In a 115-year-old ferry terminal in New York’s financial district, an abundance of excess now exists. Walls lined with Loro Piana cashmere, Brooklyn Bridge views, a wellness center, a jazz bar — all of it can be yours for $3,900 annually (or just $2,500, if you’re under 30). Since it opened in 2021, Casa Cipriani has become one of the city’s buzziest private clubs.
If you can get in, there are many rules on how to behave. No photos are allowed in the “living room” — last year, some members were reportedly ousted after guests snapped pictures of Taylor Swift with Matty Healy. And there’s a dress code — jeans are allowed, so long as they have “no rips.”
Private clubs have long shaped the fabric of New York social life. Many of them formed during the Gilded Age, meticulously designed to be showstoppers before Manhattan’s skyscrapers surrounded them. Some of the original clubs still exist, sitting on prime real estate near Central Park and now officially designated as city landmarks.
But in recent years, a new wave of clubs, including Casa Cipriani, has proliferated, varying in price point, exclusivity and amenities. These clubs have risen by filling two voids left by the pandemic: the loss of “third places,” or locations distinct from work and home that can foster a sense of community, and the abundance of empty office space amid a new work-from-home culture.
Last month, over 98 million square feet of office space was available in Manhattan, nearly double the amount in March 2020, according to the real estate firm Colliers.
Commercial landlords are not in a position to be picky about their tenants, said Ruth Colp-Haber, chief executive of the real estate brokerage Wharton Property Advisors. “There are many New York City landlords that have a lot of empty space, and they need to figure out how they’re going to fill it,” said Ms. Colp-Haber. “They’re very welcome to new tenants, new types of uses.”
In a survey conducted by GGA Partners, a consulting firm for private clubs, over 60 percent of clubs reported an increase in membership for 2022. “The remote work environment fueled by Covid has created these executives who are working from home but still craving that social interaction,” said Zack Bates, the founder of Private Club Marketing.
The historical function of members’ clubs — to stratify the city by gender, race or class — persists today.
Aman New York, which opened in 2022, has offered a membership with an initiation fee of $200,000, plus annual dues. Exclusive access to Casa Cruz, which opened the same year, came at a price of $250,000 to $500,000. ZZ’s Club, from Major Food Group, has comparatively modest fees of $20,000 at initiation and $10,000 per year — the cost of getting into “the world’s first and only private location of Carbone,” the company’s restaurant beloved by celebrities.
On the other end of the spectrum, a membership at Verci — which has more of a D.I.Y., college campus feel — ranges from $200 to $300 a month, with no initiation fee. “We’ve been using this as our third space, our shared living room, a place for about 120 people that are all young and creative and artistic,” said Anant Vasudevan, a co-founder of Verci, which opened its first location in a former office space in Lower Manhattan last year.
The speedy growth has come with some sputtering. Soho House, one of the best-known clubs, announced late last year that it would stop admitting new members at its Los Angeles, New York and London spaces after complaints of overcrowding. The company, which has over 180,000 members and more than 40 locations worldwide, was founded in 1995 and helped pave the way for today’s clubs. In 2021, Soho House made an initial public offering during an aggressive expansion effort, but recently it has considered going private again.
Will the current flurry of hip, trendy clubs stand the test of time?
‘Staying Power’
The affordability of commercial real estate played a role in Verci’s ability to secure a physical space in downtown Manhattan, according to Mr. Vasudevan. “Being able to have a little bit of leverage on that side has been really helpful for us, especially as we start this out,” he said, adding that his company “retrofitted” the space to “feel more like a cozy environment rather than like a corporate environment.”
While many of the older institutions own their clubhouses, the newer ones tend to rent them: Verci, Remedy Place and Maxwell are on leases. “I wish we had the capabilities to buy the buildings,” said Jonathan Leary, the founder of Remedy Place, a “social wellness club.” “Maybe one day.”
Renting might limit the “staying power” of the newer clubs, said Diana Kendall, a professor of sociology at Baylor University and the author of “Members Only: Elite Clubs and the Process of Exclusion.” Dr. Kendall pointed out that some of the new crop “have already come and gone,” including the much-publicized women-only social club the Wing, which shuttered in 2022.
Some new clubs lack “the prestige and resources of the old, established clubs,” Dr. Kendall said, and are thus “more vulnerable to shifts in the economy and fluctuations in the employment sector even at the top levels.”
‘Who You Were and Who You Knew’
The city’s oldest clubs — places for wealthy New Yorkers (mainly white men, at the time of their founding) to socialize among other people of the same status — were created in a sometimes messy fashion, the stuff of gossip.
The Union Club, widely considered New York’s first men’s social club, formed in 1836 out of “an informal meeting of a number of gentlemen of social distinction,” as Francis Gerry Fairfield put it in his 1873 book, “The Clubs of New York.” According to Mr. Fairfield, the initiation fee was $200, and annual dues were $75. But by 1871, after a gentlemen’s disagreement over who was being let in, some members left and formed the Knickerbocker Club — the Knick, for short.
Many other clubs were springing up around this time, including the Century Association, the Brook and the Metropolitan Club, whose first president was J. Pierpont Morgan.
The club culture “was dependent on who you were and who you knew,” Dr. Kendall said. During the Gilded Age, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, “people were making lots of money — railroads, banking, all of that — in New York,” Dr. Kendall explained. “And so they really wanted places where they could sit around and have cocktails with each other.”
Many early clubs did not allow women or people of color as members. In response, some elite members of those marginalized groups formed their own associations. The socialite and suffragist Florence Jaffray Harriman founded the Colony Club in 1903, which became the city’s premier women’s social club. And the Harmonie Club was founded by Jewish men who were denied entry to other clubs.
University clubs, such as the Yale, Harvard and Cornell clubs, were also popping up during this era to bring together people who shared academic credentials. Other clubs formed around mutual interests — for instance, the Anglers’ Club for those who loved fishing, the Lotos Club for the literary elite and the National Arts Club, which was founded by The New York Times critic Charles de Kay.
But interest in some clubs slumped in the mid- to late 20th century. As suburban development expanded, wealthy white people left New York City in droves and joined golf or country clubs. With membership down, the Union and Knickerbocker clubs even considered a merger.
What You Get for Getting In
With a plenitude of amenities, many of today’s New York City clubs offer more than the opportunity to hobnob.
At Remedy Place, members can take Zoom calls from hyperbaric oxygen chambers. And at Zero Bond, yuppies can, ironically or unironically, sip on a drink called the Trillionaire.
Other clubs pride themselves on offering little to no services. “We don’t have a fully functioning restaurant here, we’re not open until 6 p.m. during the weekdays — you can’t use this as a co-working space,” boasted David Litwak, a co-founder of Maxwell, which opened in Tribeca last year. “Our members have their own liquor locker. They can pour their own drinks.” Membership at Maxwell costs $3,000 annually, with initiation fees that range from $1,000 to $12,000.
Getting into some clubs may require navigating an opaque system. Cipriani’s website says the club “has the sole discretion to approve or deny any application for membership.” Those interviewing to join Maxwell need to pass “a vibe check,” Mr. Litwak said. “There’s no requirement for a degree of accomplishment. We have people who own hedge funds, or people who are in the lowest rung at hedge funds.”
These hoops can be part of the appeal of joining a private club. The clubs can “give you a feeling of prestige that in contemporary life a lot of people don’t necessarily have,” Dr. Kendall said — the feeling that you’re special enough to skip the line.
Searching for Third Places
Third places, such as libraries, coffee shops, bars and community centers, are locations where people can casually spend time outside of home and work — and research shows they have been under threat in recent years. The pandemic accelerated small-business closures, and in New York last year, Mayor Eric Adams — who is known to spend time at the private club Zero Bond — proposed budgets that would have forced libraries to cut their hours and programming. (After a backlash, the mayor said he would exempt public libraries from the cuts.)
For some people, private clubs have been filling that social void.
Last year, Sarah Mary Cunningham, a 41-year-old who works at Columbia Records, joined Remedy Place, which opened its Flatiron location in 2022 and has memberships ranging from $300 to $2,250 a month. Ms. Cunningham said she once made a friend while waiting for an IV drip at the club. “It was a shared connection,” she said. “There might not have been other ways for us to have met.”
Joining Verci “opened up this whole world for me because I didn’t go to college,” said Khalil DaTerra, a 21-year-old artist. “So having this campus feeling of dropping into a community is so valuable.” Mr. DaTerra is a resident member at Verci, part of a program that allows some members who can’t afford the monthly fees to pay what they can or nothing at all.
But in some crucial ways, private clubs cannot be considered third places. In “The Great Good Place,” Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term in the 1980s, detailed several characteristics that ideal third places have — including being inclusive and homely and not setting “formal criteria of membership and exclusion.”
The business interests of private clubs can also sometimes conflict with the desires of their members. While people who join private clubs often seek intimacy, personalized treatment and a feeling of exclusivity, the clubs usually seek profitability and increased membership.
Aaisha Bhuiyan, a 27-year-old who works in tech, joined a private social club at the end of last year. She moved from New York City to New Jersey so that she could afford to live on her own, she said, and having access to a club gave her “a place to host my friends without dragging them to another state.” But she said that being at the club has felt “transactional.”
She declined to specify which club, but the cost, she said, is $250 a month.
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