Streetscapes/44th Street Between Fifth and Sixth Avenues; In Center for Clubhouses, Remnants of Small Stables

THE Harvard Club's plan for an eight-story addition to replace its little buildings at 33 and 35 West 44th west of the main clubhouse is just one part of the general revival of what was established at the turn of the century as the club center of New York. The clubs themselves settled here in the 1890's because others disdained the noises and smells of the Civil War-era stables that then dominated the street. Now it appears that the last of the stables are disappearing.

In the 1850's and 1860's, row house construction flourished west of Fifth on 42nd and 45th Streets, but for some reason 43rd and 44th were dominated by small stables. Perhaps the block-long stable for horse-drawn trolley cars at the Sixth Avenue end, built in the early 1850's, spoiled the flanking blocks for higher uses.

In 1865 Benjamin Jones and Andrew Luke, grain dealers, built four two-story stables at 43-49 West 44th; only 47 survives, as an annex to the Hotel Iroquois. They sold 47 to 1865 to Wedworth Clarke, an oil dealer who lived in a brownstone at 55 West 45th. It must have been Clarke's coachman, William Dunn, who shows up at the stable address in the 1869 city directory online at the Web site Ancestry.com.

The same directory shows the block as one of working class occupations: at 35 West 44th Street, a stable built in 1859, lived a coachman, a watchman, a trunk maker, a carpenter and an oysterman, William Reckhow.

In 1871, Elisha Brooks built a new stable on the site. Brooks, who moved up from Union Square to Fifth Avenue near 46th Street, was a member of the firm of Brooks Brothers.

His new stable was designed by the architect William Laimbeer and is the most intact of the stables remaining on the block, with its cornice and upper floors remaining from its stable days.

Brooks died in 1878 and his family sold 35 West 44th Street to George D. Phelps, who had graduated from Yale, was a member of the Union League Club and was independently wealthy; in 1881 The New York Times reported that he had been charged with insulting two women on a Broadway stage with ''vile and indecent language'' while drunk; he paid a $10 fine. When he died two years later from a fall while intoxicated, The Times reported that he had recently been swindled in a purchase of some Kentucky horses, ''which were not what they were represented to be.''

Around the same time, the Clarke family sold 47 West 44th Street to Edward Brandon, a prominent Wall Street stockbroker who often traded for the financier Jay Gould. Brandon went bankrupt in 1890 and the next year had to sell 47 West 44th to Henry G. Trevor, a sportsman who founded the Shinnecock Golf Club on the East End of Long Island and lived at 6 East 45th Street.

BY this time many of the original stable owners had moved farther north, and changes were occurring that would significantly alter West 43rd and 44th Streets. Because the stables depressed land values, these blocks attracted users looking for economical sites.

In 1887 John S. White, the Harvard-educated headmaster of the private Berkeley School, built a gym for the school at 19-21 West 44th Street (it has since been demolished) and established a men's athletic club there to defray expenses. This was the first club on the block.

Two years later the New York Academy of Medicine (also demolished) and the Century Association built on West 43rd Street, attracted by the modest land costs and proximity to Grand Central Terminal. In 1890 the Brearley School, a private girls' school, built a building at 15 West 44th Street (which no longer exists).

Most private clubs were still in second-hand buildings, and in 1891 the Real Estate Record and Guide said that clubhouse architecture was ''utterly unknown in New York until recently'' and also made a prediction that perhaps seemed reasonable: ''there is no club centre in New York, nor is there likely to be.'' In 1893 the Harvard Club started its Georgian-style clubhouse at 27 West 44th, and the St. Nicholas Club began a Dutch-style building at 7 West 44th (later demolished). In 1894 the Bar Association built its own clublike headquarters at 42 West 44th, and in 1899 the Yale and New York Yacht Clubs started clubhouses at 30 and 37 West 44th Street.

In the same year the multimillionaire James Ben Ali Haggin bought the old Brooks-Phelps stable at 35 West 44th Street and raised it one story, apparently reusing the original cornice, and replicating the brickwork of the lower floors. Haggin, who was not a member of any of the clubs on the block, lived at on Fifth Avenue near 47th Street.

He had made his fortune in the California gold rush and owned several thousand horses; his father was born in Kentucky, but his mother was Turkish.

In 1900 Henry G. Trevor moved from 45th Street and sold the 47 West 44th Street stable to the new Hotel Iroquois at 49 West 44th, one of several hotels that developers built as the fortunes of 44th Street rose markedly.

Such changes were also reflected in the census returns; the 1900 census shows an influx of occupations like bellman and waiter into the old stable structures. That year The New York Tribune noted the sudden transformation of the block, calling it ''Bachelors' Alley'' because of all the rooms for single men; some of the clubs had also taken blocks of rooms in the 1897 Hotel Royalton, at 44 West 44th Street.

The City Club, a civic organization, was the last club to build on the block, putting up its eight-story house at 55 West 44th Street in 1904.

The next year The New York Times said that sightseeing buses routinely went down 44th Street, where ''you could not throw a stick very far without hitting either a magnificent clubhouse or a dingy stable.''

The 1920 census records a completely changed tenancy in the old stables; 33 West 44th Street, built in 1860, was the home of two ''''motion picture'' actors and a lawyer, and 35 West 44th, the Brooks-Phelps-Haggin stable, was the home of Julia Azez, 65, who was born in Syria but arrived in the United States in 1888, along with her Arabic-speaking daughter Alice Azez, a landscape artist.

The club buildings of 44th Street have generally survived and even prospered. The Harvard Club now has 10,000 members. Several years ago, the Penn Club reclaimed the old Yale Club, which had built its present clubhouse on Vanderbilt Avenue in 1915. The Penn Club acquired the building from Touro College, which had been located there since the early 1970's.

Within the last month 44th Street was blocked off as new steel was lifted to the roof of the old City Club, which is becoming a hotel; Philip Murray, whose firm Gilsanz Murray & Steficek is the structural engineer for the project, says the steel is for 10 additional stories to be added at some future date.

Stephen Brighenti is the head of Metropolitan Hotels, a partner in the development of what is being called the City Club Hotel, which he expects to open in June. Mr. Brighenti calls 44th ''the most accommodating block in New York,'' including all the clubs that offer rooms for members.

The City Club project involves the restoration of its exterior, but the Harvard Club's plan, designed by Davis Brody Bond, calls for the demolition of 33 and 35 West 44th. That would leave 47 West 44th as the last recognizable stable structure on the block; it now appears empty and abandoned. But Paul Celnick, general manager of the Iroquois, says that by the end of the year the hotel is going to make it into a banquet and convention space for the Iroquois. The funny little arches and keystones will disappear too; the facade will be rebuilt to match that of the hotel.