Grolier Club

47 East 60th Street | Upper East Side | built 1917

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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. 1916

    The Grolier Club buys two high-stooped brownstones on East 60th Street and hires Bertram Goodhue

    By 1916 the club had outgrown the building it had occupied since 1890 at 29 East 32nd Street, a design by Charles W. Romeyn. That year it acquired two brownstones, at 47 and 49 East 60th Street, and commissioned Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue to design its third clubhouse. Goodhue was better known for churches, and his Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue was under construction at the time.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1917

    December

    Goodhue's neo-Georgian clubhouse is finished in red Flemish-bond brick for $129,348

    Construction ended in early December 1917 at a cost of $129,348.22. Goodhue gave the club a domestic, 18th-century look meant to fit the still-residential block: a marble entrance with fluted pilasters, a cartouche and swags over the arched transom, a full-width iron balcony at the second floor and a marble cornice above the fourth. The New York Times called the result attractive.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1917

    December 6

    The club opens an exhibition of Persian and Levantine books before moving in, then hosts wartime volunteers

    To mark the completion of the new clubhouse, the club opened a show of Persian and Levantine books and miniatures on December 6, 1917, as The New York Times reported the next day. Days later, with World War I under way, the building became one of five new workrooms opened by the American Fund for French Wounded, where women volunteers prepared surgical dressings.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1930

    January 7

    Troy H. Hinton, the club's steward for nearly half a century, dies

    Troy H. Hinton was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1859 and came to New York in 1883. For nearly fifty years he worked as steward of the Grolier Club, an organization whose members were then all white men. He died on January 7, 1930, and The New York Age noted his long service to the club in its notice of January 18.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1970

    Herbert H. Johnson, curator of a Bruce Rogers show, is nominated as the club's first Black member

    On April 15, 1970, the club opened "Bruce Rogers: Sixty Years of Book Design," curated by Herbert H. Johnson, a book designer born in 1936 who became an educator and the curator of the Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A few days before it opened, member John M. Crawford wrote the first letter nominating Johnson, who became the club's first Black member.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  6. 1971

    April 20

    A newly found Maya codex goes on view at the club and takes its name from it

    The exhibition "Ancient Maya Calligraphy," curated by Yale's Michael D. Coe, ran from April 20 to June 5, 1971, with nearly 90 objects bearing Maya writing. Among them was a bark-paper manuscript from a Mexican cave, shown for the first time in the United States. It became known as the Grolier Codex, though the club never owned it, and it went back to Mexico in 1976. About 1,858 people visited.

    Source: grolierclub.wordpress.com

  7. 2006

    After a contentious members' meeting, the club sells its air rights to a Park Avenue tower developer

    In 2005 the developers William and Arthur Zeckendorf agreed to pay over $37 million for the unused development rights of the Grolier Club and neighboring Christ Church. The church portion never closed, but after a contentious meeting of its members the club completed its own sale in 2006. The Zeckendorfs' planned 51-story tower on 60th Street was to cantilever over the clubhouse.

    Source: Internet Archive

  8. 2018

    A $4.6 million renovation by Ann Beha Architects updates the interiors and ground-floor exhibition hall

    Ann Beha Architects finished a $4.6 million renovation of the club's interiors in 2018. The firm kept Goodhue's design intact while bringing the building's functions up to date. In December the club marked the centennial of the Georgian-style building along with the renovation of its ground-floor Exhibition Hall.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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