University Club
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The University Club, located at 1 West 54th Street in Manhattan, is a private club. The Club received its charter in 1865, but its origins date back to the autumn of 1861 when a group mainly of Yale men, who had been good friends in college, founded the club hoping to extend their collegial ties. The Club first met in the rooms of the Columbia College Law School (now the Columbia University Law School), where Theodore Dwight, the Club's first president and a Yale alumnus, was a professor. After several moves, the club took over an existing town house at 26th Street and Madison Avenue in 1883.
By the 1890s, with its membership limited by the size of its building to 1,500 resident members and 900 who lived elsewhere, the Club was looking for a larger space, because it had nearly 600 people on a waiting list to join. It acquired the St. Luke's Hospital site and proceeded to seek an architecture firm. The firm of Charles McKim, William Mead and Stanford White, who were all members, got the architectural commission and went on to design what remains the most imposing of the city's social clubs and a famous work of architecture.
Erected in 1899 in an Italian Renaissance palazzo-style and particulary noted for its library (with ceiling murals by H. Siddons Mowbray modeled after the Vatican Apartments), dining room, and the attempt made by the architects to disguise a nine-story building behind what seems to be a three-story facade.
The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Other places called "University Club" include:
- A building in London, designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1866;
- A private club in Washington, D.C. whose first president was William Howard Taft http://www.universityclubdc.com/;
- A club in St. Louis, of which Frederick William Lehmann was once president;
- A building in Portland, Oregon, on the National Register of Historic Places;
- A building in Rochester, New York, on the National Register of Historic Places;
- Various university clubs.
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