fraternity clubs

[TSteven]

I found this regarding the Fraternities Club at New York Architecture Images - The Pythian.

But the boom years of the 1920's accelerated the pace of such projects, including some that seemed financially doubtful. One of the first was the Fraternities Club, designed in 1922 and completed in 1924 at the southeast corner of 38th Street and Madison Avenue. An adjunct of the Allerton Hotel chain, the 38th Street building was put up for members of college Greek-letter organizations.

Designed by Murgatroyd & Ogden in a medieval Italian style, the 17-story building had meeting rooms for 16 college fraternities, like Delta Phi and Kappa Alpha, along with 560 guest rooms. In effect, it was really a very specialized hotel. The Cornell Club, a tenant, had an expansive set of rooms on the 12th and 13th floors, with a double-height lounge and murals of the Ithaca, N.Y., landscape.

The Clergy Club was also a tenant. Thus, in 1930 some of the most prominent ministers in the city were embarrassed — or perhaps only inconvenienced — to find that prohibition agents had masqueraded as college men for several weeks and then conducted a raid at the building. They confiscated 101 bottles of liquor, with a result that the entire building was threatened with closure, although it is not clear whether that happened.