I have a gzipped directory called "new" which contains other directories and files, that I compressed in the following way

gzip -cvr --no-name /path-to-directory/new > new.gz

I have copied this >700MB to another location (on a different server) and would now like to unpack it. So, on the new server I go to the directory has "new" in it and I use

gzip new

The result is a single 880MB file - no directories or smaller files.

What did I do wrong and how can I correct this?

Thanks.