Last week I wrote of a way to beat the New York blues: Stand on the east side of Fifth Avenue midblock between 53rd and 54th Streets, and look across the avenue. To the left is St. Thomas Church, at the northwest corner of 53rd Street; to the right is the University Club, at the northwest corner of 54th Street. No finer buildings, I wrote, of their size, style, or type can easily be imagined. Last week I wrote about St. Thomas, promising to write about the University Club this week. The clubhouse was built from 1897 to 1900. As Henry Hope Reed has written, though the building was influenced by Renaissance palazzi, no specific source for the design can be adduced. The clubhouse is not only a remarkably adept but a remarkably original handling of the formal vocabulary of classical architecture – in much the way St. Thomas Church is strikingly original in its use of Gothic forms. There is no more absurd notion than that New York’s great architects borrowed whole designs, as opposed to formal patterns, from great architecture of the past.

Charles Follen McKim, of McKim, Mead & White, designed the club, and he achieved something like perfection. All the elements are handled just right. For example, note the seamless way McKim made the building look much less tall than it is. He divided it horizontally in three; each section has a lower row of high, round-arched windows, with prominent, beautiful keystone masks, by the fine sculptor Charles Henry Niehaus. (They are among the best keystones in New York.) These windows draw the eye. But look above them on the first and second sections and you will see small, square windows, alternating in a frieze-like pattern with carved-stone seals (by Daniel Chester French) of great universities. The final ornamental element of the Fifth Avenue facade is the bronzework of the balcony railings. We call these swirling-foliage designs rinceaux, and we see another outstanding example of them in the frieze of the Cartier store two blocks to the south. All this ornament is applied to a background of rusticated granite. Not least there is a superb cornice. It is all, as I say, perfect. The dramatic entrance on 54th Street is flanked by banded columns and features a prominent cartouche designed by Kenyon Cox.

A little to the west on 54th Street is another McKim design, in a very different though no less classical idiom: the neo-Georgian house of the financier James J. Goodwin. Goodwin was J. Pierpont Morgan’s cousin and a partner in J.P. Morgan & Company (Goodwin’s middle name was Junius, which was Morgan’s father’s first name.) Goodwin’s son, Philip Lippincott Goodwin, the co-architect of the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street, grew up in this house. McKim, of course, also designed Morgan’s library on East 36th Street.

Savor as well the club’s relation to the Peninsula Hotel to the north.That hotel was designed by McKim, Mead & White alumnus Hobart Weeks. Sometimes, Manhattan gets it as right as right can be.