Automobile Club of America

On June 7, 1899, a group of gentlemen auto racers met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan and founded the Automobile Club of America.

Architect Ernest Flagg "designed a sophisticated factorylike building with great banks of metal windows, set in a rich screen of glazed terra cotta, particularly fulsome on the second floor.

There, a double-height assembly hall, modeled on one at Château de Cheverny in the Loire Valley, ran 100 feet across the building’s front, adjacent to a grill room on the same scale at the back.

Though the rationale for this decision has been lost with time, the move was most likely done to allow AAA to oversee all automobile events and not just racing contests.

[4] The club relocated to the former Fisk-Harkness townhouse at 12 East 53rd Street and separately negotiated blocks of space in garages around Manhattan.

[12][13] The East 53rd Street building was placed for sale at a foreclosure auction that August,[22] and it was sold to the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York for $50,000.