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Streetscapes/India House, at 1 Hanover Square; A Club Created With the Theme of World Commerce

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June 30, 2002, Section 11, Page 7Buy Reprints
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JUST as it begins to repair its old brown walls at 1 Hanover Square, India House is readying an exhibit, ''Forged by Fire,'' that is to open in September with art and artifacts documenting both this unusual lunch club and also Hanover Square, which the club calls the first World Trade Center.

At the same time a restoration campaign may present the downtown club with questions about which appearance it considers original.

What is now Hanover Square, the narrow triangle bounded by William, Stone and Pearl Streets, was waterfront in the 16th century -- Pearl Street was originally Dock Street. As landfill pushed the shoreline farther away, the area filled up with shops and houses, and by the late 18th century it was developing into the principal business center of New York, with shops of prominent New York merchant families like Goelet, Hamersley, Broome, Bayard, Leroy and Clarkson. The Great Fire of 1835 swept a 20-block area around the square, but it was rebuilt quickly.

According to research by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the building that now contains India House was built in 1854 by the Hanover Bank, which had been organized in 1851. (It is not clear when the square got its name.) An early print shows the brownstone, Anglo-Italianate-style building with two stoops, as if it were a pair of unusually broad row houses, but it is clear from directories and other sources that it was occupied commercially. Various merchants, like Meadows T. Nicholson & Son, ''brokers in foreign exchange,'' are listed there in the 1869 directory.

In 1871 the New York Cotton Exchange took over the building; its architect, Ebenezer L. Roberts, reconstructed parts of the interior, added a single columned doorway and placed a large clock face at the roof with the legend ''Cotton Exchange'' in raised letters of graduated size. At this point the structure took on the appearance of a single, large building, rather than a pair of small ones. On the interior, the Victorian-style stair baluster and the third-floor gallery, open to the second floor below, appear to date from the Roberts work.

The Cotton Exchange moved in 1886, and it appears that the handsome, muscular fire escapes on the side-street elevations were added shortly after that, by the architect Julius Kastner. The shipping merchant William R. Grace took over the building, and by the 1890's someone had made a curiously retrospective change to the sign: a photograph at the New-York Historical Society shows that the sign had been amended to read ''Old Cotton Exchange.''

The building went through various uses -- at the turn of the 20th century it was the Haitian Consulate. Then, in 1914, India House came into being. The diplomat and writer Willard Straight and the president of United States Steel at the time, James A. Farrell, were convinced of the need for a social center for shipping executives and merchants concerned about America's place in world commerce.

They chose the name India House to evoke the time when the Indies represented the focus of Western mercantile interests, and they hired the architects William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich to make further changes to the building.

Elite architects like Delano & Aldrich considered Victorian design, like the building's clunky parapet decoration, aesthetically unsalvageable, but they probably saw the underlying Anglo-Italianate design as something handsome, even if it was brownstone -- by that time the chocolate-colored stone was in complete disrepute.

There are no early photographs of the new India House, but a contemporary rendering by Delano & Aldrich shows a facade stripped of its Victorian rooftop accretion, with window boxes and ornamental lanterns -- and, to judge from the rendering, a coat of whitewash. In 1924, the Delano & Aldrich firm was called back to expand the building southward into some older brick buildings on Pearl and Stone Streets. The architects added a large third-floor room, high and light, with a delicate oval skylight and the firm's signature, as well as unusual lighting fixtures, in this case a collation of shells and glass spheres. The column capitals and frieze in the room contain depictions of shells, fish and seahorses, another typically understated but playful touch.

In 1926, writing in the magazine Architectural Forum, the architect Alexander B. Trowbridge called India House one of the most attractive clubs in New York, and in 1938 the magazine Antiques called it ''a kind of collector's paradise'' because of the ship models, paintings, prints and other artifacts that the club had assembled. It also described the exterior of the club as ''cream'' in color.

The president of the club, George H. Gregor, says that India House has about 600 members, a number that has risen since it arranged for the restaurant Bayard's to take over the food service. Bayard's serves meals to club members in the daytime but then gets to use the building as a restaurant at night. Evening diners are offered a tour of the building, including its collections, which include a figurehead from an 1869 clipper ship, Glory of the Seas, which had sunk to barge use before it was burned for scrap metal in the 1920's.

Margaret Stocker, the curator, says that India House has about 100 ship portraits in oil and 500 works on paper, from views of foreign harbors to portraits (including ones of Grace and Straight). On the ground floor, a large 17th-century Chinese silk portrait of a warrior has an astonishing frame, a gilt, deeply carved representation of a forest with gods, serpents and human figures.

Over the atrium at the third-floor gallery a suspended wooden model of a merchant vessel, the Gladiator, swings slightly in the draft, as if rocking at anchor. The most unusual model, all white, is of the Royal Sovereign, one of Lord Nelson's fleet at his victory over the French and Spanish at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Superficially, it looks like ivory, but Ms. Stocker says it was made of soup bones, by a French prisoner of war at the time.

THE clubhouse is filled with other maritime artifacts: a gilt eagle from the top of a New York pilot boat, and a stopped clock salvaged from a Spanish ship sunk by Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay in 1898; a large mahogany case of drawers with a plaque reading ''The Basic Commodities of Commerce,'' with glass-topped exhibit drawers of spices, furs, gums, resins, coals, petroleums, sugars and silks.

This September India House will open ''Forged by Fire,'' an exhibit documenting Hanover Square's position as a nexus of world trade, from the time the Dutch West India Company used the area for its first docks. It will include an iron anchor found during excavations for the World Trade Center. Ms. Stocker is reevaluating the existing research on the club building; some conflicts between documents, and some peculiarities of the building, lead her to suspect that it may, in part, date from the fire of 1835, instead of 1854.

By September the club's consultant, Walter Sedovic Architects, should be well along with initial tests on the facade, which is scheduled for a complete restoration. It has long been covered by a dull, brown stucco finish, a poor imitation of stone. Mr. Sedovic says that, unlike what occurs in most such projects, he and the club are committed to uncovering and restoring the original brownstone, patching with real stone where necessary. Most such projects accept brown-tinted stucco, even in cases where such a material would never be considered on a limestone, granite or marble building.

But Mr. Sedovic, who has seen the original Delano & Aldrich drawing, which appears to show a white wash, is alert to the possibility that testing may present him with two restoration possibilities: a lighter-colored, painted facade of the 1910's, or a true brownstone facade of the 1850's.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 11, Page 7 of the National edition with the headline: Streetscapes/India House, at 1 Hanover Square; A Club Created With the Theme of World Commerce. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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