Downtown Athletic Club
THE EXTREMELY tall and narrow, 35-story, 534-foot-tall Downtown Athletic Club is the apotheosis of the Art Deco skyscraper aesthetic, because each floor is devoted to a different function. A regulation boxing ring takes up most of the eighteenth floor; th
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WEST STREET
h e e x t r e m e l y tall and narrow, 35-story, 534-foot-tall Downtown Athletic Club is the apotheosis of the Art Deco skyscraper aesthetic, because each floor is devoted to a different function. A regulation boxing ring takes up most of the eighteenth floor; there is a full-court basketball gym on eight; a four-lane, Olympic-sized pool on 12, and a rooftop sun deck with panoramic views in three directions. In its heyday, the club even featured a landscaped indoor miniature golf course. As Rem Koolhaas writes in his indispensable Delirious New York, “nature is now resurrected inside the Skyscraper as merely one of its infinite layers.” The club is a dizzying fantasia that lifts all the aspects of urban living into the clouds, just as the earliest skyscraper theorists had imagined. The top 15 floors are devoted to 111 hotel rooms for sky-dwellers—tiny, ocean-liner-like cabins with spectacular views of the harbor. Every form of recreation is provided for—billiards, banquets, massage, squash courts—each on a different level connected by banks of elevators. The swimming pool, under a double-height ceiling, is the pièce de résistance. Koolhaas captures the over-the-top aim of the architects: “At night, the pool is illuminated only by its underwater lighting system, so that the entire slab of water, with its frenetic swimmers, appears to float in space, suspended between the electric scintillation of the Wall Street towers and the stars reflected in the Hudson.” The enigmatic exterior of variegated orange-glazed brick gives little hint of the exclusive (if somewhat dated) luxuries within (the club was all-male until 1972). There are no windows at street level on the narrow, 78-foot, 8inch-wide West Street front, and the frontispiece above the entry consists only of unetched limestone blocks. The platform is fortress-like; in fact the window bays do not even begin until the eighth floor. This is a building whose architectural plan is only for the initiated.
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STARRETT
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VAN VLECK ,
1930
The tower springs up in three major setbacks, minimally highlighted with limestone copings, and ends in a Gothic-style turret that conceals a water tank. The only decorative touches are metal-trimmed chevrons in the windows and glass spandrels, painted an opaque rust brown. The window bays are continuous glazed strips suppressed behind uninterrupted brick piers. Though not quite as plush as it was in the 1930s, when six barbers waited on call and a raw oyster bar adjoined the locker room, the club is still devoted to the manly pleasures of Clubman talc, Shine-O-Mat automatic shoeshine machines, and proper decorum: “congregating in the Lobby area with athletic attire is strictly forbidden.” A charming detail: the club’s emblem of a diving seagull over the harbor shows a skyline of close-packed, flat-roofed towers rather than fanciful geometric shapes—a vision of the city as it actually became.
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[ 1 ] A stylish woman of the 1930s passes the club’s cryptic exterior. [ 2 ] The starkly undecorated tower rises over i
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