Penn Club of New York

The Penn Club of New York (usually referred to as Penn Club) is a private club located on Clubhouse Row in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Its membership is restricted to alumni, faculty, and board members of the University of Pennsylvania. The club's 14-story building, which is a designated landmark, is located at 30 West 44th Street and initially was occupied by The Yale Club of New York City.

For 2023–2024, the Penn Club was named to the list of the Top 50 City Clubs and was ranked the second-best city club in New York City by Platinum Clubs of America.

The club has status under 501(c)(7) Social and Recreation Clubs; in 2025 it claimed $15,562,013 in total revenue and $28,448,135 in total assets. The Thirty West Forty Fourth Street Foundation for the Penn Club's preservation and restoration has status as a 501(c)(3) Public Charity. In 2024 it claimed $317,220 in total revenue and $675,730 in total assets.

In November 1886, the first local group of University of Pennsylvania alumni outside of Philadelphia was formed in New York over dinner at Delmonico's Restaurant. At the alumni group's annual banquet at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in January 1900, they presented a plan to secure "a convenient suite of rooms in the middle of the city, adjacent to a cafe."

On October 6, 1900, the Penn Club of New York opened in four groundfloor rooms in the Royalton Hotel, just 200 feet (61 m) next door to today's clubhouse. It soon had more than 150 members at a time when only 400 alumni lived in the New York area, and received its charter from the New York Legislature in 1901.

In 1905, the Club moved to "new and commodious quarters" in Hotel Stanley at 124 West 47th Street, where it remained until 1910. Between 1911 and 1922 (during World War I), the club temporarily did away with a clubhouse, instead focusing on their annual banquet.

In 1922, after a three-year search, the club's directors leased two townhouses on East 50th Street, next to today's New York Palace Hotel. Throughout the 1920s, the Penn Club on East 50th Street was active and successful. Its dining and guest rooms were regularly filled and its dinners and programs were highly attended. During the Great Depression in 1935, it vacated its townhouses.

Thereafter, it shared space in the Cornell Club formerly on East 38th Street, moved to two other clubs, and landed in the Phi Gamma Delta Club on West 56th Street, where it remained until 1961, when it moved to the Biltmore Hotel. The Club stayed in the Biltmore Hotel until the hotel was gutted and made an office tower in 1981 by Paul Milstein.