The Whitney Museum of American Art's original building is a collection of three 1838 rowhouses at 8–12 West 8th Street, between Fifth Avenue and MacDougal Street, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.

This, and the later Whitney Studio Club at 147 West 4th Street, were intended to provide young artists with places to meet and exhibit their works.

[1][7][8] In 1918, American artist and friend Robert Winthrop Chanler was commissioned to redesign the interior of the 8th Street property, adding an allegorical bas-relief ceiling, a 20-foot-high plaster and bronze fireplace, elaborate stained glass windows, and decorative screens.

[1][3] In the 1940s, plans to incorporate the collections of the Whitney into the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the 75th-anniversary celebration of the Met were unrealized.

[6][9][14] Listed on the World Monuments Fund's 2012 Watch list,[12] it has been the focus of an extensive restoration project on the part of the University of Pennsylvania's Architectural Conservation Laboratory, in collaboration with the fund.