FOR determined University of Pennsylvania alumni seeking to keep pace with other Ivy League schools that have long had snug harbors in New York City, there is no place like Clubhouse Row, the stretch of 43d and 44th Streets between Vanderbilt Avenue and the Avenue of Americas.
"We wanted to be near the theater district," said Lynne Tarnopol, co-chair of the Penn Club committee. "We also wanted to be near Grand Central and near the other university clubs."
When it opens next spring, the new Penn Club -- in a building built in 1900 at 30 West 44th Street for the Yale Club -- will join the Harvard Club, across the street at No. 27 since 1893; the Yale Club, which moved to 50 Vanderbilt Avenue in 1915 after 15 years in its previous location, and the Princeton Club, around the corner at 15 West 43d since 1963.
Hoping to attract 10,000 members in its first two years, Penn is raising $25 million to renovate and expand, from 11 stories to 14, the Beaux-Arts building with neo-classical overtones designed by Tracy & Swartwout, whose principals left McKim, Mead & White to form their own firm.
The other Ivy League newcomer to club ownership in town, the Cornell Club, opened at 6 East 44th Street three and a half years ago. Cornell, too, sought out the district for its clubhouse, installing it in the Chicago Pneumatic Corporation building, which it bought in 1986 for more than $10 million. It spent $22 million overhauling the building and adding four stories to its ten.
Though neither club had owned its own quarters before, they share a surprisingly prescient provenance. Founded in 1889, the Cornell Club bounced around different Manhattan locations for a century before finally having a home of its own, a block from the Royalton Hotel, where it rented rooms in 1900, the same year the Penn Club rented space in that hotel.
"Cornell already had a large presence in New York with the Medical Center, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and approximately 25,000 alumni in the area," said Thomas Inglis, the club's general manager (and a graduate of Cornell's Hotel and Restaurant School.) "Many of them felt it was important to have a prominent place in Manhattan, a presence."
For both Penn and Cornell, the expense and effort of having that presence on these unassuming but power-packed blocks -- which also are home to the New York Yacht Club, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the Century Club -- is an investment with incalculable returns not only in image-boosting but also in cementing the ties that bind future endowments.
"These alumni are intensely loyal," said Walter A. Hunt Jr., an architect and vice president at Gensler & Associates, the firm that renovated the Cornell Club, "and they have an incredible ability to raise money. The subliminal purpose of the clubs is to do just that."
"We have lost a lot of alumni because there's no meeting place for them," said Mrs. Tarnapol. "Now we are focusing on the younger alumni, who will be using the club the most."
The desire to establish a fruitful link with the past, one their neighbors have long been able to exploit, could also hold pitfalls that the older clubs are either immune to or better equipped to cope with.
"Harvard, Princeton and Yale have experienced a decline in activity of between 5 and 15 percent," said Bjorn Hanson, hospitality industry chairman of Coopers & Lybrand. "That is not really threatening to their financial picture. But because Cornell and Penn have higher debt costs and project costs than the established clubs, they are in a different situation."
The older clubs are owned outright by their members, rather than being developed by the universities themselves, as is the case with Cornell and Penn.
"Fortunately, both clubs are backed by the universities, and have deep pockets behind them," Mr. Hanson said. "It's very hard to pre-sell memberships. They are a discretionary item, with little incentive to join before the doors open."
Dues vary widely, with categories like resident, suburban and student. Cornell's range from $150 to $715 a year; Harvard's and Yale's are somewhat higher and Penn's, which have not been set yet, are expected to be comparable.
Building a club is somewhat like creating an amalgam of manor house and luxury hotel, and as trustees and architects struggle to fit all the desired programs into the allotted space, one result can be substantial overruns in construction costs. It's unlikely, says one analyst, who declined to be identified, that a building like the current 21-story Yale Club, with 140 guest rooms, as opposed to Cornell's 48 and Penn's 39, could be financed today.
"THE building was too small for the original program, and every alumni sector wanted more," said Mr. Hunt, whose firm designed Cornell's reworking of Chicago Pneumatic's rundown premises. He called the property "a good period piece, with classic stone-framed windows."
"We had to compromise on the quantity of programmed space, but we were able to establish a traditional club look and a sense of place," he said.
The former Yale Club building had been occupied since the early 1970's by Touro College, which sold it to Penn in 1989 for $15 million. David P. Helpern, the Manhattan architect hired to renovate the club and add two floors, said that he had found "nothing reusable" but that it had "a wonderful, wonderful facade."
The limestone and brick cladding, he said, "are much closer to the Penn campus than to Yale's" and "we wanted to be as authentic as possible."
With the aid of the interior designers Bennett and Judie Weinstock, a husband-and-wife team from Philadelphia, who are Penn alumni, Mr. Helpern's firm converted the former ground floor grill room into a living room/library, putting a new grill room in the basement and installing a double-height dining room seating 130 on the second floor. A smaller banquet room on the 10th floor, also two stories high, looks out of the facade's huge arched terra cotta-trimmed window.
One touch that the club's trustees are eagerly anticipating is the recreation in the grill room of Maxfield Parrish's "Old King Cole" mural, the original of which is at the Mask and Wig, the university's theatrical club, with another at the St. Regis Hotel.
"It's very clubby, but we don't want to over Red-and-Blue the interior," said Mrs. Tarnopol, alluding to the school's colors.
The building was "the minimum size Penn could have bought for their club," said Mr. Helpern. That is an important factor if the 10,000 dues-paying members Penn hopes to attract from an area alumni population of 30,000 are not to feel overcrowded. One hospitality industry analyst worried that the new club would be too small to accommodate its own success, characterizing the ratio of dining seats to possible members as "an interesting challenge."
ON the other hand, hotel industry analysts note that the membership goal may be too lofty to begin with.
"Starting up like this is difficult any time you're in a downward economy," said John A. Fox, a director of PKF Consulting, a hotel and real estate consulting firm (and a Cornell graduate), "but Penn has a large and loyal group of alumni."
Mr. Inglis said there was a "cloud of doubt" about the Clinton Administration's plans for tne business entertainment tax deduction. If lowered from the current 80 percent to 50 percent, as some tax analysts deem likely, he said, it could combine with the region's still struggling economy to further erode use of club facilities.
Thomas J. Donnelly, a partner at the accounting firm of Condon, O'Meara, McGinty & Donnelly, which specializes in clubs and nonprofit associations, said:
"It's an easy target. And I think it is much more of a threat for luncheon clubs. A lot of members of university clubs are reimbursed by their employers for their dues. When the price becomes noncompetitive with local restaurants it becomes more difficult to justify those dues to your employer."
But Mr. Fox says that the lower deductibility "could have a bigger impact on public restaurants, because of the loyalty issue."
That loyalty is, after all, what the university clubs are in business for, both to encourage and to reap its benefits.
"The club is a really strong synergy between alums and Cornell," said Fred Eydt, the Cornell Club president.
The members reap the traditional benefits of a social club, from athletic facilities to business contacts, while the universities keep ties to their former charges. The Penn Club, too, will have athletic facilities.
"All the universities today are needful of campaign fundraising," Mr. Eydt said, "so the club keeps people focused on Cornell and strengthens the university for many generations to come."
"It's a practical matter," said Mr. Helpern, the architect. "They are spending a lot of money, but they get that back many times over."