An Urban Ode To the Sea / With its nautical trappings and striking facade, the 100-year-old building that houses the New York Yacht Club is considered one of Manhattan's architectural gems: [ALL EDITIONS]

THERE IN THE landlocked epicenter of midtown Manhattan, John Rousmaniere glances at the nautical trappings of a long, oak-paneled dining room and describes some of the architect's more subtle allusions:

"This is a ship. The feeling is that you're in the hold of a ship. See the curve of the deck beams?"

It's the Grill Room of the landmarked clubhouse of the New York Yacht Club, which has been restored to a condition not seen since the era of J. Pierpont Morgan, the club's 17th commodore. The imperious financier-yachtsman presided over construction of the beaux-arts building after buying and donating the three lots on which it now is situated.

Though the NYYC was founded in 1844, the fifth and current clubhouse, on West 44th Street, marks its 100th anniversary this year. It was the first major commission for Manhattan architect Whitney Warren, who went on to design Grand Central Terminal and the Helmsley Building.

The shiplike Grill Room lies deep within the grand and whimsical edifice, described by a Yale architecture dean as a "masterpiece of bravado." The Architectural Guidebook to New York City touts it as having "one of the most exuberant facades on earth ... clearly the wildest architectural sculpture in New York."

"This building is a gem," says Rousmaniere, a sailing author ("Annapolis Book of Seamanship," "Fastnet, Force 10"), historian and longtime NYYC member who grew up in Oyster Bay.

The five-story clubhouse, continues Rousmaniere, now of Stamford, Conn., "is a temple to pleasure boats and also a temple to a romanticized vision of the sea." Amateur sailors romanticize boating, he points out; professionals do not.

The clubhouse showcases 150 fully rigged ship's models and about 1,200 half-models. Nautical artifacts include the tiller used to steer America, the 101-foot schooner from which the America's Cup takes its name, and the NYYC burgee, or pennant, that Henry Morton Stanley is believed to have carried on his third African expedition. Stanley was bankrolled by James Gordon Bennett, a former NYYC commodore and publisher of the New York Herald.

The clubhouse also contains such curiosities as a model ship carved of bone as well as a 13,000-volume library and climate- controlled rare-book room overseen by a full-time librarian.

While works by such maritime artists...