The Players is a private social club founded in 1888 when Edwin Booth, the greatest American actor of his time, purchased a Gothic Revival-style mansion facing Gramercy Park and commissioned architect Stanford White to transform it into a certain club "for the promotion of social intercourse between the representative members of the dramatic profession and the kindred professions of literature, painting, sculpture and music, and the patrons of the arts." More than 130 years later, the tradition continues.