Robert W. Chambers' secret Manhattan studio

Chambers is best known as a resident of Broadalbin, NY, but spent his winters in New York City.  In that less private environment, he found it useful to maintain a separate space for writing, away from the distractions of New York society life. 

Broadalbin historian Lewis Cornell is sadly no longer with us.  But in the 2000s his successor, Jay Nellis, passed on his recollections to Chambers researcher Larry Loc, who posted the relevant correspondence on his website:

Mr. Chambers kept as a secret the location of his New York City office.  [His chauffeur, Leon] Crannel left him at a club each morning, from where he walked to his office. He was then picked up at the club following the day’s work.

This echoes Stanley J. Kunitz's 1934 biographical reference book Authors Today and Yesterday, which says:  

During the winter months Chambers lives in New York City and has an office, the location of which not even his family knows. Here he writes daily from ten to six, secure from distraction. He says his stories have the most erratic way of developing. "Sometimes I begin with the last chapter, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes I lay out an elaborate skeleton. The despair of my publisher is this uncertainty of working method. I have sometimes written thirty thousand words, waited two weeks to decide what should happen next, and torn up the whole thirty thousand to get rid of the dilemma. It was much easier for me to do that than to doctor the manuscript."  

This has for quite some time been spoken of as a lost location, kept so secret that future researchers were unable to find it.  I don't know how much serious effort has been made and how much of this talk is truth or myth, but I do believe I may have found it.  

Late-1920s editions of The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association include membership rolls, complete with addresses.  Several list Mr. Chambers thus: 

 

 Chambers, Robert W. - 43 East 83rd St., New York.  

At first I'd thought this was the family home, not a secret studio.  Chambers' wife Elsie was active in the NYC art and antique community (contemporary sources note her making donations of paintings and furniture to institutions), so it seemed unlikely Chambers would use a private address in a context that would be published.  But of course, the sources and oral history may have overstated the absolute secrecy for effect, and the world was so much less searchable back then.  

This weekend I got ahold of Chambers' 1934 New York Times obituary (which is paywalled and not available through my library's Newspapers.com subscription, so I hadn't read it before) and it very briefly mentions the location as well:

In his studio off Fifth Avenue, Mr. Chambers painted while the light was good, then wrote stories in the evenings. 

The building at 43 E 83rd no longer exists, but the lot is a block from Fifth Avenue, right down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in fact. That's not proof-positive, but it's pretty persuasive, and an attractive location for such a devotee of art and beauty as Chambers.