Posted on 10 October 2014.
I’m standing outside the Vanderbilt Avenue exit of Grand Central Station facing the Yale Club of New York City. I’m seven minutes early, so I kill time looking up and down the building, which was completed in 1915 by the ubiquitous James Gamble Rogers, YC 1889. The neoclassical facade with its soaring ionic columns bears little resemblance to Sterling Memorial Library and the Gothic residential colleges Rogers went on to design for Yale’s campus, although the weathered—in places, almost blackened—white stone does recall the acid-splashed walls on Cross Campus. An American flag waves from the left side of the third floor. On the right hangs an equally large blue flag adorned with a block-letter Y.
I’m wearing a button-up shirt, slacks, a sweater, and a blazer. I’m sweating, even though it’s colder today than it’s been recently. I’ve been to the Club once before for an accepted students event in the spring of my senior year. That day I wore a pair of ripped jeans and a t-shirt. No one said anything, but they were courting me then. This time I’m overcompensating by exceeding the business-casual dress code. I cross the street and notice the Club’s barred windows, small and high, and the understated revolving door that serves as its main entry. I check my watch and wait a little longer before going inside.
The Yale Club of New York City dates back to 1897, but this coming spring it will celebrate its hundredth year on Vanderbilt Avenue. In July 1915, just after the building became operational, the New York Times hailed the 22-story clubhouse as deserving of the “rather overworked title of skyscraper.” It is still the world’s largest university clubhouse. Much about the Club’s physical appearance has remained constant over the last hundred years; the sketches of the library and the lounge in the Times article might well have been drawn earlier this year.
But as the Club’s membership pool—Yale University’s student body—has changed, so have the Club’s policies adapted in an attempt to attract the largest number of alumni. Women were first admitted to Yale College in 1969, and the Yale Club of New York opened up membership to women in 1971. Female membership at the Club has increased steadily since its introduction, but women still represent only one quarter of its members. The Club has also expanded its efforts in recent years to recruit recent Yale graduates to correct for the disproportionately old membership body. In 2010, the Yale Daily News reported that only 18 percent of the Club’s members were below age 30, and those numbers have remained more or less constant. The average age of a Yale Club member is 56.
I tell the man at the front desk I have an appointment with Alan Dutton, the Club’s general manager. I already have some knowledge of the shortage of young members, so sitting in an armchair I realize that maybe I’m being courted this time, too. I keep my jacket on just in case.
Dutton’s office is at the end of a long blue-carpeted hallway. As I walk toward his open door I pass the membership offices for Dartmouth, the University of Virginia, and the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, all of whose alumni have access to the Yale Club. Dutton offers me a seat and we get acquainted. I learn that he commutes to work from Fairfield, CT, and is originally from the UK, as are many of New York’s hotel and club managers, he tells me.
“This is the third iteration of the actual clubhouse,” he says, getting down to business. The first clubhouse was a rented townhouse on East 26th St., and in 1901 it moved to the building on West 44th St. that now houses the University of Pennsylvania’s Club. The move to 50 Vanderbilt Ave. was not only notable for the massive expansion it represented, but also because it was one of the first notable buildings in the neighborhood. “It was not a great area in those days,” Dutton explains. “It was Terminal City.” The photographs of the building upon its construction displayed in the lobby confirm his claim. The clubhouse towers over the few buildings in the surrounding area. The completely deserted road in the background is Park Avenue.
“The club has changed dramatically over the years,” Dutton continues. “We started to let women in in 1971. In the early days it was purely men that lived in New York. They used it as a gentlemen’s club. Then some of the members started to go out to the suburbs, and it became more of a commuter club.”
The Club still caters differently to commuters and residents, and now a sizable contingent of membership is made up of people traveling through New York, but living as far away as other continents. Each of these members pays a different membership fee, with the permanent residents paying most since they presumably make the most frequent use of the facilities. Because the Club incentivizes recent graduates to become members by offering them discounted rates, a non-resident member who has graduated since 2012 will only pay 84.92 dollars per quarter for full membership, with an initiation fee of 179.10 dollars. Permanent residents nine years out of school or longer are subject to the highest rates, at 490.21 dollars per quarter with a 1,372.59 dollar initiation fee. “In the grand scheme of things,” Dutton says, “we’re not expensive. Of all the clubs in New York, we are about the third cheapest.” Further, he tells me that the Club has always been affordable, even in its early days.
Dutton also describes to me the Club’s Master Plan, introduced in 2012 and slated for completion in 2022. The short term plan promises renovated dining areas, updated guest rooms, more efficient kitchens, improved Wi-Fi, new windows to replace the hundred-year-old panes, and elevator repairs, among other things. Longer term goals include the renovation of essentially every other space not listed under the short term initiatives.
After we’ve chatted for a few minutes, Dutton answers my prayers and offers to give me a tour of the building. We walk back down the blue carpeted hallway to the elevators, and we wait for one to arrive for about 30 seconds. The doors creak as they open and close, but despite being original to the building, they move quickly enough, and I hope the renovation doesn’t sacrifice their vintage arrival “ding.”
***
Despite sharing the Yale name and, to some extent, a set of people, the interaction between the University and the Club is limited. The Club is run by a board made up of its members, and is entirely financially independent from the Yale Corporation (although the University did guarantee the ten-million dollar loan the Club took out in 1995 to fund major renovations). The University occasionally uses the Club’s space for functions like the accepted students event I attended, and the Club invites Yale professors to come in and speak to its members. Robyn Acampora, who works in the Office of Career Strategy at Yale and runs the Yale in New York summer program, noted that the Club provides food and housing for four Yale undergrads interning in New York, and provides stipends for two of those students. Still, Joan O’Neill, Yale’s vice president for development, said the development office’s interaction with the Club is virtually nonexistent. Despite tenuous official ties between University and Club, the fact remains that while freshmen, sophomores, and juniors may have little reason to be aware of the Club’s existence, the Club actively seeks out new members from the senior class, 10 percent of whom, on average, end up joining.
My tour starts on the 22nd floor, in the rooftop dining room. The room takes up nearly the entire floor, with windows on three sides. It’s bright and carpeted, and save some simple panelling, the walls and ceiling are unadorned. A large balcony provides ample space for outdoor dining over the summer. Their summer happy hours on Thursday nights can draw crowds of 400 or more. Dutton mentions that the Harvard Club of New York City just spent ten million dollars to create a rooftop dining room of their own. “Yale’s much better than Harvard,” he adds. “I’ve worked at both.”
Many of the members who show up for Thursday evenings in the summer are recent graduates. The Club has worked to galvanize these young members, as evidenced by its sleek new website, designed by Joshua Beach, GRD ’10. Beach said he recalled walking into the marketing and communications office, “and I said I’ve been a member here for three years and your website really sucks, and I can help with it. I know how to fix this. And then they ended up inviting me to join the marketing committee.” Beach aimed to improve the user experience for all the Club’s members, but he focused on increasing the Club’s social presence with younger members like himself in mind.
We call the elevator again and take it down one floor to the Grand Ballroom. This is the impressive room I remember from the accepted students event, although now it’s completely empty of furniture. Besides Dutton and me, there is one other man in the room, who vacuums the floral cream-colored carpet. The expansive arched windows match those on the second floor visible from the street. This room, too, takes up most of the floor, allowing for lots of natural light. The white ceiling is three-dimensionally floral, and reminds me of the one in the Linonia and Brothers (L&B) reading room in Sterling. In fact, that room, which has always seemed thematically out of place to me in the medieval world of Sterling, would fit in perfectly at the Club.
Rather than wait for the elevator a third time, we take the stairs. The stairwell is narrow and purely functional. It is a jarring transition from the near-garishness of the Grand Ballroom, but I assume there are other, more attractive stair options. I learn, however, that there are not, an omission notable enough to warrant attention in the 1915 Times article on the new building. In the piece, Rogers says, “As we did not want to give up any more space than necessary to stairs, I decided to banish the ornamental staircase from the club.” In accordance with regulations, there are three fire stairways, but like any modern skyscraper, the Yale Club was designed to be navigated by elevator. The Master Plan prioritizes these elevators because Rogers envisioned them as the sole means of transportation from floor to floor.
On 19 is the building’s primary kitchen. Dutton greets about a dozen cooks and busboys by name. “All the stuff gets cooked up here,” he explains, “and we have separate kitchens where we finish the food up.” In the early years on Vanderbilt Avenue, when the primary dining space was the Grand Ballroom, the kitchen’s placement high up was logical, despite the inconvenience of transporting produce. Now most produce arrives on 19 only to be prepared and shipped down again to the third floor, where the primary restaurants, the Tap Room and the Grill Room, are located. The Master Plan aims to address this inefficiency.
The various menus at the Club have perhaps seen the greatest change in recent years. “The food used to be frozen fish and frozen peas,” Dutton recalls. “There are nineteen-thousand restaurants in New York. Just because we’re the Yale Club doesn’t mean we don’t have to compete.” None of the Club members I talked to had any complaints about the quality of the food. Beach did say, “I don’t really eat there that often. It’s a little out of my price range, and also when you’re in New York, you want to explore the restaurant and bar scene.”
We duck into a back hallway and reemerge in the hotel portion of the building. On our way, we pass men’s and women’s bathrooms across the hall from each other. “We only had two ladies’ rooms when I got here,” Dutton notes. “I’ve been here 19 years now, and when I came, we had 85 percent men and 15 percent women. Now we’re about 75–25, and eventually we’re going to be 50–50 because that’s what’s graduating out of Yale now.”
But perhaps the numbers gap between men and women isn’t purely the Club catching up to the numbers coming out of Yale. Every Club member I talked to either worked in law, business, or finance. When I asked Alfred Puchala, DC ’83, who has been a member since graduation, if he found there to be a noticeable gender gap, he said, “A lot of people at the Yale Club are finance and business people, because it’s right in the middle of where all the banks are. [The gender gap] is more a reflection of finance, because finance is predominantly men.”
None of the women I spoke with complained of any specific instances of discomfort, but the atmosphere is still palpably masculine. Chinhui Juhn, TD ’84, who was the only exception to the law, business, finance rule, and who was also the only nonresident member I talked to, said that while she has never felt any hostility or condescension at the Club, her outsider status was nevertheless apparent. “The funny thing is my husband, he looks like a Yalie even though he’s not,” she said. “When we’re in the elevator and there are other couples there, no one says anything, but I feel like everyone is thinking, ‘He’s the member and she’s the Asian wife who married in.’” She continued, “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel self-conscious about it. I feel okay being an Asian female in a room full of older, white males.”
Back in the hallway Dutton picks up an elegant rotary telephone from a table in the hall and asks the front desk if there are any unoccupied rooms on the 17th floor. There are three, and one of them is right behind us. Dutton knocks and we enter. The room is simple: The queen size bed has an attractive blue leather headboard and a neutral-colored bedspread. Dutton tells me that every year they renovate a floor of rooms, and that this floor was most recently redone. The doorknobs on the bathroom and closet doors are brass and adorned with the now familiar YC. Photographs from Yale’s football glory days hang on the wall, and Handsome Dan is embroidered in tails and a top hat on the throw pillow in the middle of the bed. “We have to distinguish it from a hotel,” Dutton says.
Perhaps the most important way these rooms distinguish themselves from hotel rooms is in their pricing. “It’s cheaper than a New York hotel,” Dutton explains, “but we’re not giving it away either. In July and August this room is, say, 190 dollars, but now in October it’s about 280 dollars. But if you want to stay at the Hyatt it’ll cost you four and a quarter.” Each of the 10 guest room floors also includes one of what Dutton describes as a “shoebox” room, which contains little more than a twin bed, and which is even more reasonably priced than the others. I ask if these affordable rooms were present in the building’s original design, and he tells me they were. The Club has always aimed for accessibility to all Yale alums, and at least since 1915, Yale alums have been socioeconomically diverse. Later in the day the Club’s director of marketing and communications, Jennifer Warpool, would explain to me that the Club is truly open to any Yale alum willing to pay the relatively modest dues. The vetting process for new applicants begins and ends with a search in the Yale directory.
Next we take the elevator to explore the athletic facilities. We walk past the sign-in desk to the squash courts. Two small girls, albeit blonde and blue-eyed, are getting lessons. Later Warpool explains that the Club has the most trouble hanging onto the members like these girls’ parents, between the ages of 35 and 50: “They’re either going back to grad school, or getting a job somewhere else and moving away, or maybe they’re getting married or starting to have kids, so we start to see a drop,” he says.
While there’s not much the Club can do to retain members who move away and don’t see the point in remaining active, they have prioritized making the club more attractive to members who might leave once they start a family. “If you can keep the families involved, we’re not going to lose the parents as members. We have activities, we have swimming lessons, Halloween parties, gingerbread houses.” And squash lessons too.
We continue on into the cardio room. Access to this gym is perhaps the most attractive aspect of membership for young alums. It’s an unexceptional facility. “Finally, a gym that’s a gym, not a scene,” reads one of the Club’s many membership packets. Gym membership is free for a year for new young Club members, and even after that first year, at 400 dollars a year, it’s still more affordable than most comparable athletic facilities.
“The gym [crowd] is typically quite a young group of people,” said Elizabeth Snow, BR ’13, who cited the gym first when I asked her about the ways in which she uses the Club. Andrew Kraszewski, CC ’12, was also enticed by the gym membership included in dues upon graduation: “That was really the incentive for me to join,” he said. He did note, however, that he recently deactivated, both because he moved downtown, further from the Club, and because he had to begin paying the additional yearly 400 dollars for gym membership. The athletic floors also attract members not fresh out of school. “I think the sports facilities are really good,” said Puchala. “I play a little bit of squash, but I usually use it for working out and relaxing in the sauna.”
We leave the gym and walk past the barber shop, which is the size of a large closet, where a man is seated getting a trim. I ask if barber shops are common in social clubs, and Dutton replies, “Traditionally, yes. The members like it.”
We then enter the men’s locker room, which is the most impressive space we’ve seen. It’s not on the scale of the Grand Ballroom, and doesn’t have the views of the rooftop dining room, but it’s unlike any locker room I’ve ever been in. The floor is carpeted, and there are plush burgundy couches facing a large flat-screen tuned to CNN. The lockers are dark walnut and look like paneling. On another wall hangs an oil painting of a smiling old alum wearing a towel around his waist. We walk further into the locker room, and the next room is more what I would have expected: tile floor and walls, metal baskets for members’ belongings. Dutton explains that space had to be taken away from the men’s locker room to build the women’s, so these baskets provide overflow space. To compensate for what they lack in luxurious appearance, members can have their clothes laundered here for free. Elsewhere on the floor are the Club’s steam room and sauna. We pass a row of original marble showers without curtains or doors. “Their showers are incredible,” Beach told me. Dutton and I enter the pool area.
The author of the 1915 article in the Times was taken with the pool area: “Most alluring looking it is. The pool is larger than one would expect.” By today’s standards, the pool seems rather small at 18 by 32 feet. “This is the plunge,” Dutton says over the echoing splashes. “It’s not exactly a huge lap pool.” Nonetheless two people are swimming laps, although they have to switch direction frequently. It seems the Times’ fondness for the pool has endured. In Nov., 2000 Times reporter Tara Bahrampour cited many of the plunge’s advocates as the Club’s administration considered expanding its cardio and weight rooms into the space the pool occupies. “They’re always talking about getting rid of it, but I don’t think they actually will,” Dutton says.
We walk down another flight of stairs. “This is one of our crown jewels,” Dutton whispers as we enter the library. This room is the first that bears a strong resemblance to a feature of Yale’s campus. Although the room is colonial-style, its long curved ceiling is nearly identical to the ceiling in the study area off to the side of the Sterling nave. The library houses forty-thousand volumes and is staffed during business hours by a full-time librarian. The sketch of the library included in the Times article still seems a completely accurate representation of the space.
The library serves as another major draw for recent grads. Blair Seideman, BR ’14, cited the library as one of her favorite aspects of the Club, as she uses the space to study for the GMAT: “I don’t want to stay in my apartment to study. The library is really great.” Despite having so little to do with the University in reality, the Club library provides members with a return to their collegiate atmosphere in a space that even resembles those found on the Yale campus.
One more floor down we stand on a balcony from which we can see the Club’s two primary restaurants. To the left is the more formal Tap Room. The four-million dollar Master Plan renovations of this space have just been completed. The bar is expanded, and the wooden beams on the ceiling, which evoke Yale’s Gothic dining halls, are adorned with gold Y’s. Irving Rosenthal, LAW ’49, fondly remembered coming to the Tap Room every day for upwards of 25 years to eat lunch with his twin brother. To the right is the Grill Room. This room draws a younger crowd, and allows use of computers and cell phones as well as denim, as long as it’s in good repair. “Food’s a little more casual, less expensive,” Dutton says. “Still got Bambi on the wall.” He nods at the mounted stag’s head.
While the change in dress code may seem minor, the acceptability of jeans in public spaces like the Grill Room, the library, and the rooftop restaurant (over the weekend and during the summer) represents a real shift in the atmosphere in the club. “It used to be jacket and tie,” Dutton elaborates. “About 14 years ago, we changed to business casual throughout, which was a pretty big change, and now this last year we’ve gone to allowing denim in certain areas of the club at certain times.” The New York Times reported on this change in its early stages, when the Club experimented with casual Fridays, in an article titled “Eli Chic or Boola Boorish?” “What we’re trying to do is appeal to all of our members,” Dutton continues.
“When I first got there, I was mad that it’s more formal, more stuffy,” Beach said. “You can’t wear tennis shoes and jeans in certain rooms. You can’t have your laptop out in public places other than the library or the business center. As I’m getting older, I’m glad there’s a little bit of the old world feel.”
Dutton admits that there has been some pushback from older members, yearning for the return of the jacket and tie dress code. The Club’s house rules state first and foremost in the section on dress code: “Traditional business attire (jackets and neckties for men, equally appropriate attire for women) is always welcome.”
“We still have a few members who are getting used to the more relaxed attire policy,” said Henry Tibensky, SM ’03, who has been a member since graduation, and who now serves on the Club’s board.
“Our bread and butter is the guys over their 50s who are nine-year residents, who are paying dues, but we have to look to the future,” says Dutton. “If we don’t do that, we’ll wither on the vine.”
That said, many of the Club’s younger members are fond of the dress code. “I really like the dress code. I think it makes people take the place a bit more seriously, but I can see how it might discourage people,” Snow said.
The next flight of stairs is an exception to Rogers’s general rule. The public spaces on the lower floors are connected by the sorts of grand staircases you’d expect to find in a club on a Business Insider list of “The Most Exclusive Private Clubs in New York City” (the Yale Club was listed second). We arrive in the main lounge, a beautiful, high-ceilinged room that boasts the looming windows I had seen from the street upon arrival. The walls are decorated with portraits of the four Yale graduates who went on to become U.S. presidents. Dutton points out the painting of George W. Bush. “Someone tried to steal Bush’s portrait four or five years ago, but we got him on camera.” The Times sketch of this room looks as though it could have been drawn last week as well, and the attractive walnut and leather furniture described seems present today, and in good condition.
It does, however, seem that this room, more than any other, is responsible for the Club’s stuffy reputation. The crowd here is old and white and male, and many, myself included, have overshot the dress code. Dutton is aware of the impression students might get of the Club: “The young students think, ‘Oh God, the Yale Club with so many stuffy old men,’ and we do have some of those believe me.” But members I talked to cited ways in which the Yale Club is far more progressive than many of its counterparts. “I’m a member of a private club in Houston,” Juhn said, “and these private clubs are very slow to change. The club that we’re at still doesn’t allow women to become members. If you’re widowed you lose your membership.” Puchala also stressed the ways in which the Yale Club is less traditional than some of its counterparts. “There are always a few rules that are meant to establish decorum that allow the membership to have a certain environment,” he said. “Some clubs you have to wear a jacket or a tie, some clubs you can never use your cellphone anywhere in the club. Others have rules about guests walking around unaccompanied.”
The last stop on our tour might very well be considered the heart of the Club: the main bar. “This hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years,” Dutton says. “We still serve the best martini in the city, and you get a little dividend with it. And if you order a single malt you get a bucket of it, not just a small touch. Tradition is you get a big drink at the Yale Club. None of this pouring stuff.” He added, “During prohibition the Yale Club bought enough booze to last 12 years, and they never stopped serving booze here.”
The Yale Club is certainly less of a mystical place on my train ride home than it was on my way here, but I’m still unsure of what role the Club plays or should play. Yale University is a group of students united by an elite education, but part of me still feels that the Yale Club of New York seeks to recreate that atmosphere minus the education. On my way out of the building I passed under the enormous portrait of Elihu Yale. His long curly brown wig, older than this country itself, embodied the estrangement I sometimes feel from the “Old Yale” that the Club strives to keep alive.
