Cold Wind in Clubland

A club, according to Dr. Samuel Johnson's famed dictionary, is "an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions." The conditions have changed considerably during the last generation or so, and the good fellows of another era would choke on their bathtub gin to see some of the things that are going on today in those citadels of the social order known as gentlemen's clubs.

Ladies swish and titter in rooms once sacrosanct to cognac and cigars. Clubs that once disdained "activities" now stage musical evenings, lectures, seminars and even dances to lure members and their guests to the board and bar. Membership rolls have been expanded while services have been curtailed; a drink costs as much as or more than it does at the restaurant around the corner, and many a club member is doing well to get a ham sandwich on a summer weekend.

Old & Bent. The cold fiscal facts of club life are laid out in a financial study of 50 city clubs published this month by the New York accounting firm of Harris, Kerr, Forster & Co. Its gist: city-club expenses are steadily increasing while income is decreasing. In 1961-62 the total revenues of the 50 clubs were $52.1 million--down $170,000 from the preceding year--while operating costs were up $259,000 over a year ago. Compared with 1952-53, city-club revenues are 26% higher, but operating costs have risen by 29%.

Behind these figures lies a constellation of social changes. One piece of trouble for the clubs is the steady move to the suburbs. Says an officer of Boston's 600-member Union Club: "Years ago, our membership consisted of prominent Bostonians who lived on nearby Beacon and Marlboro Streets. Now they've moved to the outskirts, and our membership is largely professional people who work in the city. And they go home to the suburbs at night. The Union used to be a club in the pure sense of the word. Now it's a businessmen's luncheon restaurant." A member of Chicago's swank Chicago Club feels that even more crucial to the club is the out-of-town migration of business and industry: "Who's going to come into the city during lunch hour?"

For those clubs that are virtually a must for top businessmen--such as San Francisco's Pacific Union, the Arizona Club in Phoenix, or the Missouri Athletic Club in St. Louis--the trend to country living has had little effect on membership. But the evening flight from the city has generally depleted club revenues from food and drink. Says Lieut. General Milton G. Baker, superintendent of the Valley Forge Military Academy and a longtime member of Philadelphia's century-old Union League Club: "These days you won't find 15 men in the League's card, billiard or game rooms, or the libraries on any one night, and the ones that are there are old and bent. Thirty or forty years ago the place was jumping every night."

Women & Drink. Men's clubs are still reeling under the impact of the female's arrival as a drinking partner. Today women have invaded all but the oldest-line bastions of masculinity. "Women and country clubs have broken up the tradition," says a member of Manhattan's University Club, one of the first to install a ladies' cocktail lounge (in 1942). "Thirty years ago, women didn't care much about clubs; now they all want to join a country club. And what's worse, they want their husbands to hang around there with them."

An incalculable influence on the traditional clubs is the sprouting of high-initiation luncheon clubs. Manhattan has several on top of skyscrapers: the Wall Street Club and the Harbor View downtown, the Cloud Club in the Chrysler Building, the Pinnacle in the Socony Mobil Building, the Hemisphere in the TIME & LIFE Building. These have an advantage over the regular clubs, by operating on a one-meal-a-day, five-day-week basis. The 700-member Pinnacle, for instance, spent $626,000 in fiscal 1961-62 and took in a comfortable $632,000.

The Last Ditch. Higher wages and more fringe benefits for the help, higher taxes and out-of-town living have been hardest of all on the smaller college clubs.

Manhattan's 7,001-member Harvard Club is still operating in the black (1961 expenses were $1,759,443, revenues $1,764,570), but the 6,340-member Yale Club is not. The 3,500 members of the Princeton Club will move in January into a brand-new $4,300,000 building, and are virtually abandoning any pretense of running a men's club by providing sleeping accommodations for couples. But Manhattan's 1,700-member Columbia Club is marginal enough to suffer sorely the loss of the Princeton Club members who have been making their home on Columbia's premises since mid-1961.

A recurrent rumor in college-club circles is the formation of an overall "Ivy League Club." Pittsburgh's Harvard, Yale and Princeton clubs long ago merged. Merger is considered a last-ditch expedient--especially since so much of a college club's esprit depends on old-school loyalty--but it definitely is in the air. Says President Robert V. Cronin of Manhattan's Brown Club: "The chances of club amalgamation in the future are much greater than for the continued existence of individual clubs."

Food Around the Clock. The larger clubs, with many facilities and correspondingly high overhead, have had to fight hard to stay in the black. Boston's Algonquin Club is down to 950 members from its customary 1,000, is closed on Sundays during the summer months, and operates with a skeleton staff on Saturdays. Philadelphia's University Club, founded in 1881, filed a petition of bankruptcy in July. Many of the members will join the Penn Athletic Club on a special cut-rate basis--thereby, perhaps, saving it from a similar fate.

Manhattan's giant (4,000 members) University Club, founded in 1865 by a group of young Yale men for the purpose of promoting literature and the arts, has fought hard and successfully against the tide with a wide variety of special activities. Not so well off are the more socially desirable and therefore much smaller clubs, such as the Knickerbocker and the Union, which have to run relatively large buildings with low membership. When expenses cannot be met by income alone, many clubs look hopefully to their wealthier members. Four years ago, the handsome Knickerbocker is said to have been rescued from a merger with the 126-year-old Union Club by a timely check from Member Nelson Rockefeller.

Such clubs as Manhattan's Links and Brook are better off because, in addition to having small (and wealthy) memberships, they have only relatively modest town houses to keep up. Since its founding in 1903, the Brook has made a fetish of service. It is always open. And until shortly after World War II, a member could order a full-course dinner at any hour of the day or night. Today members can still get sandwiches at any hour.

The opposite kind of well-heeled security is represented by Manhattan's large but Social Registered Racquet & Tennis Club, whose 2,500 members indulge in almost every form of indoor exercise (including elbow bending) in a looming, block-long clubhouse on Park Avenue. In its Dec. 31, 1961 financial statement, the Racquet Club reported assets of $1,472,370.10--including $259,000 in cash.

One Exception. The winds of change are blowing hard through clubland, and some venerable structures will certainly be blown away. But many more will withstand even the influx of females, the high cost of help and other vicissitudes. For a man's club is not only his refuge from his non-equals. As one clubman explained recently: "At the turn of the century and on into the '20s, the things that were important were your school, your college, your club, the dances, trips to Europe and where you went in the summer. Now all of these things are available to almost anyone and everyone, with one exception: the club."

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