The Montauk Club on is one of the most distinct and beautiful buildings in Brooklyn and a building that I have admired for years. Located at #25 Eighth Avenue, this gem from the Gilded Age was landmarked in 1973. Opened in 1891 as the most elite social club in Brooklyn, its members included the city’s mayors, inventors and industrialists, lawyers, judges, bankers and politicians. Oil baron Charles Pratt, Brooklyn’s richest man, was also a member and probably bankrolled this huge, elegant building. The Montauk club reminds me of a building on a Venetian canal, plopped down in the heart of Brooklyn. The extraordinary vision of one of New York’s greatest architects, Francis Kimball, the Montauk Club takes its inspiration from the 1490 Ca’ d’Oro palace on Venice’s Grand Canal. The club’s Venetian features include four-lobed windows, pointed arches, balconies and Loggias, detailed terra cotta ornaments and friezes and carved mahogany woodwork and large number of stained-glass windows on the interior.
Though the main architectural inspiration for the building’s design came from Italy, the members wanted to accent that the Montauk Club was American, so they named it after one of the Native American tribes that inhabited Long Island. The club is ornamented with images of the Montauks, which can be found on the building’s capitals, over the main entrance, and on a continuous frieze between the third and fourth floors. Carved terra-cotta faces adorn the columns and the arch above the main entrance. Other panels depict a meeting in 1659 between the Montauks and Europeans, and the laying of the building’s cornerstone. Kimball’s love of architectural terra-cotta is clear in the façade of the Montauk Club. He used it as a decorative element that could mimic carved stone, enabling him to create rich ornamentation that would not have been economically possible in any other medium.
Kimball put elaborate windows and ornamentation on three sides of the building, but left the north side of the building unadorned, expecting the club to expand on the unadorned side in the future. The remaining three sides perfectly employ light and the use of contrasting solids and voids. The Gothic tracery, the stained glass, the loggias and oriel window bays, plus the pale red brick building itself, all combine to form one of Brooklyn’s most beautiful buildings. Francis Kimball marshalled all his creative talents to construct what the Landmark’s commission referred to as an “architectural treasure.” Kimball’s design for the Montauk Club owes much to the time he spent in England studying under British architect William Burgess. The British architect stimulated Kimball’s love of Gothic architecture, whose features would appear in many of his buildings. 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. When he came back to New York in 1879, Kimball opened his practice with an English partner, Thomas Wisedell. The two designed gothic style churches and theaters until Wisedell’s death in 1884. Kimball continued without Wisedell. In 1886 he designed Clinton Hill’s stunning French Gothic-style Emmanuel Baptist Church for oil man Charles Pratt.
The Montauk also was also quite socially progressive. In an era when social clubs excluded women entirely, though ladies could not be members, club members’ wives were given their own dining room upstairs. Kimball designed a ladies’ entrance to the left of the main entrance on 8th Avenue. The ladies went up a separate staircase to their own elegant rooms, never interacting with men. Despite its foundation as an organization of wealthy white males of a ‘certain social standing’, the Montauk Club was regarded as radical in admitting Catholics, and Jews, as well as Democrats and Republicans from the start. The Montauk Club was extremely popular for years. Most of Brooklyn’s elite belonged to it. Local and national politicians were invited to speak over the course of the 20th century, including presidents McKinley, Hoover, Eisenhower and both John and Robert Kennedy. New York Governor Hugh Carey was a longtime member.
The interiors, though only open to the public on rare occasions, are often seen in film and on television in shows like Billions, Boardwalk Empire and The Knick. Some of the notable people who have stepped through these doors include four United States Presidents – JFK, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley – who all gave speeches there. By the 1980s the proud old club had seen better days. To raise money for necessary repairs, the club sold off the upper floors as condos, retaining the two lower floors for the club. I hope one day to enter this extraordinary relic of Brooklyn’s Gilded Age.