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The group of about 25 men incorporated as the Montauk
Club in 1889. The name had no real meaning other than to
reference Brooklyn’s “exotic” Native American past. The
group rented a brownstone at 34 Eighth Avenue and opened
the membership. In a matter of months, they had 300 members.
The brownstone was not going to be large enough.
Local real estate man Leonard Moody found a suitable
plot of land for the club just down the street at 25 Eighth
Avenue. They paid $40,000 for the large site and held a
competition for a designer. The winner was noted architect
Francis H. Kimball.
FRANCIS H. KIMBALL—AN ARCHITECT FOR HIS TIME
Francis Hatch Kimball was born in Kennebunk, Me., in
1845. At the age of 14 he apprenticed to a builder for several
years before joining an architectural firm in Boston.
He was chosen as the supervising architect for Trinity
College in Hartford, Conn., during which time he was
sent to England to study with Trinity’s British architect,
William Burgess.
Burgess instilled his love of Gothic architecture in Kimball,
lessons that would influence many of his buildings.
When he came back to New York in 1879, he opened
his practice with an English partner, Thomas Wisedell.
The two designed churches and theaters until Wisedell’s
death in 1884. Kimball continued on his own. In 1886 he
designed Clinton Hill’s French Gothic-style Emmanuel
Baptist Church for oilman Charles Pratt.
Kimball fell in love with architectural terra-cotta. Its
use as a decorative element could mimic carved stone,
Left, the exterior of the Montauk
Club from the book “Views of
Brooklyn,” published 1905 by
L.H. Nelson Co. of Portland,
Me. The club’s dining room and
bar on the second floor, right.
Photo by Susan De Vries.
enabling him to create ornament that would not be
economically possible in any other medium. He used
terra-cotta trim lavishly in most of his buildings, including
the Montauk Club, a group of row houses on 122nd
Street in Harlem, and the Corbin Building at 11 John
Street in Lower Manhattan.
Kimball has been called the “father of the skyscraper”
for his work in New York’s earliest tall buildings. He developed
a system of caisson foundations that became the
basis of skyscraper construction. His Manhattan Life
Insurance Company building at 64 Broadway, demolished
in 1964, was the first skyscraper to be built with
a full iron and steel frame set on pneumatic concrete
caissons.
Kimball’s other buildings include the Rhinelander Mansion
on Madison Avenue, now home to Ralph Lauren,
the Empire Building, and the Trinity and United States
Realty Buildings, all landmarked. All, including the
Corbin building, have strong elements of Gothic design
or are lavishly decorated in terra-cotta trim — or both.
THE MONTAUK CLUB’S DESIGN
Francis Kimball designed the Montauk Club in the
Venetian Gothic style. The building is based on Venice’s
Ca’d’Oro, today a museum on the Grand Canal. The
Venetian elements can be seen in the loggias and windows,
as well as the general shape of the building. While
Kimball was in England, he was highly influenced by the
popularity of the Venetian Gothic and Renaissance style
– itself an amalgam of Middle Eastern and Gothic forms.