The American Woman's Association Clubhouse between West 57th and West 58th Streets, December 29, 1931. It was established as a place where professional women could network their way to success in the business world. At that time the group estimated that 700,000 women held salaried jobs in the city, with 50,000 of those in managerial or executive positions. Their architect was Benjamin Wistar Morris, who had close ties to the Morgan family.
Most of the credit for the clubhouse goes to Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, who used her huge inheritance to advance causes of social justice. In 1903 she had been among the founders of the Colony Club, the pre-eminent women's club in New York, and in 1909 she brought striking women garment workers to be heard by the membership.
Morgan called the AWA ''a training school for leadership, a mental exchange'' where women ''can hear what other women are doing.'' The organization had 61 doctors, 16 lawyers, 939 teachers, a bacteriologist, a tug dispatcher and workers in many other fields. But Miss Morgan said that not everyone was eligible, only the woman ''with ambition, pluck and energy, which will push her up and up in her profession.''
The clubhouse had 1,250 rooms, along with a swimming pool, gym, meeting rooms, a restaurant, music rooms and wide terraces on the upper setbacks. Although the sleeping rooms had 128 color combinations, the exterior was bare and boxy, rising up among the aging brownstones of West 57th Street like a grain elevator in the Nebraska prairie grasses.
The club lasted until 1941, when bankruptcy proceedings forced the AWA to sell it, and it became the Henry Hudson Hotel.
Photo: Associated Press Text: Christopher Gray in the NY Times
