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Century Association

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Century Association

The Century Association is a private social, arts, and dining club in New York City, founded in 1847. Its clubhouse is located at 7 West 43rd Street near Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It is primarily a club for men and women with distinction in literature or the arts. The Century Association was founded by members of New York's Sketch Club; preceding clubs also included the National Academy of Design, the Bread and Cheese Club, and the Column. Traditionally a men's club, women first became active in club life in the early 1900s; the organization began admitting women as members in 1988.

Named after the first 100 people proposed as members, the first meeting on January 13, 1847, created the club known as the Century; it was incorporated in 1857. It was first housed at 495 Broadway in Lower Manhattan; the club gradually moved uptown, leading to the club's construction of its current location in 1899. During the Civil War, it became headquarters to the U.S. Sanitary Commission. 134 Centurions served in World War I; 110 served in World War II.

The clubhouse, a five-story Palazzo style building, was designed by McKim, Mead & White and built from 1889 to 1891. It became a New York City Landmark in 1967 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It was extensively renovated in the early 1990s, with a fifth floor and terrace constructed in 2009.

Members of the club have included artists and writers William Cullen Bryant, Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand, John La Farge, Winslow Homer, Paul Manship, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Jules Turcas, John Quincy Adams Ward, and J. Alden Weir. Architect members have included Calvert Vaux, Carrère and Hastings, Frederick Law Olmsted, James Renwick Jr., McKim, Mead & White, and York and Sawyer. Members are known for other endeavors, including eight Presidents of the United States, ten US Supreme Court justices, 43 Members of the Cabinet, 29 Nobel Prize laureates, members of the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Roosevelt, Jay, Schieffelin and Astor families, and noted individuals like Dan Beard, J. P. Morgan, Samuel Morse, and Anson Phelps Stokes.

The Century Association resulted from the merger of two earlier private clubs for men "of similar social standing or shared interests." The Sketch Club had focused on literature and the arts, while the Column Club had been a Columbia University alumni organization. The initial invitation for the combined club was sent to one hundred men, which became the basis for the name "The Century", later slightly altered to the Century Association.

The club rented a variety of temporary locations in Manhattan, gravitating to the area around Union Square and Madison Square. Among these locations were over Del Vecchio's picture store at 495 Broadway, 435 Broome Street, over a millinery shop at 575 Broadway, and 24 Clinton Place (later redesignated 46 East 8th Street). Rapid growth in membership to 250 led the club to incorporate and purchase a permanent location in 1857.

The League to Enforce Peace was created in 1915, proposed at the Century by Theodore Marburg. The organization continued hosting dinners there in 1916 and 1917.

The US entered its Prohibition era in 1919 with the enactment of the Volstead Act. One year later, club president Elihu Root conveyed to the US Supreme Court that should the court find the act constitutional, Congress would have no limitations, changing the nature of the federal government.

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