Panhellenic Tower (Now Beekman Tower Hotel)

History and architecture

Prominently sited at the top of Beekman Hill, the Panhellenic Tower (now the Beekman Tower Hotel) is one of the great Art Deco skyscrapers in Midtown Manhattan. Erected in 1927-29 as a residence and clubhouse for women belonging to national Greek-letter college sororities, the Panhellenic Tower provided affordable housing for young college-educated women who were entering the work force in record numbers in the 1920s. Designed by the noted architect John Mead Howells, this striking modernistic building features a square-plan twenty-six story tower with chamfered corners and setbacks.

The tower is renowned for its dramatic volumetric massing and bold vertical striping created by deeply recessed window-and-spandrel bays set between narrow piers which rise unbroken from a two-story base to a parapet crown. Though sparsely decorated, the building incorporates handsome Gothic-inspired Art Deco ornament by the leading architectural sculptor Rene Chambellan.

The Panhellenic House Project

In the period following World War I, the number of women attending college began to approach that of men for the first time. Unlike the graduates of the preceding generation, three-quarters of whom had intended to become teachers, the majority of women attending college in the 1920s planned on careers in business, the social sciences, or the professions. Nearly every woman student expected to obtain a job upon graduation, and many intended to move to urban centers where the career opportunities were greatest.

Young women choosing to settle in New York, however, faced a major housing shortage. War-time rent controls and inflation had brought housing construction to a standsti11.3 Apartments were difficult to find and generally too costly for young women just establishing their careers. Alternative housing choices such as boarding houses and hotels usually gave preferential treatment to men. By 1915, there were also about fifty-four organized, non-commercial homes for self-supporting women, but most of these were charitable institutions serving recent immigrants and working-class women.

Thus, in 1921 the year-old, 3,000 member, New York Chapter of the Panhellenic Association proposed to erect a clubhouse to provide permanent and temporary living accommodations for students and working women. A committee investigated what other associations and clubs had done in providing housing for their members and friends. Two clubs, the Bryn Mawr Club and the Smith Club, and two YWCAs, the Judson Memorial Home in Brooklyn and the Tatham House in Manhattan, had long waiting lists.

The committee came to the conclusion that "there was more to be lost by building too small than too large"' and therefore proposed to build a fourteen-story building with two floors of public and club rooms and bedrooms to accommodate 400-500 guests. In October 1922, Donn Barber, a prominent designer of institutional and commercial buildings who had planned the Central Branch of the YWCA at East 52nd and Lexington in 1913, was selected as architect.

Meanwhile a corporation was formed to sell stock in the venture. The corporation would issue both preferred and common stock, with the common stock (which carried voting rights) assigned equally to the eighteen member-sororities of the National Panhellenic Association. Each national sorority was expected to purchase a controlling interest in its assigned shares and to sell the balance to its members, thus assuring an equal representation of the sororities in the management of the project and the continued involvement "of those who would be sympathetic to the purposes and ideals of the Panhellenic House."

It was decided that the common stock had to be subscribed before preferred shares would be offered for sale. Though well meant, these restrictions severely limited the number of potential investors in the project and led to a long period of delay. It was not until 1925 that sufficient shares of common stock were sold to warrant the search for an appropriate site. This responsibility fell to Emily Eaton Hepburn, a philanthropist and civic leader, active in the sorority movement, who took over the Panhellenic project in 1926.