Downtown Athletic Club

The Downtown Athletic Club is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1928 by Starrett & van Vleck, and built between 1929 and 1930 in New York, NY.

Downtown Athletic Club is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Downtown Athletic Club between 1926 and 2002.
• 18 West Street.
• 28-32 Washington Street.
• Downtown Club from 2005 until this day.

Its precise street address is 19 West Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Downtown Athletic Club is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New York and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Downtown Athletic Club was officially declared as a national landmark on November 14^th 2000.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1952 and 2005.

Starrett & van Vleck was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Barnet Phillips and Duncan Hunter in charge of Interior Design.

The Downtown Athletic Club can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Downtown Athletic Club was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Downtown Athletic Club uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features orange mottled bricks combined with prominent details of the same material highlighting the entrance and the upper part of the building. Limestone on the parapet above the entrance door and on the building's crown. Granite on the street-level plinth .

Other materials found at the Downtown Athletic Club include, metal, used in the entrance foor and canopies, and glass, found in panels at the entrance door with chevron patterns.