The Architectural League of New York Announces to its Members the Acquisition of a New Club House at 115 East Fortieth Street – May 1927

In 1927 the League moved out of the American Fine Arts Society building at 215 West 57th Street, where it had been housed for many years, and into a clubhouse of its own on East 40th Street. The League’s new home was next door to a building in which many of the city’s leading architects, and League members, had their offices.

The League’s new headquarters included a dining room, a “locker room” where members could store their liquor (as this was during Prohibition), and a double height exhibition space where the League mounted weekly exhibitions of members’ work.

As Robert A.M. Stern and colleagues write in New York 1930, “As a result [of having its own premises] the League emerged as the nation’s principal forum for formal and informal discussion about architecture; under the reign of Raymond Hood, Ralph Walker, and Ely Jacques Kahn, its dining room became the locus of the most significant talk and debate about architectural Modernism in the critical years that accompanied the 1929 stock market crash and the Depression.” (New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars, p. 190)

The announcement states that the League planned “to occupy its new Home by Thanksgiving and open it with a most unique House Warming.”