Four New Landmarks Include City’s Youngest

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission approved four new landmarks Tuesday morning: a former social club for engineers, an early experimental theater, a Bronx cottage attributed to the architect James Renwick Jr. and the Modernist headquarters of a Japanese cultural organization.

The Japan Society building, 333 East 47th Street between First and Second Avenues in Turtle Bay, is now the city’s youngest landmark — unseating the Ford Foundation building, which was completed in 1967. The five-story building was completed in 1971; it was designed by the architects Junzo Yoshimura and George G. Shimamoto.

“Yoshimura produced a serene work that spoke to Japan’s aspirations at the time and reflected the nation’s contemporary architectural design trends,” Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the commission, said in a statement.

The three other buildings are:

Engineers’ Club Building, 32 West 40th Street between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, in Midtown

This 12-story Renaissance Revival-style building was built in 1907 for the swelling ranks of the Engineers’ Club, which the commission said was founded in 1888 as the country’s first social organization for engineers, attracting 2,000 members by 1909.

Among the club’s more illustrious members: Andrew Carnegie, Herbert C. Hoover, Thomas Edison, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt and H. H. Westinghouse. Still, it declared bankruptcy in 1977. The building was sold and subsequently converted into a co-op apartment building, which it remains.

“The club building today looks almost exactly as it did more than a century ago, and stands as an architectural reminder of the emergence of New York state as the engineering center of the nation,” Mr. Tierney said in the statement.

The Neighborhood Playhouse (now the Harry de Jur Playhouse), at 466 Grand Street, at the corner of Pitt Street, on the Lower East Side

This was one of the city’s early experimental theaters, which “staged innovative works and gave rise to the Off Broadway movement,” the commission said. The three-story red brick neo-Georgian-style playhouse was built by Alice and Irene Lewisohn, the daughters of a wealthy German Jewish immigrant and philanthropist, and was “completely controlled by women,” the commission said.

When the Neighborhood Playhouse theater company closed in 1927, the Henry Street Settlement took over the building and renamed it the Henry Street Playhouse. It later housed a modern dance school and was, in 1967, renamed for Harry de Jur, a former Henry Street Settlement director.

Greyston Gatehouse, 4695 Independence Avenue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx

The gatehouse was built in 1868, when Riverdale was a summer retreat for the wealthy, to house a caretaker for the Greyston Estate, a granite villa. The villa itself, also called the William E. and Sarah T. Hoadley Dodge Jr. House, was named a city landmark in 1970.

The commission wrote that the one-and-a-half-story gatehouse was “one of New York City’s finest examples of the picturesque rural cottage style that was popularized in the mid 19th century.” It remained in the Dodge family until 1977, the commission said, and is now owned by the Cleveland H. Dodge Foundation.