of the Booth Room in hopes of renovating every inch of the room – which meant finally opening up the closet this summer. The architects tried out a giant key box that had been sitting in the office for “who knows how long,” says Tim Redmond, vice president of the foundation. But unfortunately none worked. So they took the door off its hinges. Inside they found a death mask of Booth cast in plaster. They later discovered in the club's archives that the last mention of the mask was in the 1950s, meaning it had been locked away for almost a century. “And it happened the morning after he died in that room,” Coates says.

The cupboard in the wall to the right of the fireplace was closed and locked for almost a century.
Photo: Wendy Goodman

The death mask, made a few hours after Booth's death. “It's so incredibly detailed, you can see his eyelashes and hair,” says Redmond.
Photo: Wendy Goodman

Booth, a famous Shakespearean actor throughout his life, is probably better known today as the brother of President Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. He founded the Players Club in 1888 after purchasing the mansion at 16 Gramercy Park South, hoping to create a club where artists and artists of all stripes could come together and always have a room to stay. When he bequeathed the mansion to the club, he had only two wishes: that the building remain a club in perpetuity and that the architect Stanford White, who designed the interior, create a permanent space for it. Coates plans to keep the mask in the closet and only show it off on special occasions or occasionally to club members.

The meticulous first two phases of the restoration, led by preservation specialists from EverGreene Architectural Arts, included replacing the windows and shutters, which had long been boarded up with plastic boards and blinds to prevent sun damage. Under layers of paint, they also exposed the room's original wallpaper and recreated it on both sides of the room. They cleaned and reframed artwork and restored a number of furniture pieces, including the daybed, dressing table, leather wingback chair, stair railings and chandelier. Further work is still to come. Ultimately, says Redmond, “the goal is to see what Booth saw when he lived here.”

The bed: Booth's restored bed and the daybed where Edwina slept as she cared for him in his final days. Booth's slippers can be seen on the side of the bed.
Photo: Wendy Goodman

The skull on the shelf: Booth received the skull by his father Junius, also an actor, who once shared a prison cell with a hanged horse thief. The two developed a friendship and the thief bequeathed his skull to him. Junius later used it to perform Hamlet, as did Edwin.
Photo: Courtesy of the players

Booth had a cast made of his hand holding the hand of his daughter Edwina when she was a child.
Photo: Wendy Goodman