Yale Club of New York City

	The Yale Club of New York City
	Company information
Company type:	Private gentleman's club
Website:	www.yaleclubnyc.org
Founded:	NYC, New York, (1897)

The Yale Club of New York City, commonly called the Yale Club, is a prominent gentlemen's private club in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York. Its membership is restricted almost entirely to alumni and faculty of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Clubhouse

The club is located at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue, at the intersection of East 44th Street, across from Grand Central Terminal and the MetLife Building. Four other clubs affiliated with Ivy League universities have clubhouses in the surrounding neighborhood: the Harvard Club of New York, the Princeton Club of New York, the Cornell Club, and the Penn Club. The neighborhood also includes similar clubs not affiliated with universities, like the New York Yacht Club and the University Club of New York, as well as the flagship stores of Brooks Brothers, J. Press, and Paul Stuart, which traditionally catered to the club set.

The 22-story clubhouse contains three dining rooms (a grill room, a tap room, and a roof dining room and terrace), two bars (the grill room and the main lounge), banquet rooms for up to 500 people, 140 guestrooms, a library, an athletic center, and a barber shop, among other amenities. The heart of the clubhouse is the main lounge, a large, high-ceilinged room with an ornate ceiling and walls lined with fireplaces and portraits of the five Yale-educated American United States Presidents, all of whom are or were members of the Yale Club: William Howard Taft; Gerald R. Ford; George H.W. Bush; William Jefferson Clinton; and George W. Bush.

Three other, smaller clubs also are in residence at the Yale Club: the Dartmouth College Club, the University Virginia Club, and the Delta Kappa Epsilon Club ( a social fraternity founded in 1844). Members of these other clubs have the same access to the facilities as members of the Yale Club of New York City.

History

The roots of the club reach back to 1868 and the foundation of the Old Yale Alumni Association of New York. In response to the association's desire for a permanent clubhouse, it formally established the Yale Club in 1897. The first clubhouse was a rented brownstone at 17 East 26th Street. Thereafter, in 1901, the club built and opened a new, twelve-story clubhouse at 30 West 44th Street, which today is home to the Penn Club of New York.

The current clubhouse opened in June of 1915, designed by architect and Yale alumnus James Gamble Rogers. It purposely was situated on the very corner where Yale alumnus Nathan Hale was hanged by the British Army for espionage during the American Revolution.

See also [ Declaration of Independence ]

Yale College did not admit women until 1969, so until then the Yale Club restricted its membership to men. Wives even had to enter the club through a separate entrance (today the service entrance), and were not allowed to have access to much of the clubhouse. Once Yale opened to women, however, the club quickly followed suit on July 30, 1969, although the club did not open its bar, dining room, or athletic facilities to women until 1974 and did not open its swimming pool (known as "the plunge") to women until 1987. Now, though, women constitute a large percentage of the club's membership.

Today, membership is restricted to alumni, faculty, and full-time graduate students of Yale University. The club also offers legacy memberships for any Yale-affiliated member's children and grandchildren. The club sends out a monthly newsletter to all members.

Recent events

According to a book published for the club's 1997 centennial, members at that time included George H. W. Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, John Kerry and George Pataki. Among others were architect Cesar Pelli and author David McCullough. Today, the Yale Club has over 10,000 members worldwide.

In July of 1999, the Yale Club became the first of New York's Ivy League university clubs to change its dress code to business casual, a move which upset some members and was received with polite scorn from other clubs. Today, the dress code remains business casual, except in the roof dining room, where formal business attire is required, and in the athletic facilities.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Heisman Trophy, traditionally presented at the Downtown Athletic Club, was presented at the Yale Club in 2002 and 2003.

New York City's smoking ban, which went into effect in March of 2003, included a ban on smoking in private clubs. The Yale Club always had allowed smoking in many of its spaces and publicly opposed the ban; when the ban did take effect, however, the club enforced the ban, and today the outdoor section of its roof dining room is the only place in any of New York's Ivy League clubs where smoking is permitted.

On June 6, 2007, former United States Solicitor General and onetime Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork filed suit in federal court in New York City against the club over an incident that had occurred a year earlier. Bork alleged that, while trying to reach the dais to speak at an event for The New Criterion magazine, he suffered a fall due to the Yale Club's failure to provide any steps or handrail between the floor and the dais. According to the complaint, Bork's injuries required surgery, immobilized him for months, forced him to use a cane, and left him with a limp. Bork's lawsuit has been criticized as hypocritical, given his public stances on tort reform and the propriety of personal injury suits.

Cultural references

In the first chapter of the novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the narrator, Nick Carraway, mentions that he "took dinner usually at the Yale Club", when describing his life as a bonds broker in New York.

In the novel American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, Patrick Bateman gets up to use the restroom during lunch at the Yale Club, where to his chagrin he discovers that his coworker Luis Carruthers is in love with him.

In Nothing Can Keep Us Together, the eighth novel in the Gossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar, Blair Waldorf lives in the Yale Club for a short period of time and holds her graduation party there.

The NBC television series Law & Order has mentioned the Yale Club in numerous episodes since its debut in 1990.

In his infamous weekly column titled "My Turn," author John O'Hara once lamented, "If Yale had given me a degree, I could have joined the Yale Club, where the food is pretty good, the library is ample and restful, the location convenient, and I could go there when I felt like it without sponging off friends. They also have a nice-looking necktie."

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