Cosmopolitan Club

122 East 66th Street | also 124 East 66th Street | Upper East Side | built 1932

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The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1930

    Members vote to move the Cosmopolitan Club uptown to a new site on East 66th Street

    By 1926 the club had outgrown its second home and begun to think about a clubhouse farther uptown. Members voted to move in 1930, and a site on 66th Street was found. Even as the Depression deepened, the club raised the money to build.

    Source: Internet Archive

  2. 1931

    Three 1870s rowhouses give way to the club's new ten-story clubhouse

    The clubhouse at 122-124 East 66th Street, built in 1931-32 to designs by Thomas Harlan Ellett, replaced three rowhouses dating from the 1870s. It is a ten-story brick building with a basement and penthouse, in the Regency Revival style. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1981 district report notes that it still houses the club.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1932

    December

    The Cosmopolitan Club opens its new clubhouse on East 66th Street

    The clubhouse welcomed members in December 1932; Thomas Ellett was its architect. The larger clubhouse made it possible to expand the club's programs and events. It was the club's third headquarters since its start in 1909, after a leased apartment in East 33rd Street's Gibson Building and a home on Lexington Avenue.

    Source: Internet Archive

  4. 1932

    Prokofiev, Count Basie and Lotte Lenya perform at the new clubhouse during the 1930s

    Once the larger clubhouse was open, the club's calendar filled with guests. By its own account, the guests of the 1930s were Paul Hindemith, Nadia Boulanger, Sergei Prokofiev, Count Basie, Lotte Lenya and the Trapp family, along with the poets Robert Frost and Padraic Colum and the writers Dorothy Thompson, Edward R. Murrow and Pearl Buck.

    Source: Internet Archive

  5. 1933

    Architect Thomas Ellett wins the Architectural League's gold medal for the clubhouse

    In 1933 the Architectural League of New York gave Thomas Harlan Ellett a Gold Medal for the Cosmopolitan Club. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's district report singles out the building's tall, elegant cast-iron balcony. Ellett's small body of work also includes the Bronx Post Office of 1935-37, a city landmark.

    “In 1933, Ellett received the second Gold Medal of the Architectural League of New York for this design.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Further reading

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