New York City Bar Association (New York City, New York)

 office building, attorneys, association - do not use. Needs to be refined as to what association., non-profit organization

6-story Neo-Classical office building completed in 1896. Designed by Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz, it is faced in Indiana limestone. The main facade is on 44th Street, but there is also an entrance on 43rd, where the facade is only three stories high. The north facade consists of three main bays, the center having a recessed porch with two magnificent fluted Doric columns. The doors are at the back of the recessed area, framed by fluted pilasters with an elaborate frieze on top. There is a hanging light fixture at the middle of the porch's ceiling. The rest of the base is heavily rusticated, with paired windows in the end bays. A strong horizontal dentiled stone band separates the base from the 2nd floor and extends the entire width of the building.

The smooth-faced 2nd floor also has paired windows in the end bays, and the center bay has three windows - the middle one being slightly wider. Two projecting flagpoles are mounted on the piers between the bays. The 2nd floor is topped by an elaborate foliate frieze surmounted by a dentiled cornice with a wave pattern along its top edge.

Rising above and extending through the 3rd and 4th stories are four pairs of well proportioned, fluted Corinthian pilasters forming three distinct bays of which the center one is wider than those on either side. The windows of the 3rd floor are small, but those on the 4th are wide with small Ionic columns at each window. A Corinthian cornice boasting beautifully detailed brackets (modillions) crowns the 4th floor. Above the cornice the facade only spans the center bay, with another grouping of fluted pilasters and Corinthian columns, topped by a stone parapet that angles up toward a raised, flat middle section.

The south facade on 44th Street has its main entrance at the east end, slightly recessed up a short set of stone steps, framed by fluted pilasters with a small entablature. To the left are four large windows in stone surrounds, above three low basement windows and a metal service door at the left end. The base is capped by a cornice with a wave motif above an egg-and-dart molding. Above are six double-height, fluted Ionic columns, with three tall windows in the middle, and two carved panels at the ends. The facade is crowned by a modillioned and dentiled cornice.

The New York City Bar Association (City Bar), founded in 1870, is a voluntary association of lawyers and law students. Since 1896, the organization, formerly known as the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, has been headquartered in a landmark building on 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan. Today the City Bar has over 23,000 members.

The House of the New York City Bar Association, is a New York City Landmark building that has housed the New York City Bar Association since its construction in 1896. After the New York City Bar Association was founded, it housed itself in a series of buildings in lower Manhattan. By the 1890s, membership of the Association had grown to the point where its leadership began looking for a new House farther uptown.

On December 11, 1894 the membership approved the acquisition of a large site between West 43rd and West 44th Streets for the construction of a new, larger building. The street, already home to the Harvard Club of New York and the Century Association, was considered by the members “specially adapted to our purposes” because of the other prominent clubs and societies in its vicinity.

www.nycbar.org/about-us/overview-about-us
nysfilm.smugmug.com/NEW-YORK-CITY/MANSIONS-HISTORIC/THE...