The New York Yacht Club Building is a seven-story Beaux-Arts clubhouse at 37 West 44th Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, United States. Opened in 1901, the building was designed by architect Whitney Warren of Warren and Wetmore as the sixth clubhouse of the New York Yacht Club (NYYC). The clubhouse is part of Clubhouse Row, a concentration of clubhouses on 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. The building is a New York City designated landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark. Many of the facade and interior decorations are maritime–themed. The building's ornately decorated facade, on 44th Street, is clad with stone on its first four stories and is asymmetrically divided into four bays. The easternmost bay contains the entrance, while the western three bays contain double-height arches, ornamented with bay windows that resemble the sterns of ships. The upper stories are within a mansard roof that is slightly set back. Inside is a double-height entrance hall, visitors' room, and various other spaces in the basement and at ground level. On the second story is a double-height model room, measuring 45 by 100 feet (14 by 30 m) and containing over a thousand ship models. A private library/chartroom, dining rooms, and offices occupy the fourth story, and there are bedrooms on the remaining floors. The NYYC, founded in 1844, was known for holding the America's Cup yachting trophy for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. By the 1890s, overcrowding at the club's previous headquarters prompted the NYYC to consider developing a new clubhouse. J. P. Morgan bought land for the new clubhouse on 44th Street in October 1898, and Warren & Wetmore won an architectural design competition for the building that December. The clubhouse formally opened on January 19, 1901, and has hosted the club's annual meetings and events since then. The clubhouse remained mostly unchanged during the 20th century, although some rooms were converted to different uses. The NYYC renovated the interior in the 1980s and restored the facade in 1992. The interior was renovated again for the clubhouse's centennial in 2001.
Site The New York Yacht Club Building is on 37 West 44th Street, on the north sidewalk between Sixth Avenue and Fifth Avenue, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The rectangular land lot covers 7,538 ft2 (700.3 m2), with a frontage of 75 ft (23 m) on 44th Street and a depth of 100.42 ft (31 m). The site, which is the clubhouse for the New York Yacht Club (NYYC), is landlocked. On the same block, the Algonquin, Iroquois, and Sofitel New York hotels are to the west, while the Harvard Club of New York City building is to the east. Other nearby buildings include the Belasco Theatre to the west; Americas Tower to the northwest; 1166 Avenue of the Americas to the north; the New York City Bar Association Building and the Royalton Hotel to the south; and the Penn Club of New York Building, General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, and Hotel Mansfield to the southeast. The adjacent block of 44th Street is known as Club Row and contains several clubhouses. When the New York Yacht Club Building was developed at the end of the 19th century, several other clubhouses were being built in the area. By the early 1900s, these other clubs included the Harvard Club, Yale Club, New York City Bar Association, Century Association, and the City Club of New York, all of which remained in the area at the end of the 20th century. Prior to the development of the Yacht Club Building, the neighborhood contained a slaughterhouse, stables for stagecoach horses, and a train yard for the elevated Sixth Avenue Line. There had been many stagecoach stables on 43rd and 44th streets between Fifth and Sixth avenues, but only a few of these buildings remained by the end of the 20th century.
Architecture The architectural firm of Warren and Wetmore designed the New York Yacht Club Building, which was completed in 1901. The club was known for the America's Cup yachting trophy, which it held from 1857 to 1983. The building is designed in a Beaux-Arts style, though characterized by contemporary newspapers as being "modern Renaissance of the French school". The clubhouse was the first of many buildings that the firm designed in New York City; the firm later designed such structures as Grand Central Terminal and the New York Central Building. Whitney Warren, one of the partners at Warren & Wetmore, wrote of his firm's design: "We consider that externally and internally the arrangements should be such as to place the subject in evidence, and not to retire it and make the clubhouse appear as that of merely a social club." As such, it was elaborately decorated with marine and nautical motifs.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
