The sea-inspired windows of a Midtown clubhouse

West 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is packed with architectural gems.

It’s kind of a clubhouse and hotel district, with the headquarters of the Harvard Club and General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen there, as well as the old Algonquin and Iroquois Hotels.

Still, I think the six-story headquarters of the New York Yacht Club just might be the most enchanting building of all.

It all comes down to those incredible nautical-themed windows, with their shells, seaweed, and raging dolphins.

Completed in 1900, the “street side of the building is regarded as one of the most expressive examples of Beaux-Arts architecture in the country,” states the NYYC website.

“It draws on a number of classic motifs,” the NYYC website explains.

“But its hallmark is the elaborate bay windows set into sculpted framework depicting the sterns of fancifully carved baroque sailing vessels, with garlands of seaweed and shells hanging from wave-like consoles and dolphins spewing into the overhanging wakes of the departing ships.”

Inside the clubhouse, things look pretty spectacular as well, as these NYYC photos and a virtual tour of one of the rooms reveal.

The midtown block dubbed “Rubberneck Row”

These days, West 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues probably isn’t a double-decker tourist bus hot spot.

But it was around 1900, when this block reeked with power—home to the gorgeous headquarters for the Harvard Club, Yale Club, New York Yacht Club, and the New York Bar Association.

Rich New Yorkers lived on 44th Street’s new Algonquin and Royalton residential hotels. And they dined on the block in the city’s most prestigious restaurants, Delmonico’s (at the corner of Fifth and 44th Street in 1903, below) and Sherry’s.

No wonder this stretch of midtown was known as Rubberneck Row. As a 1905 New York Times article put it:

“This name was given to the street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues by the barkers on the sight-seeing coaches because of the frequency with which the passengers had to turn their heads from side to side to look at the Yale and Harvard Clubs, the Bar Association, and various other things of interest . . . while driving through it.”